I’m visiting India for the first time in six-and-a-half years this week, meaning my usual capacity for a research-heavy, analytical column is pretty diminished. So instead of dissecting the guts of some current event, I’ll be doing exactly the opposite: talking about rocks. For the first hour after departing from Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, my eyes were glued to the ground. A scarcity of clouds revealed a vast expanse of land unfurling some 30,000 feet below, its geographic features creating a beautifully uneven texture like an oil painting. Crossing into the northeast of Oman, we began to follow Al Hajar mountain range from the skies.
From my viewpoint, the red-gray soil looked as though it had been carved and folded in on itself by the delicate hand work of a sculptor. Jebel Akhdar, one of tallest mountains in Oman, towered over the mining towns, tourist traps and vehicles dotting the desert, humanity’s most recent playthings strewn across the ageless floor. The mountains had a consistency that I’d never had the privilege of witnessing in person, almost as if I was being shown the exposed flesh and arteries of planet Earth, inviting me to venture further into its beating heart (now I know how geologists feel).
The roads connecting Oman’s natural tourist destinations to the nearby cities of Muscat and Salalah dwindled in number as we approached the coast; skinny belts of asphalt were gradually replaced by the serpentine remnants of a river left upon the land like the stroke of a wet paint brush. The low tide of the Arabian sea left behind hairlike deposits of sediment and moisture exploding out from the valleys, provoking the question of how the landscape changes when the tide swells and parts of the river fill in. What’s more — the riverbed and surrounding towns were cradled by a wider depression in the land, calling up ghostly images of a giant river or sea that may have once existed there.
As I later found out, this wasn’t too far from the truth – albeit geology isn’t all that glamorous. Al Hajar mountains and the scientific insights it offers were shaped by millions of years of slow, dispassionate glacial and tectonic plate activity. Indeed, now-blistering Oman may have once been covered in ice, lending substantial credence to the hypothesis that this planet could have been a “Snowball Earth” 700 million years ago. Additionally, Oman’s mountains are largely exposed portions of the earth’s mantle – quite literally its flesh – and those winding valleys, also known as wadi, are composed of pillow basalt, which is igneous rock formed by undersea volcanic activity. In other words, Oman’s beautiful wadi are parts of the sea floor that you can walk on.
Even though I knew I’d be pressed for time to research this week on account of attending a wedding abroad, I broke my promise. I couldn’t resist delving into the wide array of academic research and travel accounts of Oman’s geological history and was taken aback by the sheer history of the landmass that I only perused for a short while cruising overhead in an airplane. But it’s because of the fact that geological time is so vast that physical geography is so awe-inspiring. The human lifetime is barely even a blip in the time it takes for these formations to shape the planet the way they do. Some people might take this to mean that our lives are insignificant, and to an extent, I don’t disagree. After all, when our moments of pleasure, hatred, excitement and lethargy are all but dust in the wind, the mountains and wadi will still be there.
But at the same time, it’s the brevity of our time on this planet that makes each day all the more valuable. We have a profoundly unique opportunity as a people — a collection of individuals with a common interest in keeping this planet livable — to extend our influence long beyond the time our lives begin and end. We are at a pivotal moment in history. Day in and day out we are presented with unambiguous evidence that the dominant economic system, capitalism, is having a devastating social and environmental impact. In India, where I’m writing this, hazardous air quality has been linked to as many as 1.67 million deaths in 2019 alone, placing most of the burden on poor homes with multiple children and no toilets, as well as Indians with disabilities. The main drivers of this intense air pollution are industrial and vehicular emissions – those that are deemed necessary to maintain the flow of commerce and movement of capital.
Even after landing in Bangalore and recovering from a hellish bout of jet lag, my mind still wanders to Jebel Akhdar. The exposed mantle making up the mountains are actually part of an ambitious research initiative by geologists to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide by “mineralizing” it in the rock. As such, Al Hajar has immense potential to aid our technological capacities in the fight against climate change. However, we must also remain cognizant of the dangers of instrumentalizing nature for human gain in a supposedly eco-friendly way (i.e. by turning carbon capture into another industry to amass wealth without solving the social inequalities that make climate change so acutely dangerous). We’re not here for a terrifically long time; we have a responsibility to wrest the fate of the Earth from those who have a vested interest in destroying it, thus securing something to leave behind for those short-fated beings who come after.
I guess it was an eventful flight.