1885: Mountain formation - The book of science

Mountain formation
Ecology
Distant blue
Commentary

Mountain formation

An aspiration, a mystery—
the high mountains
the mountains ranges
implied great movements
of the continents.
Eduard Suess lined up the mountains
according to their ages
and was the first to consider a belt of mountains as a whole
proposed that a supercontinent in the southern hemisphere
connected ranges that spanned South America,
Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica,
but because a mechanism for moving continents
had not been discovered
Seuss thought that the land sunk into the oceans between them.

Ecology

We began to consider our planet as a whole
and saw that changes had been wrought
upon the face of the earth
of dramatic and permanent effect
upon which all life depends
and began to connect the causes and effects.

Distant blue

Were a thing so big
and far enough away
for us to see it as a whole
comprehending its beauty
in the blue distance
in its immensity
then we might see
it effects us not from esthetic balance
like a work of art,
for it doesn’t need balance,
but because its size is incomprehensible
and remains incomprehensible for centuries.

In his textbook The Face of the Earth, Eduard Suess introduced the concept of the biosphere for the conditions that promote life. Connecting mountain ranges using fossils of the extinct glossopteris gymnosperms speaks of Suess’s ability to comprehend the whole from its parts.