Coal Black Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Cornwall coast of England, lay Nova Scotia.
    It’s a staggering notion: when Pangaea formed, Nova Scotia was on or near the equator, and continued to inch its way northward as the supercontinent slowly broke apart and the continents continued to assemble. In time, as the continents collided, mountain belts formed—and, eventually, small deep basins between them. This mosaic of interconnected mountains and basins extended from central Nova Scotia northward across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the present-day shore of the Gaspé Peninsula, east to Newfoundland. The region, by then completely emerged from the sea, was crossed by northeasterly flowing rivers. The rivers carried gravel, sand and mud from the adjacent primordialmountains down into the luxuriant rainforest swamps and bogs flourishing across the tropical lowlands. As the climate warmed, vegetation formed, not just in present-day Nova Scotia but elsewhere in Pangaea’s spreading land mass. And ever so slowly, in the river valleys and freshwater lakes between the remains of those mountain ranges in what would become England and Wales, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Nova Scotia, coal formed.
    What Calder seeks are the remnants of the vegetation that grew on the flood plains. The tectonic plates continued to grind, collide, recede and collapse, the continents to assemble. Rock bent into folds, or split, causing great slices of plate to rise and fall relative to each other. The Cumberland Basin, where Joggins lies, was one of the low-lying areas that settled between the faults. The exposed sediments we’re looking at are the 300-million-year-old wash from the rivers in the uplifted highlands to the west and south.
    It doesn’t take Calder long to find what he’s after: a brownish column, maybe a yard around, suspended perpendicularly within the cliff face. All these hundreds of millions of years later, it’s still possible to make out elongated, diamond-shaped scars that span the trunk. Today, the tree’s only living relative is common club moss, which grows just a few centimetres high. In its heyday, that Lepidodendron, one of the most common types of lycopod, stretched thirty metres into the steamy prehistoric sky. Calder’s on a bit of a roll now, pointing out thin stems that indicate a once-thick undergrowth of calamites, ancient horsetails; running a finger along the remains of a cordaite, which had roots like today’s mangrove and metre-long leaves that resembled the amaryllis. Each remnant tells a similar story of the ancient crust of the earth sinking and sediment quickly—by geological standards—accumulating overtop.
    Lyell and I have something in common. What he saw in 1842—Lepidodendrons suspended as if in aspic, lycopods haphazardly dotting the sedimentary rocks, calamites peeking out at weird angles—astounded him. “Just returned from an expedition of 3 days to the strait which divides Nova Scotia from New Brunswick,” he wrote to his sister after a Joggins visit similar to my own, “whither I went to see a forest of fossil coal—trees—the most wonderful phenomenon perhaps that I have seen, so upright do the trees stand, or so perpendicular to the strata, in the ever-wasting cliffs, every year a new crop being brought into view, as the violent tides of the Bay of Fundy and the intense frost of the winters here, combine to destroy, undermine, and sweep away the old one—trees twenty-five feet high and some have been seen of forty feet, piercing the beds of sandstone and terminating downwards in the same beds, usually coal.”
    I have to tell you: it’s a humbling thing to look at the remains of a 300-million-year-old plant. The intricate, perfect design, for starters. Then there’s the notion I first encountered in Barbara Freese’s book
Coal: A Human History,
that when you look at an ancient fern you’re indirectly gazing upon prehistoric sunlight. All those ancient trees, ferns and mosses were sophisticated machines that captured