(urth) Cumaean???
Matthew King
automatthew at gmail.com
Fri Dec 14 14:44:05 PST 2007
On Dec 14, 2007, at 4:13 PM, Pedro Pereira wrote:
> > But I think 100K to 1M years is too short a time: some serious
> geology takes
> > place between Sev's time and ours, enough so that human structures
> > (made of materials strong enough to endure the process) are
> subducted
> > into the ground and then uplifted as part of mountains. I'm not
> sure how
> > long orogenesis actually takes, but I'm guessing it's on the
> order of millions
> > of years. Any geologists in Da Howse?
>
> I'm a geologist.
> There's no "serious" geology going on between Severian's time and
> ours. South America seems to be basically the same as now. So there
> are no substantial destruction of human structures by subduction,
> that become part of the mantle and then eventually become part of
> the crust again during orogenesis. Orogenesis makes itself felt on
> the order of the millions of years, or hundreds of thousands of
> years, although its not so linear as that.
I'm guessing Dan'l is referring to the scene where Severian, IIRC,
describes climbing a sheer cliff with strata after strata of human
artifacts exposed by erosion. How would a geologist account for that?
I personally suspect that something other than uniformitarian
geological process is responsible for that cliff. One of the fun
controversies on this list has been over the magnitude of the
timescale required to reach Wolfe's dying earth. Wolfe is partly
responsible for that, as he gave, in an interview, a figure for the
time until Severian that seems orders of magnitude too small (was it
100,000 years).
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