A Wilder Time. William E. Glassley
hair was matted; his blue eyes blazed in a weather-beaten face. His nose, broad and flat, made it clear he had some history. His English was perfect, but with an accent I didn’t expect.
“So, what’re you guys doin’ up here?” he asked. Despite the cold, he was dressed in a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans.
“We’re geologists,” I said, quickly recovering a semblance of composure. “We’re here to study the rocks.”
He thought for a moment and then said, “Hmm. Lookin’ for gold?”
“No, just interested in the history of the rocks.”
He nodded and pursed his lips.
“Why is that interesting?” he asked nonchalantly. He wasn’t looking at me—his eyes were on the slowly passing scenery.
I explained that there was some debated evidence that a mountain system about the size of the Himalayas or the Alps had existed there nearly two billion years ago. Now all that was left were cryptic hints preserved in what might have been the deep roots of that old mountain system. After so much time, erosion had brought those potential roots to the surface, where we could study them to see if that story were true.
“Mountains like that here? That’s really amazing . . . hard to believe,” he said as we both looked out at a rolling landscape that gave no hint that K2s and Eigers and Mount Everests had once soared there.
“Where’re you from?” I asked. His Anglo complexion and accent made it obvious he hadn’t been born and raised here.
“Sydney. I came here with my girlfriend five years ago. We were just tourists but hung around because it was so beautiful. I ran into Peter a couple of times and got to like him. He’s Swedish. Been here twenty-five years. He goes back to visit family in February but has to return here—no place else he can live. Our first year here, we took care of his house when he went back. When he returned, he offered me a job on his boat, and I took it.”
He looked out over the water for a while and then said, “I can’t go back to Australia. It’s too hot.” He laughed. Then he got serious.
“I love the life here. It’s free and open. There are too many people in other places. . . . People here take care of each other. But they understand that it’s what’s out there that matters.” He waved his hand at the horizon. “There’s a peace here, an emptiness that I’ve never seen anywhere else. . . . I can’t give that up now. Neither can my girlfriend. This is home now.”
I looked out at the landscape and wondered what he felt as he looked at it. I loved my neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, the streets and cafés and small shops, but that connection obviously paled in comparison with his passionate relationship to place.
For a long while, nothing was said. Then he pushed back from the rail. “I better get back to work. Peter hates it if he’s payin’ me and I’m not doin’ somethin’ on the boat. Good luck. I hope you find what you’re lookin’ for out there.” He shook my hand and walked away.
THE JOURNEY THAT HAD LEAD TO THAT MOMENT was a long one, stretching across years and half the globe. I had met Kai Sørensen nearly three decades earlier, in Oslo, Norway. He was from Denmark, escaping a complicated situation involving love and friendship, while simultaneously trying to pursue his scientific career in geological studies. He had come to the research institute where I was to find a mental refuge where he could quietly continue his research and reconstruct his life.
I, too, was seeking change. I had just been through a divorce, started a new relationship, and finished my Ph.D. When the chance to pursue new research directions in Norway was offered to me, I jumped at it, craving a place where I could start over. I knew no one in Oslo, which provided the possibility of a monastic lifestyle, a quiet world where immersion in a science I was just beginning to understand could be an escape from a complex emotional past. Our somewhat similar state of emotional and cultural transience resulted in many discussions, a shared apartment, and a close friendship. Eventually, we were joined by a third, Julian Pearce, whose life path mirrored ours in many ways. We became an odd household of foreign friends. Each morning, we rode the bus to the research institute, ate lunch at the communal table of geologists on the third floor, and rode back at night to take turns making dinner. In the evening, we played hearts, which I nearly always lost, listened to Cabaret and Jesus Christ Superstar on Kai’s stereo, and sipped coffee enhanced with a shot or two of Linie aquavit. In that temporary setting, we found stability.
THE DESIRE TO CHANGE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS was stimulated by a growing excitement I could not have anticipated when I began pursuing geology. During the first few years of my thesis work on the relatively brief sixty-million-year geological history of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, I slowly began to perceive the incomprehensible magnitude and beauty of Earth’s evolution. I was overwhelmed by the unstoppable, yet unimaginably slow, dynamism eloquently detailed in the bedrock backbone of landscapes. I became addicted to the thrill of experiencing unseen and unrecognized histories of much more ancient times. The position in Norway provided an opportunity to work on problems more profound than what my thesis research had considered. The work at the research institute in Oslo was a chance to deal with fundamental questions, such as how certain types of rocks exchanged chemical compounds with other rocks when buried tens of miles below the surface. It was an esoteric academic issue, of little interest to any but a handful of other researchers scattered around the world, but it also allowed me an opportunity to delve into something that had global implications, even if on a virtually insignificant scale.
While involved in those studies, Kai would tell me captivating tales of the work he was doing in West Greenland in a terrain of very old rocks with a complex history. The setting, at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet in a place I knew nothing about, deeply intrigued me. He described mysterious patterns in rocks over two billion years old that seemed to record events very much like those happening near the land surface in today’s Himalayas or Alps. Those ancient events in Greenland seemed to have taken place many miles below the surface, possibly preserving hints as to what is happening today far below the jagged peaks of those present-day mountains. But there was no obvious plate tectonics context within which to fit those observations—the rocks were too old and too little was known about those ancient times to allow anything other than empty hypothesizing.
His specialty was structural geology, which meant he focused his attention on the shapes, patterns, and orientations of layers in the rocks. He and his colleagues had reached the conclusion that the area was a complex zone where it seemed a continent had literally fractured, with one part slipping past the other for many tens or hundreds of miles shortly after the mountains had formed. It was an area of intense deformation.
I had a background that could complement their structural work, providing details about temperatures and pressures the rocks experienced as they went through that extreme deformation. My expertise was in metamorphic processes, which meant using the minerals in rocks to decipher how hot they had gotten and the paths they had followed deep into the earth and back again. Working in laboratories with microscopes and X-ray spectrometers and electron beams, I could tease from the rocks their journeys through vast times and great distances deep into the earth and back to the surface. Just before returning to the U.S. I convinced him to let me work in the lab on the rocks he had collected, hoping one day it would lead to visiting the place.
Eventually, I became friends with John Korstgård, a colleague of Kai’s who also was primarily a structural geologist but who had extensive experience in geochemistry and mineralogy. The three of us made a good team.
After a few years, we obtained funding to travel to Greenland and then worked there together, enjoying our collaboration. For nearly a decade, we pursued common interests, publishing a few papers and giving joint presentations at conferences. But over time, our attentions were distracted by differing career paths and life choices. By the late 1990s, our communication was only occasional, and the work in Greenland a fond memory.
Unexpectedly, Kai got in touch with me in 2000 about plans for a new expedition. At that time, he was involved with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which was sponsoring a regional