Tag: geology

The Alikos river and agriculture in Agios Sozomenos

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

The Mesaoria combines every extreme of beauty and ugliness; barren, sand-bedevilled, empty, and under moon-light a haunted waste; then in spring bursting with the shallow splendours of anemone and poppy, and cross-hatched with silk-soft vegetation. Only here you realize that things pushed to extremes become their opposites; the ugly barren Mesaoria and the verdant one are so extreme that one wonders whether the beauty or ugliness has not the greater power.

Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons

When I first visited Agios Sozomenos in February, I was astonished: the land was lush, with tall green stalks of barley waving in the breeze. Just two months later, in mid-April, all the green had dried to the dirty-gold I associate with Mesaoria, the semi-arid plains of Cyprus. This variability was central to the life of everyone who lived in Agios Sozomenos and nearby areas, from the Bronze Age to today.

Agios Sozomenos is built in Mesaoria, near the confluence of the Alikos with the Yialias. This eastern part of the plains was originally a shallow bay that silted up over the past two million years (see Andrea Rowe, The Ayios Sozomenos Region: A Bronze Age Landscape in Cyprus (PhD thesis: University of Sydney, 1995)). Over that time, the rivers have delivered fertile sediments to replenish the soils of the alluvial plains, moving nutrients from the mineral-rich Troodos Mountains into the lowlands. These river valley floors are topped by kafkallia, a type of hard limestone that is resistant to weathering and thus lends itself to a topography of mesas, buttes, and plateaus overlooking the rivers. The Yialias may have been more powerful in the past, but in the past 6000 years the river has not incised itself more than 6 metres (Frank L. Koucky and Reuben G. Bullard, “The Geology of Idalion,” in American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus: First Preliminary Report: Seasons of 1971 and 1972 (Cambridge, MA: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1974), p. 17). Yet even when the rivers don’t flow, there is underground water easily available by digging shallow wells.

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Black Studies and Geological Thinking

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

In this time of crisis, I and many others find comfort in imagining what thinkers we feel close to would say about the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s idiosyncratic conception of the world. For her, it is human interaction that creates a world out of the earth; in The Human Condition, Arendt writes thatwe make a “home for men during their life on earth” by acting together and speaking to each other in a common space. It seems, then, that social distancing is quite literally the end of the world. What Arendt dreads has come to pass: men have become entirely private — that is, deprived of physical interaction with other human beings. What, then, do we do after the end of the world from COVID-19?

To answer this question, I want to suggest that we look to a bevy of recent works in indigenous and black studies that take seriously the ends of the world that have already happened. The apocalypticism of the climate crisis and of COVID-19 is not novel to people who survived the genocidal onset of modernity. The diseases that devastated indigenous populations in the Americas were many times more deadly than the novel coronavirus; the Middle Passage, too, cut short not just many lives but also spelled the end of entire families, languages, and cultures. In short, the creation and discovery of a new world spelled an end to many old ones. For people who survived these catastrophes and their descendants, the end of the world has long been on their minds.

Recent interventions have brought this rich legacy of thought to bear on the apocalypticism of the climate crisis. We would do well to turn to these recent works as we face another crisis. Just as we can learn much about crisis mobilization from the response to the pandemic, we can begin to imagine a different world post-pandemic by listening to the voices that remind us about the ends of the world that have already happened. In other words, we should think together the end of the world due to colonialism, climate change, and COVID-19. The point of this comparison is not to inspire unfounded hope: to say that the end of the world has happened should never be to diminish its severity. Yet the fact remains that people have always survived and persisted. We should turn to these voices to learn more about the stakes of apocalypticism and what to do after the end of the world.

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How Salty Has The Sea Been Over the Past 541 Million Years?

Aliosha BielenbergLeave a comment

Take a bottle of water from the sea and try to drink it. You gag and your lips pucker. After all, dissolved in that liter of the ocean are around 35 grams of salts (mostly sodium chloride). Now, imagine you tried to do this same thing 1 million years ago, 10 million years ago, 100 million years ago, even 500 million years ago (that is, throughout the Phanerozoic eon). Would you ever be able to drink the water? Alternatively, would the sea ever have been so salty that today’s ocean creatures would not have survived? A 2006 article by Hay et al. helps answer precisely these questions. The authors tracked variable chloride levels to demonstrate how salinity has changed throughout the Phanerozoic, noting a significant overall decline. These changes have had important effects on ocean circulation and on plankton levels — and possibly contributed to the explosion of complex life in the Cambrian, 541–520 million years ago. Continue reading “How Salty Has The Sea Been Over the Past 541 Million Years?” →