The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Read Free

cities, and forged the character of civilizations.
    As a Boy Scout I loved hiking in the Sierra Nevada and the coastal mountains of California. I would follow our treks matching map to landscape, tracking the progress we’d made. Because I rarely got lost, my parents designated me navigator on family vacations through the wide-open landscapes of the American West. Driving through country with rocks laid bare or sculpted into cliffs, spires, and mesas held my attention. I would chart our route on a map, carefully noting where we were, my head swinging from the map on my lap to the landmarks out the car window and back again. What river were we following? What range were those mountains on the horizon? My love of topography and maps—my topophilia—cultivated an eye for understanding landscapes.
    It wasn’t until college that I learned to recognize and name the processes behind why Earth’s surface looks as it does, and how to read the signature of erosion and deposition in shaping landscapes. Most people see the land as static. I learned to see it as ever-changing.
    Now, wherever I am in the world I look to the shape and arrangement of hillslopes and valleys, mountains and rivers, to read the processes that shaped the land. There is something inherently beautiful about topography, in the rhythmic rise and fall of rolling hills, a soaring wall of rock rising to a rugged mountain peak, or the looping symmetry of a great river meandering across a wide-open floodplain. Coming to understand the forces that sculpt our world has nurtured the sense of wonder and beauty I find in nature. I’ve also found in my travels and expeditions that, like me, people all over the world are enthralled with and tell stories about topography.
    Some of humanity’s oldest stories are about the origin of the world and its landforms. Why do volcanoes exist? How did the oceans form? When did it all begin? People have wondered about such things for about as long as they’ve been thinking. How am I sure of this? We live on Earth’s surface, and the lay of the land influences almost everything we do, all the more so if you’ve ever climbed a mountain, or found yourself in a flood, an earthquake, or near an exploding volcano. How the world was made and how it works is of interest to anyone living on Earth—which pretty much covers everybody.
    After Tibet, another encounter with flood traditions made me suspect that there may be more truth to flood stories than I ever imagined. A bright spot in the tragic December 2004 tsunami that decimated Indonesia and Thailand was the remarkable tale of how the Moken people, the region’s sea gypsies, survived without casualties because they knew to run for the hills. These seafaring people had an oral tradition of a big flood that warned them to get to high ground when the tide mysteriously went out far and fast. Knowledge that it would soon come back in as a monstrous wave helped them survive, and gave them a chance to pass the story to future generations.
    Could science be playing catch-up to folklore? For most of our history as a species, oral traditions were the only way to preserve knowledge. So why wouldn’t the world’s flood stories record actual ancient disasters? After all, the world’s first civilizations were agricultural societies settled along major floodplains where swollen rivers periodically submerged fields and towns. And, of course, among the best-known and most controversial flood stories is that of Noah’s Flood. Could there also be truth to the biblical tale?
    Today, geologists generally dismiss Noah’s Flood with a chuckle and shrug it off as a relic of another time. But for centuries it was considered common knowledge among Christians and many natural philosophers that Noah’s Flood shaped our world. What else could have? If the planet itself was but a few thousand years old, as Christians believed the Bible implied, how could the processes we see today have possibly shaped a