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Museums: Darwin’s life and work on exhibit
Books: Deciphering the Grand Canyon
On Nov. 19,
2005, the life and work of Charles Darwin went on exhibit at the American Museum
of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. The exhibit will stay in New York
until May 29, after which it will travel the world, making a stop at London’s
Natural History Museum in 2009 to celebrate the bicentennial of Darwin’s
birth. Meanwhile, visitors to New York — or to AMNH’s Web
site about the exhibit — can learn about the man who developed the theory
of evolution.Links:
"Victory
for evolution in Dover," Geotimes, February 2006
AMNH
Darwin Web site
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 Carving
Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and Mysteryby Wayne Ranney. Grand Canyon Association, 2005. ISBN 0 9382 1682 1. Softcover, $14.95. |
 Grand
Canyon: Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzleby James Lawrence Powell. Pi Press, 2005. ISBN 0 1314 7989 X. Hardcover, $27.95. |
“The Grand Canyon was carved by the Colorado River.” That statement
is perhaps the only one about the Grand Canyon on which most geologists who
study the feature can agree with certainty.
The details behind that statement remain murky, despite a century and a half
of scientific work on the canyon and its evolution. Two new books about the
Grand Canyon and its history — both human and scientific — make clear
the complexity and inscrutability of this stunning geologic feature.
Both books, Carving Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and Mystery and
Grand Canyon: Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle, were published in
2005, several years after a landmark conference took place in 2000 at the national
park. Before the meeting, geologists had yet to hammer out a unifying theory
of what ultimately formed the Grand Canyon, and the number of hypotheses had
multiplied to several tens of possible scenarios: among them, a very old canyon
(80 million years), a very young one (6 million years or less), or a river that
once flowed in the opposite direction.
But at the end of the conference, writes Wayne Ranney in his book, Carving
Grand Canyon, geologists could settle on that most simple statement, of
the river having carved the canyon, as ultimately the only reason for the existence
of the feature. Ranney, a river guide and geologist who teaches at Yavapai College
in Sedona, Ariz., writes that he is well accustomed to describing this grandest
of geological puzzles for laypeople visiting the Grand Canyon, as well as for
his students, and his book, published by the Grand Canyon Association, bears
that out.
For a first-time visit to the Grand Canyon, this relatively slim volume will
come in handy both before and after the trip. The illustrations are useful and
straightforward, as is the prose — if only sometimes in need of copy-editing
— and the cover flaps of the book contain a timeline of and elemental data
on the river and canyon. Ranney covers the history of the scientists both past
and modern and what they thought made the Grand Canyon, building up to an excellent
concluding chapter. In the end, he manages to fit the history of the canyon
onto two short pages at the end of the 150-page book.
Not so for James Lawrence Powell’s lengthy tome, Grand Canyon: Solving
Earth’s Grandest Puzzle. Powell, a former geology professor at Oberlin
College and now executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium,
has turned his fieldwork and writing skills to a twisting and turning tale of
the high-walled valley, which is sometimes more confusing and backtracking than
the river’s own path.
Powell attempts to tell Grand Canyon history and geology in the context of the
life and science of John Wesley Powell (who is no relation to the author). The
first half of this book is a paean to Powell, the one-armed, self-educated major
who eventually headed the U.S. Geological Survey. While the historic figure
is obviously worthy of the focus of a book on the canyon, the repeated use of
“self-educated,” “rudimentary formal education” and other
such descriptive phrases to describe Powell weigh down the storytelling in some
places.
Despite this and some other style issues, the author includes some juicy tidbits
beyond just the elder Powell’s adventures and political missteps. He lays
out possibly all of the original hypotheses put forth by the earliest scientists
to try to solve the puzzle, from the first white man to see the canyon, to the
multitude of “great men” who wrote about it in the early 1900s, and
some of the people who continue to explore it today. Powell lovingly describes
their lives, the history of biblical versus natural historic thought and of
course the Grand Canyon itself.
Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle also contains a few attention-grabbing
stories of more modern interpretations of the valley’s and river’s
deposits. And in the end, Powell attempts to boil down the work done at that
geology powwow in 2000 into a chapter, to find a “new theory” of the
formation of the Grand Canyon. His conclusion, however, is more geologically
complex, resting more on the uplift of the Colorado plateau as the progenitor
of the Grand Canyon than on the simple statement that the river that flows through
it carved it. Although parts of the book are very accessible, some of the geology
may prove to be difficult reading for a nongeoscientist. Those readers who are
geologists, and particularly those who are obsessed with the Grand Canyon, most
likely will enjoy this book.
Naomi Lubick
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