Seven-Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson Read Free Book Online

air. That was a mere 40 million years ago, in geological terms practically the other day.
    Aboard Farnella there is easy talk of subduction zones; any disputes arise over quite specific technical theories associated with them. Subduction zones (where the edge of one tectonic plate dives down beneath the edge of its neighbour) were not suspected until plate tectonic theory proposed them, and tectonic theory itself was a direct descendant of the theory of continental drift which theGerman, Alfred Wegener, had brilliantly proposed in 1915. Poor Wegener! In 1928 a panel of fourteen geologists was convened to vote on his theory and only five were fully in support. Two years later he vanished in a blizzard in the middle of Greenland and his theory suffered a similar fate until the 1950s. I myself can remember a geography lesson in early 1955 when the teacher, in response to a question from a boy who must either have been very studious or else a troublemaker, suddenly shouted: ‘Continental drift is bunk! It is loathsome bunk!’ *
    And so, as the geologists speculate and tap their bitten ballpoints on computer printouts, I have to remind myself that not so long ago their conversation would have been pure heresy and have evoked tirades of condemnation, not only from other scientists but also from fully robed bishops. A bare hundred years before I was born William Buckland (who was both a geologist and the Dean of Westminster) wrote his Bridgewater Treatise in which he categorically affirmed that Noah’s Flood accounted for sedimentary rocks and fossils. To watch the endless scrolls of paper emerge jerkily from printers and plotters is to feel that this is not so much mapping a new world as burying an old, which in turn makes one wonder what fresh heresies the future holds.
    Meanwhile, the question of whether or not we have discovered a hitherto uncharted field of manganese nodules looks like having to remain undecided until a later cruise. The weather is now bad enough to make us abandon our course and begin a new set of legs on a different tack.
    ‘Not so nice for us, though. It’ll mean rolling instead of pitching. But kinder to the equipment.’
    ‘What does the forecast say?’
    ‘We are the weather forecast, that’s the trouble. The Farnella ’s an official weather reporting ship when she’s on station, so the forecasts out here are simply based on our own data from yesterday.’
    I like the idea that we are helping invent the world’s weather but can see it is unhelpful having no higher authority on which to rely. Still, the measured tones of a radio weatherman repeating one’s own reports might well endow them with an official quality which would suddenly make them credible as predictions. Up on deck it is exhilarating as the ship buffets into the wind, shouldering clouds of water back over her superstructure. Another day denied the sunbathers, their towels unspread, their copies (courtesy of the Marine Society) of Tom Clancy, Len Deighton, Clive Cussler, Cruz Smith, unopened. The library contains dozens of these more or less identical Cold War what-ifs: unmemorabilia which after the past few years have suddenly come to seem like fossils, requiring of their readers a streak of the antiquarian, even of the geologist. By contrast, nothing could be more present than this ocean leaping past and over. It raises its crests to the horizon, empty and brisk, at once a locus of sublime vacancy and massive energy. When the tropic sun blazes through cracks in the scudding clouds a brilliant ultramarine floods back into the water. Simultaneously, its tusks of foam gleam white while peaks and crevasses wring colours from the constant motion. At these hot, radiant moments the sea is transformed into prodigious and arcane machinery, liquid clockwork glinting with moving parts. In the intermittent bursts of light it looks like what it is: the planet’s gearbox mediating and transmitting the motive power of the sun.
    In early