Cumaean???

Matthew King · 14 Dec 2007, 22:44 · from 2007-December.txt.gz

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From: automatthew at gmail.com (Matthew King)
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:44:05 -0600
Subject: (urth) Cumaean???
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On Dec 14, 2007, at 4:13 PM, Pedro Pereira wrote:

> > But I think 100K to 1M years is too short a time: some serious  
> geology takes
> > place between Sev's time and ours, enough so that human structures
> > (made of materials strong enough to endure the process) are  
> subducted
> > into the ground and then uplifted as part of mountains. I'm not  
> sure how
> > long orogenesis actually takes, but I'm guessing it's on the  
> order of millions
> > of years. Any geologists in Da Howse?
>
> I'm a geologist.
> There's no "serious" geology going on between Severian's time and  
> ours. South America seems to be basically the same as now. So there  
> are no substantial destruction of human structures by subduction,  
> that become part of the mantle and then eventually become part of  
> the crust again during orogenesis. Orogenesis makes itself felt on  
> the order of the millions of years, or hundreds of thousands of  
> years, although its not so linear as that.

I'm guessing Dan'l is referring to the scene where Severian, IIRC,  
describes climbing a sheer cliff with strata after strata of human  
artifacts exposed by erosion.  How would a geologist account for that?

I personally suspect that something other than uniformitarian  
geological process is responsible for that cliff.  One of the fun  
controversies on this list has been over the magnitude of the  
timescale required to reach Wolfe's dying earth.  Wolfe is partly  
responsible for that, as he gave, in an interview, a figure for the  
time until Severian that seems orders of magnitude too small (was it  
100,000 years).

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