Lists
of interesting places to visit have become something of a cottage industry.
1000 Places to See Before You Die (Patricia Schultz, Workman Publishing,
2003) and its tie-in materials of travel journals and calendars are bestsellers.
Similar books include Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die (Steve
Davey and Marc Schlossman, Firefly Books, 2004) and Unforgettable Things
to Do Before You Die (Steve Watkins and Clare Jones, Firefly Books, 2005).
Iguazú Falls, called Foz do Iguaçu in Portuguese, and Cataratas
del Iguazú in Spanish, lie on the Brazil-Argentina border and are a must-visit
for any geology enthusiast. Courtesy of Lisa Rossbacher.
After having written more than 100 columns in Geotimes, I am well aware
that the one column of mine that continues to generate the most correspondence
(as recently as a few months ago!) was about the “geologist’s life
list.” The column was first published in the April 1990 issue and reprinted
in December 1998. The concept follows the “life lists” that many avid
birdwatchers keep, tracking locations and experiences of geological significance.
My original geologist’s life list was influenced heavily by places I had
visited or read about, and by the travels and opinions of friends and family,
with some effort to include geologic and geographic diversity. The initial list
created a storm of suggestions for additions, and an addendum was published
in Geotimes a year later, in April 1991.
Looking back on the lists from a distance of 15 years, they’re not bad.
There are some places I would absolutely add (Iguazú Falls, in Argentina
and Brazil, for example) and some that I might leave out (the Carolina Bays
can be, well, sort of underwhelming). But overall, I included most of the biggies.
In 1996, Terry Acomb, then a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati,
turned the idea of a geologist’s life list into a creative
Web site that includes both the original lists and some of his own favorite
locales. Although Acomb has long since graduated from the University of Cincinnati,
the geology department there continues to host the site — and I am grateful
for that support.
The geologist’s life lists beg an inevitable comparison with the 1000
Places book. Just as my geological colleagues had opinions about my lists,
so do I have opinions about the 1000 Places list. The overlap between
the original geologist’s life lists and the 1,000 places is limited. Several
reasons explain this difference.
Some of the items on the geologist’s life list are generic, such as “a
desert, both erg and reg” (“sand sea” and pavement) and “coastlines
along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate,” and therefore
they cannot be correlated to the specific locations in 1000 Places. Some
of the items on the life list are experiential and not location-specific: “feel
an earthquake with a Richter magnitude greater than 5.0” and “find
gold, however small the flake.” Still others are, I admit, not likely to
interest a nongeologist; visiting an ophiolite or an anorthosite complex is
not part of most tourist guides. And the 1000 Places has a major emphasis
on hotels and restaurants, rather than rocks.
Nevertheless, the lists do have some similarities. In 1000 Places, 17
spots were specifically mentioned on one of the two original geologist’s
life lists published in Geotimes:
In addition, five of the generic geologic events or experiences are included as specific sites in 1000 Places:
There are two anomalies of note. One is that the geologist’s life list
includes “coastlines along the leading and trailing edges of a tectonic
plate”; 1000 Places includes these and the coastlines of North Carolina
(Outer Banks) and Oregon, but I’m not feeling generous enough to count
them here. Similarly, the geologist’s life list includes “the Cretaceous/Tertiary
Boundary.” 1000 Places includes Gubbio, Italy — where you can see
the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary in an outcrop — but does not mention the
geologic significance. No credit.
A colleague recently suggested to me that his goal was not to visit all 1,000
places in the book. His goal is 999. “What happens when you get to a thousand?”
he asked. “Then you die?”
No — these lists are about living. They are fundamental ways of sharing
our ideas about places and experiences that are meaningful to us. Of course,
a competitive element is involved, but that’s minor compared to the fascination
of trading stories with friends and colleagues about where we have been, what
we have done, why we went to the effort of getting there, and what we learned
in the process.
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