#62: Otherlands: A World in the Making

 

Thomas Halliday’s book is a biography of the Earth, told backwards. He starts 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of the decisive thawing of the mammoth steppe, or grassland, in Beringia, now northern Alaska and the Arctic. The steppe rings the Pleistocene world and is home to creatures such as horses, bison and the now-extinct cave lion.

As the world warms over thousands of years, seas rise and the land fragments into islands, so these animals can no longer migrate widely. The decisive breaking up of the area will occur about 11,000 years before the present. Native species such as mammoth ‘will not survive for long, battered by the warming world and… versatile new predators.’ Who are these new predators able to move north because of the rising temperatures? Humans, of course. In our day only the caribou, brown bear and muskox survive of the species the steppe once hosted (the muskox as a reintroduction).

Time and space travel

The book then travels the Earth, moving backwards in time to land at different times and places. So there are abundant giant penguins 41 million years ago, some taller than modern humans; a gorgon 253 million years ago with a painful mouth tumour and a leg which has never been the same since she fractured it hunting Bunostegos (a creature looking like a stumpy, tall crocodile); and rock-eating bacteria in the Devonian, 407 million years ago, which make the surface of the water in which they live, intolerably hot to every other lifeform, shimmer with bubbles. The book ends in the pre-Cambrian 550 million years ago, with no life on land, a 22-hour day before friction slows the Earth’s rotation, and a closer moon shining 15% brighter.

The climate and geological processes are given as much space as plants and animals. Heading each chapter are helpful maps showing how landmasses and seas have changed, as well as illustrations of animals now unfamiliar to us. Halliday is at pains to explain scientific terms, for example on the difference between a ‘fundamental niche’ (the possible survivable conditions for a species) and its ‘realised niche’ (the way its niche is actually limited by interactions with other organisms).

In thrall to human language

In the pre-Cambrian world are the earliest creatures we can call animals. One of these is ‘a centimetre-scale flying saucer’ with eight arms, ‘spiralling clockwise from the tip of the cone to its base… floating hypnotically’. This is Eoandromeda, ‘so called because when flattened in fossilisation, its eight arms resemble the spiral galaxy Andromeda’.

Eoandromeda’s name shows how in thrall we are to our language and ways of seeing, and also to the limited range of evidence we have. So we discover this creature flattened as a fossil and name it after a galaxy at the limits of our world (which we have also previously named), a charming link between the earthly and extinct with the unearthly and infinite. So this creature has achieved a kind of immortality, in human terms.

Drama… with no humans? How?

How does Halliday add drama and interest to processes that happen over huge timescales, mostly with no humans involved?

Firstly, he picks varied moments — differently configured landmasses and oceans, with different climates and ecosystems, for example before or after mass extinctions. Secondly he focuses on movement. Movement of wind, waves and water and therefore of land; communities of animals migrating; individual creatures on the move. Thirdly, he mixes together disparate information — so as well as watching a short-faced bear rummaging in a mammoth carcass, we learn about Korean, Russian and European bear mythologies.

Lastly, he embraces human-centred ways of description. Literary quotations head each chapter (the last has Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’, commemorating the death of a young soldier in the Boer War — ‘Yet portion of that unknown plain/Will Hodge forever be’). He chooses anthropomorphic language such as ‘cyanobacteria discovered the magic of photosynthesis’, which would not get past an academic editor.

He is also happy to translate from the academic to the literary; so the academic term ‘index fossils’ (fossils which are so abundant they can be used to date the rocks they are in) becomes ‘fossil timepieces’ later in the same paragraph. The book ends with a plea to work together to stop climate change. It tells us the world will never stop being in the making, or making.

 Otherlands: A World in the Making is published by Penguin.