POTM...*: White Sands National Monument

(*Photo[s] of the Month)

Gail and I have just completed a wonderful season of ministry among some dear new friends at a church in southern New Mexico. Working alongside the leaders and families of Sonoma Springs Covenant Church of Las Cruces will always be a life highlight for us, and we are deeply grateful for the opportunity to have shared this season with them.

Heading into this ministry experience last year, church life we knew. What we had no knowledge of was the uniqueness of New Mexico. The beauty of the state is an incredible thing but a well-kept secret, likely not a place many of you outside Colorado or Texas have visited. We were not only stunned by the loveliness of its high deserts and high mountains, and by the unique habitats formed by such things as bosques, remote canyon springs and sky islands; but we were also mesmerized by New Mexico’s geology, agriculture and human culture, and by the ways all of the above impact the area’s convergence of diverse histories, among them, archaeological and ancient puebloan histories, native American histories, and the histories of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Civil War of the United States, the American west, and the more recent Atomic and Space Ages. I don’t know that I have ever been surrounded by a more diverse conglomeration of habitats and histories.

Of course, while there we did as much hiking as spare time allowed, even encountered our first rattlesnakes and tarantulas while doing so! (We had actually been surprised never to have seen them before, what with all the traipsing we do.) But since our love for the people we worked with there and our delight with the state will not fade, I thought it timely once again to focus my photo(s) of the month on one of New Mexico’s less-known natural lovelies, one of our favorites, White Sands National Monument. Just northeast of Las Cruces, it was established in 1933 by President Herbert Hoover to protect a unique landform created through a coincidental cooperation of wind, precipitation, topography and geology. Not really ‘sand’ in the technical sense (which is made up of quartz-based silica and rock particles), these dunes are made of gypsum particles, a soft, water-soluble sulfate mineral, the main component of plaster and chalkboard chalk.

The dunes form in this way. Area precipitation is impounded in what is called the Tularosa Basin, a 6,500 square mile bowl surrounded by mountains, with no riversheds or outlets to drain it. Dissolved gypsum from the mountains flows with water into the basin, and as that water evaporates or sinks, gypsum selenite crystals are formed on the desert floor. These in turn crumble, and crumbs are picked up by prevailing winds and deposited on the dune field. Now, if it’s water-soluble, I’m not sure why the whole thing doesn’t just melt when it rains, so I’ll have to keep studying that! Suffice it to know, in regards to comfort, that these picturesque white sands remain fairly cool to the feet in the hot sun compared to regular sand, and, in regards to beauty, are especially good at picking up apparently blue shadows in the morning and evening as the sun is low in the sky. It all makes for a fantastical sort of environment to enjoy – hiking, dune running and jumping, unique moonlight concerts, even year-round sledding! And by the way, White Sands National Monument is the largest gypsum dune field in the world, 275 square miles in size.

I love dunes. It not only brings me back to my church youth group days as a teen, and our many trips to sand dune beach parks near Chicago on Lake Michigan. It also reminds me of God’s heart toward you and me expressed by David the Psalmist: “How precious to me are Your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, 

                                         they would outnumber the grains of sand…” (Psalm 139:17-18)

~~ RGM, June 25 2015

From My Journal: Well, Maybe it's the Time of Man... or Not

I did not know this until yesterday: the epoch of earth geology in which I live is called the Holocene. It means entirely recent and extends back a mere twelve thousand years or so to the end of the last great ice age. 

A Lesson in Geology

The epochs of earth time have historically been debatable and controversial, but scientists at least seem to be settling into definitions laid down in recent years by others in the field; and to curb at a minimum the scientific debate, it is all now overseen by an organization that is called the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). Not being a geologist, I recognize the names of very few epochs. In fact, I find that an epoch is only one of several categories of supposed geologic time. These include Ages, Epochs, Periods, Eras, Eons and Supereons, and among these there are near to two hundred different named time periods and sub-periods!

In case you were wondering, that places us in the Subatlantic Age of the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon of the post-Cambrian Supereon – if the latter even exists! Hmmm… Who’d ‘a thought? Don’t you just love science? No wonder it was so hard in high school. (Said in a medium monotone voice: “Now, the very popular Jurassic Period [made so famous by Steven Spielberg, heh, heh], consisted of Upper, Middle and Lower Epochs, and is only one part of the much longer Mesozoic Era, which in itself is one of three Eras within the Eon called the Phanerozoic. Very interestingly, it exists within a Supereon that is not even named… questioning the existence of the Pre-Cambrian… wa-wa… sub-Ages within… wa-wa----wa-wa-wa… Tithonian, Toarcian, Oxfordian… wa-wa----wa-wa-wa-wa.”) Among the many time period names are Nectarian (perhaps named for a certain petrified fruit pit found therein), the Santonian (which may contain irrefutable fossil evidence for the existence of Santa Claus after all, yes, Virginia…) and the widely-known Wuchiapingian, purportedly some 259,900,000 years ago, give or take 400,000 years. (“Come on already, who forgot to punch the time-card?”)

                                                         An Argument Heats Up

It’s the Holocene that is curious to me, though, our present time, and a movement afoot, according to the news, to define us as having entered a brand new geological epoch. The new epoch has been variously named, but seems to be resolving into what would be called the Anthropocene – anthropo from the Greek for man, and cene from new. Simple. The age of the New Man. Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young may have had it partly right when they sang, “Well, maybe it’s the time of year and maybe it’s the time of man. And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.” Indeed it is, among other things. (Nobody’s asking me, but since this is my blog I can say whatever I want -- I like Joni Mitchell’s rendition of Woodstock better than CSN&Y. Like ‘em both, but like hers better. She also wrote it.)

...The IUGS has set a deadline

of 2016 to come to a firm decision

if indeed the old epoch and old man

have passed and the new has come...

(Sorry, back to geology…) Some epochs were long, they say many millions of years, but apparently certain folks want to ditch the current one after a measly twelve thousand. I guess that’s what the New Man would do.  And though the IUGS has set a deadline of 2016 to come to a firm decision if indeed the old epoch and old man have passed and the new has come, some geologists are insisting that the decision is motivated more by pop culture than by good science. These latter would require the change to be triggered by something profoundly observable in the strata of the earth, a standard that has traditionally differentiated all the categories and sub-categories. And those who would change it say they have their observable criteria: the pollution and/or or carbons that have covered the earth since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, or if not that, then the radiation that recently covers the earth since the inception of the Atomic Age. So now things might be redefined as our having entered our new epoch at some point between 68 and 250 years ago. And all that without so much as a birthday party…

And what does that now make of the 'entirely recent' epoch? Is it now the 'epoch formerly known as entirely recent?' 'Entirely recent asterisk?' Or does it all now depend upon one's definition of the word 'entirely?'

New Man or New Creation?

My curiosity is piqued by the effort that seems to be going into such a thing. Pop culture? What about spirit culture? There is only one truly new man I can think of and that is the one spoken of in the Bible in 2 Corinthians 5, Ephesians 4 and John 3, among other places: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come… So put on the new man, which is like the nature of God, truly righteous and holy… Don’t be surprised at my saying that you must be born anew.”

So I suppose while scientists gather their intentions around how many epochs can dance on the head of a pin, I will continue to take consolation in knowing this: the time of man, thankfully, has been intersected by a timeless God, who counts the epoch of the new man from a rock strata upon which a cross stood about 2,000 years ago.

(P.S. The photos shown in this entry are from a series Gail and I have taken over the years of random cross shapes we find in nature and elsewhere, a series we call “The Cross Before Me.”  Since this post is on geology, or ‘what’s in the rocks,’ I thought it appropriate to share some of them. In these cases, as you can see, the cross is what’s in the rocks. Looks to me like, in their way, "...the rocks cry out.")

(P.P.S. And by the way, did you know that this blog is set up in such a way that if you click on a photo it will enlarge? Try it. I think that feature is pretty cool.)

~~RGM, from an earlier journal entry written January 10, 2013