The Panda’s Thumb (31 page)

Scarcely any geological subject could be more fascinating or more beset with juicy problems. Consider the following: if you extrapolate back through time the current recession of the moon as estimated from eclipse data, the moon enters the Roche limit about one billion years ago. Inside the Roche limit, no major body can form. If a large body enters it from outside, results are unclear but certainly impressive. Vast tides would roar across the earth and the lunar surface would melt, which, conclusively from dates on Apollo rocks, it did not. (And the recession rate estimated from modern data—5.8 centimeters per year—is much less than the average advocated by Kahn and Pompea—94.5 centimeters per year.) Clearly, the moon was not this close to us either a billion years ago or ever at all since its surface solidified more than four billion years ago. Either rates of recession have varied drastically, and were much slower early in the earth's history, or the moon entered its current orbit a long time after the earth's formation. In any case, the moon was once much closer to us, and this different relationship should have had an important effect on the history of both bodies.

As for the earth, we have tentative indications in some of our earliest sedimentary rocks of tidal amplitudes that would put the Bay of Fundy to shame. For the moon, Kahn and Pompea make the interesting suggestion that its closer position and the earth's stronger gravitational pull at that time may explain why the lunar maria are concentrated on its visible, earthward side (the maria represent vast extrusions of liquid magma), and why the moon's center of mass is displaced in an earthward direction.

Geology has no more important lesson to teach than the vastness of time. We have no trouble getting our conclusions across intellectually—4.5 billion years rolls easily off the tongue as an age for the earth. But intellectual knowledge and gut appreciation are very different things. As a sheer number, 4.5 billion is incomprehensible, and we resort to metaphor and image to emphasize just how long the earth has existed and just how insignificant the length of human evolution has been—not to mention the cosmic millimicrosecond of our personal lives.

The standard metaphor for earth history is a 24-hour clock with human civilization occupying the last few seconds. I prefer to emphasize the accumulated oomph of effects utterly insignificant on the scale of our lives. We have just completed another year and the earth has slowed down by another 1/50,000 second. So blinking what? What you have just read is what.

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