2020-21:
The Missing Years (posted
February 4th, 2022) BACK TO WEATHER-BLOG MENU The Welsh Weather & Dyfi Valley landscapes Image-Library - Click HERE |
Regulars will have noticed a
lack of recent updates to my weather-blog: however I
have been far from idle. The weather of 2021 was rather
ordinary, 2022 likewise (so far) and as I have said
before, the emphasis from now on with this blog will be
on exceptionally interesting events, which means there
will be some years with little or nothing, others with
several pages. More signal and less noise was one reason
for making the change but there is another, and that's
the books I have written since around 2011, the last two
being parts of a series looking at the evolution of
Welsh landscapes over geological time. Such projects
take up an immense amount of time. The latest has now
arrived. Wales - The Missing Years
(ISBN 978-1-9161655-1-9), published in late 2021, was my
Lockdown Project. The Making of Ynyslas, that I
wrote in 2019, may only cover the last 25,000 years or
so but the Lockdown Project goes a lot further back in
time, right back in fact to the beginnings of the Solar
System. Pagewise, it's over twice as long as The Making
of Ynyslas, given the sheer amount of material it
covers. It took two lockdowns plus the time in between
to write and edit. Indeed, the less spectacular weather
(apart from those incredible August 2020 thunderstorms)
helped me to complete this task! The title concept is based
on the fact that the oldest rocks we know of, here in
Wales, are only about 700 million years old, whereas
Planet Earth was formed more than 4,500 million years
ago. What happened during that lengthy gap, making up
those missing years? The answer is that almost
everything we all take for granted in our daily lives
came into being, bit by bit and often by sheer good
fortune. Stuff like breathable air, drinkable water, a
mostly life-supporting climate, the diverse range of
habitats created by plate tectonics and, indeed, life
itself. Without those critically-important events back
in our ancient past, we simply wouldn't be here. Wales may have been late on
the scene in geological terms, but every atom and
molecule making up the country, its rocks, seas, skies
and diverse inhabitants alike, owes its origin to the
Missing Years. This, then, is a story that belongs to
everyone in Wales and, indeed, on Earth. Lots of disasters happened
along the time-line, of course. Things like asteroid
impacts, Large Igneous Province-type volcanic eruptions
and so on: it's dangerous out there, on multi-million
year timescales. Even the emergence of widespread
photosynthetic microbial life was not without
consequences: it allowed Earth's atmosphere to become
oxygenated, which was bad news for the anaerobic
community. What did impress me, though, was that after
each and any such drama, Earth recovered time and time
again. That theme of healing is so
recurrent that it makes me doubt if our worst excesses
will, given enough time, wipe out all life on Earth.
Even if we screw up so totally as to make large parts of
the planet uninhabitable, the place will bounce back. It
always has done: it just needs a few million years in
order to do so. But in celebrating all the things that
happened in order to provide us with our only home, it
is my hope that the realisation will spread among
readers that we live here by geological, biochemical and
cosmological consent. Earth is a complex system, its
processes all interlinked in diverse and
long-established webs, some of which are more sensitive
to damage than others, but none of which should be taken
for granted. Wales - The Missing Years
(and indeed The Making of Ynyslas) are
available online (price £9.99 and £7.50 respectively
plus p&p) via the following links: Coch-y-Bonddu Books in
Machynlleth: Dyfi Osprey Project's new
online shop (they also have Wales - The Missing
Years but not in the online shop just yet): Museum of Modern Art
Cymru, Machynlleth (likewise, they also have Wales
- The Missing Years but not in the online shop just
yet): If you are a bookseller and
want to stock either title, then please contact me directly.
Terms offered are identical for all sellers regardless
of size: 35% discount off RRP for wholesale purchase.
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