# A Praedial Universe

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*A Praedial Universe, Copywrite by Roger Yates Anderson, 4/12/00. All
rights reserved.*

**Geologists, by nature, are territorial in their habits. Foraging among
bushes, around boulders, and along rock ledges, their comestibles are
fragments of once-living organisms. Scraps of earthdata, collected from
crumbling outcrops, are shoved into a mental pouch that holds a current
working hypothesis. For the field geologist, as for the farmer, or for
anyone who depends upon an intimacy with the earth, knowing makes one
protective.\
\
I knew nothing of the bonding power in terrain when I agreed, in 1975,
to help government scientists explore for the first geological site for
the disposal of the plutonium-contaminated radioactive waste. The making
of atomic and hydrogen bombs had created highly toxic wastes and failure
to solve the waste problem was threatening development of the nuclear
industry. It was logical that geologists be given the task of finding a
place for the \"permanent disposal\" of waste. The mythology that
created the word plutonium implies that a solution to this difficult
problem lay deep within the earth.**

**Looking for WIPP**

![](media/image2.png){width="2.5in" height="2.321527777777778in"}**In
1972 Geologists selected a site for the WIPP disposal project which lay
within the Delaware Basin in southeastern New Mexico, not too far from
Carlsbad Caverns.**

**This was the place that, years earlier, I had unwittingly adopted as
my own. The WIPP project hit a snag when a gusher of gas and brine
erupted from a test borehole. Because I had studied the basin, I was
asked to be a consultant. The brine was in a geologic formation made of
many thousands of thin layers of dark calcite and thicker layers of
pure, nearly white gypsum. Each pair or couplet of light and dark layers
had been deposited in one year\'s time, and like tree rings, the layers
recorded changes in climate.**

 

![](media/image3.png){width="1.8055555555555556in"
height="2.7083333333333335in"}
![](media/image4.png){width="2.8645833333333335in"
height="2.7395833333333335in"}\
***Left: Brine bubbling up from the Castile*. *Right: Light/dark
couplets in the Castile. ***

**\
My students and I had set out to measure each layer and to put together
what was to become the world\'s longest annual record of climate
change - a quarter million years. While we were collecting the layers,
about 10 years before the WIPP project began, my student and friend,
Walter Dean and I had drilled into a similar chamber of gas and found
brine (see above) not too many miles away.\
\
I was being asked to use my knowledge of the geologic basin to help
solve the mystery of the brine.\
\
We never really solved the mystery, and eventually, the site was
abandoned, and another site was chosen eight miles farther to the west.
For the next five years I worked as part of the exploration team at the
second site. But investigations at the new site showed that a chamber of
brine and gas probably lay beneath the repository. We parted company
when WIPP science managers denied that a brine reservoir could be
beneath the repository.**

**My objections to WIPP, I thought, were based solely on technical
grounds and on the serious implications of the brine chamber. What I
didn\'t understand at the time was that each of us carry \"genes\" for
territoriality that can become expressed under the right circumstances.
If there was to be a nuclear waste dump in \"my basin,\" then the site
had to be as perfect as possible. No hidden blister of brine, no
concealed threat to future generations, would be acceptable. But as
genes often do, mine failed to complete their mission, overwhelmed by
more powerful forces.\
\
The WIPP repository is completed, the trucks are hauling in the waste.
and elevators are carrying it to the burial chamber. With completion of
the WIPP facility guardianship has shifted from geologists to scientific
panels that still must deal with the problem of releases of nuclear
waste. Not anchored to the land, members of panels and commissions have
the freedom to think abstractly about *\"multi-mode release limits,
collective doses, and acceptable risks.\"* Guardianship is couched in
language such as *\"propagations of comparative uncertainties between
individual dose and cumulative release.\"* The motives of scientists and
administrators have changed from protecting a place to protecting a
future, an enormous difference.\
\
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years which means that the lethal
stuff cannot be allowed to become airborne for ten times that interval.
A quarter-million years is an incomprehensible number, even for
geologists. Experts and Federal agencies have arbitrarily declared that
10,000 years is a long enough interval for which anyone can reasonably
be expected to be responsible. But being responsible for the future,
however short one thinks it might be, puts one in an uncomfortable
position and scientists and science managers, to spread accountability,
have sought the help of futurists, historians, archaeologists, and
linguists.\
\
Stonehenge!, said the anthropologists, predictably. Pictographs!, said
the non-verbal linguists. Together they came up with a plan that would
ring the WIPP site with a circle of huge manufactured stones, each
pointing skyward. Embedded in each stone would be a pictographic story,
cast in bronze, to ward off all but the most curious of our children\'s
children.**

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height="2.3854166666666665in"}

**I have extracted the pictographs from a 1984 report to DOE. The
eventual markers my carry different signs of warning, but the drawings
reflect a concern that humans at some time in the future will drill into
waste chambers. The WIPP site sits above a major petroleum reserve and
is surrounded today by pumping oil wells, and government commissioned
experts predict that several wells are likely to penetrate the
repository.**

**The artists who created the pictographs have been creative. For the
danger from plutonium they used the international symbol of an
environmental biohazard, an icon which merges the sharp, curved blade of
the death sickle with multiple wings of the harpe (the harpe being part
bird and part woman, a foul, malign creature linked with allegories of
death and self mutilation and with the self-sacrifice that goes with
weaponry - Cirlot\'s dictionary).**

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**The pictographs relay a non-verbal message. For those unfamiliar with
cross-sections through the earth, scene 1 (single dot) shows the
repository beneath an underground aquifer. A water well has tappedinto
the aquifer and irrigates crops in the field above.**

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height="2.2604166666666665in"}

![](media/image8.png){width="3.9375in" height="4.25in"}

**Scenes 2 and 3 show a water well being drilled through the aquifer and
then into the repository. Water flows from the aquifer into the
repository, picks up waste from a few drums, and carries it through the
well to the surface where it contaminates the crops. Three figures eat
the forbidden fruit.**

**In scenes 4 and 5 two of the figures keep their archaic smiles,
unaffected by the poison, but one of the three has a bellyache and a
grimace that ends in death.**

**Maybe such a pictograph will work, for it is an ancient allegory, set
in a garden, and marking the end of (nuclear) innocence. Adam and Eve
are there, along with a friend, biting into a forbidden future.**

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**Because the WIPP repository is surrounded by oil wells and derricks. I
have taken the liberty to add scenes 6 and 7, in which a drilling rig
punctures the repository and the underlying chamber of pressurized
brine. At 2000 psi, brine rushes into the repository, picks up waste,
and ejects water and waste at the surface where it becomes airborne and
enters the lungs of the drillers, etc. This part of the scenario has not
impressed many humans today and one wonders if would not also be ignored
in the future.\
\
It seems ironic, after our efforts, to find that we geologists managed
to find one of the few places on earth where geologic conditions and
natural forces can blow nuclear waste back to the surface.**

**Layers of Time**

**As the drums of radioactive trash travel down the waste handling shaft
at WIPP they passes through dirty red-brown mudstone and sandstone, pass
a leaking seal in the shaft, descend past hard, brownish dolomite, and
stop at a human cavern carved into impure rock salt sandwiched between
layers of white anhydrite. Layers of salt and anhydrite in the walls of
the waste chamber, thicker than books on a shelf, tell of heat and
evaporation in a shallow sea that once spread across much of Kansas,
Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The first plan for WIPP called for a
deeper shaft and disposal rooms cut into the pure rock salt of the
Castile Formation.**

**This is where we are heading, to the Castile Formation. WIPP and all
we have considered up to now is prologue. What I really want to tell you
about is something rare and fascinating in the geologic formation
beneath the disposal rooms at WIPP chambers and above the pool of
confined salt water. This deeper story offers hope to those who look for
less stressful reasons for being the Earth\'s guardian. To tell this
part of the story, I must describe the Delaware Basin and its terrain as
it was 220 million years ago.\
\
If you drive about 30 miles south from Carlsbad Caverns along U. S. 180,
toward El Paso, Texas, and look westard, you will see *El Capitan*, a
towering mountain. El Capitan is made of the same reef-rock which holds
the Caverns. Capitan reef, in the Permian geologic period, encircled a
deep depression which we now call the Delaware Basin. By some tectonic
accident of nature, the crust of the earth in this small part of New
Mexico and Texas lost strength, gave way, and sank into a deep cavity
that opened onto a tropical sea. For many thousands of years a reef grew
around the inside edge of the foundering basin (see the first figure),
in much the same way that reefs make atolls by growing around the
outside of volcanic islands.**

![](media/image11.png){width="1.5104166666666667in"
height="2.1979166666666665in"}**Figure 1 *(left): El Capitan, a rampart
of the reef which encircles the Delaware Basin, exposed today in the
Guadalupe Mountains.\
*Figure 2 *(middle): Dark layers of calcium carbonate and light layers
of calcium sulfate of the Castile Formation. The photo is of two
different cores, placed side by side. The core on the left was collected
24 km from the core on the right. These remarkable annual layers called
varves, only millimeters thick, can be traced across the basin for more
than 100 km.*\
**

**Figure 3 *(right): Thick layers of rock salt (halite) separated by
thin layers of calcium sulfate are also annual layers or varves in the
Castile Formation and were formed when salts were concentrated during
times of warm and dry climate***

***\
*The reef grew to be a bulwark, blocking the sand and the silt and the
clay that would enter the basin from the country that lay beyond,
keeping these fragments of rock from quickly filling the basin. What
remained was a deep body of blue water, loaded with the ocean salts of
sulfate and chloride.\
\
Within the surrounding reef, only thin layers of pure limestone, and
gypsum, and rock salt were precipitated, season upon season, year after
year, making the annual layerings called *varves*. The deep basin,
protected by the reef, held enough room for the more than 200,000 varves
in the Castile Formation.**

**You can see the varves in the Castile Formation in a roadcut along
Highway 180, about 12 miles south of the Caverns. The \"State-Line
Outcrop\" is a famous stopping place for geologists, where, exposed to
view, are thousands of varves, thosands of years of climatic history.**

**Our part in the Castile story was to count and measure each
millimeter-layer, year by year, bottom to top, and put together the
world\'s longest annual record of climate change. Our search began at
the State-Line Outcrop and our first visit introduced us to an
intriguing mystery.**

![](media/image14.png){width="4.125in" height="2.6875in"}

Figure 4 *State-Line Outcrop, looking southwest. In the far background
is Capitan reef. The NM/Texas state line is at the fenceline and change
in vegetation in the middle distance.*

**If you drive the road south from Carlsbad Caverns, stop, take a few
minutes and look closely along the weathering face of the State-Line
Outcrop. If you are patient you will find places where dark layers of
limestone and the light layers of gypsum have been folded into
remarkably intricate patterns.**

![](media/image15.png){width="2.6069444444444443in" height="3.3in"}

Figure 5 *Harmonic microfolding in the Castile Formation*

**The patterns reminded us of weavings and pottery fashioned by native
artists in New Mexico. Certainly, they had been seen along the sides of
deeply cut arroyos by many long before us. Here was Nature\'s art, ready
to be expanded and fabricated by the human imagination.**

**As all artists know, materials make the difference. When we looked
closely, and wondered how they had formed, understanding the patterns
became a challenge. My student, Douglas Kirkland, noticed immediately
that it was the thinnest layers that were the most crumpled - an
important clue. The thickest layers had put up more resiostance and had
folded only a little. His measurements showed that the thickest layers
just got fatter. There was only one way this could be explained. The
rock had been squuezed sideways and each layer responded in its own way
to being squuezed.**

![](media/image16.png){width="2.279861111111111in"
height="0.5638888888888889in"}

**From the direction of folding Kirkland deduced that the layers were
compressed by forces within the earth\'s crust at a time when the
Pacific oceanic plate collided and slipped under the North American
plate, 40 to 50 million years ago. This meant that the patterns formed
when the material was already rock, almost 200 million years after the
layers were laid down on the seafloor as a gooey mud.**

![](media/image17.png){width="3.96875in" height="2.0305555555555554in"}

**Back then, when the mud was still soft, the Delaware Basin lay just
east of the warm waters of the ancestral Pacific. Each year in the warm
season, clouds drifted eastward from the warm pool, watering the basin,
and a dark layer rich with algae was produced. And each year, as the
skies cleared and the sun burned down, water evaporated and made a light
layer.**

**One by one, year by year, the layers accumulated on the bottom until
the water shallowed and the basin was filled with striped mud. Each
season the thickness of a light layer or a dark layer recorded what kind
of a year it was, sunny, cloudy, or average. What seems remarkable to me
is that 200 million years later, as the rock was squeezed and as the
layers rumpled, the kind of year it was, the weather of some previous
era, was noticed once again as each layer offered its own resistance to
further change.\
\
It\'s no wonder that this artful geometry, exposed in the banks of an
arroyo, caught the attention of those who passed near. And it is no
wonder that the patterns deserve notice. For within the harmonic pattern
is an almost Einsteinian interweaving of space and time. Powerful
atmospheric, and oceanic, and subcrustal forces were at work in making
this example of nature\'s fretting. Its rhythms, now frozen in space,
were orchestrated by the response of fluids to the earth\'s tilt and
rotation. All these things together give our small piece of rock its
tempo. I can count the number of folds in a layer and place that number
on a musical score sheet. If I were to add flags and a clef, it could be
a musical composition written by the earth.**

![](media/image18.png){width="4.125in" height="2.8854166666666665in"}

**Our earlier studies of similar layers in modern lakes had convinced us
that each pair of light and dark layers represented one year. Our goal
was to measure each pair of layers and build an exceptionally long
history of annual climate change. We drilled, cored, sliced, polished,
and photographed more than 1000 feet of rock.**

![](media/image19.png){width="1.9993055555555554in"
height="1.8534722222222222in"}![](media/image20.png){width="2.125in"
height="1.8493055555555555in"}![](media/image21.png){width="2.2493055555555554in"
height="1.8541666666666667in"}\
***Left: Roger, worrying about core recovery. Middle: Coring rig at
sunset. Right: Working day and night.***

**We measured the layers from a photographic print which, unrolled,
stretched more than a mile. We began before the era of computers and put
computers to the task when they became available. I still have some data
sheets processed on MANIAC, the machine at Los Alamos that helped build
the bomb and was donated to the university. Finally, as our series of
numbers grew longer, and as computers grew smaller, unrolled before us,
was a 200,000-year plot of climate change.**

![](media/image22.png){width="3.779861111111111in"
height="2.1145833333333335in"}

***A plot of the 200,000-year Castile time-series. The largest changes
in climate occurred in cycles of about 2500 years 20,000 years, and
100,000 years. Yellow bands are salt beds.***

**Computers let us smooth (filter) data so that the eye could see long
cycles in climate as well as short ones. When we looked at the whole
time-series we had a beautiful history of climate. Beautiful because one
could easily see the 100,000-year cycle of climate that comes from the
earth\'s eccentric cartwheeling around the sun. There also, was a
20,000-year climate response to the precession of the equinox. Here was
Kepler\'s \"music of the spheres,\" stamped on my geologic basin.**\
\
![](media/image23.png){width="4.197916666666667in"
height="3.5416666666666665in"}\
**The message from our long record of climate change was a simple one-
our earth\'s climate was being held in an incredibly delicate balance.
We know this because there are only slight differences in the amount of
heat that reaches the earth from the sun during changes in precession
and eccentricity. Such differences should have a feeble effect on
climate. Yet here they were, telling us that our climate responds to
very small changes in forcing. One important implication of the record
from the Castile is that climate is likely to be effected by human
activity.**

**I thought that most of the mystery had been removed from the Castile.
But a few years after we published the first plot, I happened to be
invited to Sunday dinner by a neighbor. She had invited several other
friends and neighbors. One of the neighbors, whom I had yet to meet, was
a weaver and she was going to unveil a large and colorful wall hanging
that had taken her many months to complete. The weaver, Mary Ann Moraga,
had previously used earth themes in her tapestries and had once been a
musician. The new tapestry was long and narrow and after dinner we
gathered along both sides of the living room for the unrolling.**

![](media/image24.png){width="4.125in" height="1.875in"}

**I sat opposite the artist, which only added to my reaction because I
was looking at the weaving in the same way I was used to seeing the
climate record from the Castile. As Mary Ann unrolled her creation I saw
the plot of the Castile, as we had published it, within the colorful
threads of the tapestry.**

![](media/image25.png){width="3.75in" height="3.0520833333333335in"}

**How could it be? What I saw was the same series of climate
oscillations so painstakingly assembled from our annual layers! It
wasn\'t a perfect copy, but it brought goose flesh. I noticed first that
the strong, 2500-year oscillation in the Castile also dominated the
weaving. At the start, on the left, was the first big shift in climate
in the Castile, followed by a steady increase in the amplitude of
2500-year cycles. This was a time when the Delaware Basin was new and
deep and filled with water, and when the beat of climate had less of an
effect on the thickness of the annual layers of sediment.**

**Her sequence had two large maxima near 100,000 years, at a time when
our basin had nearly dried up and made two thick beds of halite. Then
both records settled into a pattern of equilibrium, with stronger and
weaker pulses in the tapestry matching stronger and weaker oscillations
in ancient weather patterns. Then, near the end, when the basin was
full, massive beds of salt and thick beds of gypsum in the Castile
became a crescendo of strong and prolonged pulsations in the weaving.**

**When my composure returned I made a feeble attempt to explain away
what I was seeing as mere coincidence. Where Moraga\'s weaving had 72
strong millennial cycles, the Castile had 76, a small but possibly
important difference. The precession cycle was not as well defined in
her piece, but clearly, the long, 100,000-year cycle of orbital
eccentricity seemed to be an organizing theme in both creations.**

![](media/image26.png){width="3.1875in" height="2.6458333333333335in"}

**All climate records and geophysical time series oscillate at several
frequencies and these same climate cycles were common at other times
during Earth\'s history. The 100,000-year eccentricity cycle, for
example, was the pacemaker for episodes of glaciation during the last
great Ice Age. A millennial cycle of about 2500 years dominated the
advance and retreat of glaciers and timed the release of flotillas of
icebergs into the North Atlantic. The same cycle brought the rains that
caused the rise and fall of lakes in western North America and Africa.\
\
These climate cycles we already knew. But how did they wind up in a
tapestry that looked so much like the climate changes the Castile?**

**In the minutes of stunned silence that followed the unveiling I
searched hurriedly for both logical and illogical explanations. Was it
something extrasensory? After all, we were neighbors. Could it have been
some form of paranormal transfer of long-wave electrical impulses
between two brains within a few blocks of each other? No! Not
pseudoscience! I had spent too long in science\'s harness to entertain
that idea.\
\
More time went by as I made sure of the kinship between rock and wool.
Then, tentatively, in unsteady voice, I asked Mary Ann Moraga how she
had come to construct such a weaving**.\
\
\
T**he mystery quickly melted away in an anti-climax. For her weaving,
she explained,**

***Moraga had numerically encoded and colorized one of the choral fugues
from the Well-tempered Clavier and had woven the musical composition
into the tapestry*.**

**The yellow patches in the cloth, my beds of halite and times of
extreme dry climate, were the voices of the chorale.**

**Here is the explanation I have settled on. Some readers, and not just
scientists, will be unforgiving about this unfair test of the power of
science to explain nature. But it is the best that can be done.\
\
Each geologic basin has a history that moves from birth to life, and
from life to death, not unlike the compositions of Bach. The changes in
climate that were recorded in the Castile were no more than the sum of
many annual cycles of change. All cyclic processes are inherently
variable and oscillate like a musical composition.**

![](media/image27.png){width="3.0in" height="2.813888888888889in"}

***Microscopic particles of calcite (yellow) frozen in place as they
settled on the floor of the deep Delaware Basin. The gray and black
mosaic is the light-colored layer (in polarized light).***

**When the Delaware Basin was young, as during a fugue\'s exposition,
changes in climate had little effect on the particles of sediment that
settled to the bottom of a new, deep basin. Oscillations induced by
climate, began weakly, revealing the texture of the piece to follow.
With maturity, the early subject of nature\'s fugue in the Castile,
imposed by climate forces acting on a body of water of just the right
size, became a counterpoint that was repeated, overlain, and amplified
to sustain the beat and a richness of detail through a long struggle for
chemical equilibrium. Having reached its peak of complexity and
fullness, the filling of the basin ended in a grand coda, and finally,
in death. Isn\'t this a fugue?**

**Maybe a scientific explanation is not needed. If we think of the
Delaware Basin as another kind of well-tuned clavier, then it could have
captured something also perceived by Bach. His \"territory,\" after all,
included the universe, and, like the Delaware Basin, his ear was tuned
to the \"music of the spheres.\" Wasn\'t the Well-tempered Clavier his
attempt to tune nature? Was not his a heavenly gift?\
\
I think the fugues of Bach and fugue of the Castile carry a lesson about
those things that we create. In a fugue, a simple beginning is
transformed into a complete composition. In the Castile, a simple
response to the seasons was propagated, over time, to became longer
cycles of precession and orbital eccentricity. In life also, our early
creations, wanted or unwanted, become the themes we repeat and
elaborate. If we think of it this way, the disposal of anything we
create runs contrary to our experience. And yet, the practice of tring
to dispose of the unwanted is so ingrained within us that our lives
would change radically if we were prevented from discarding those things
we have created or acquired.**

![](media/image28.png){width="3.0in" height="1.7708333333333333in"}\
***Borehole ERDA 9. Center of WIPP site***

 

**Why should our collective lives be any different from a fugue or from
any process that builds and becomes more elaborate over time? Why should
we be exempt from an obligation that comes with growth, and change, and
evolution? If this means that we must guard our nuclear creations
forever, then we should prepare to train its guardians. If this means
elevating a mundane profession such as garbage disposal to a priesthood,
so be it. Who knows what forms of art might emerge from such waste?**

**Can you see now why I became protective of my basin? Coming to know
even a small part of the earth leads to feelings of protection, as
surely as bonding between a parent and child. For me, my basin is a
place for communing with nature. I believe that bonding with terrain is
a powerful force that can be turned toward stewardship. It means that
guardianship of waste, or of the earth for that matter, cannot be
entrusted to panels who have little experience or contact with their
earth.**

**\
I have come to know ranchers in New Mexico and west Texas who have the
spirit to guard their corner of the world. Maybe those who are still
landed can show the rest how. But with entire educated populations
rarely treading on soil or rock the task is daunting. The challenge is
to broaden our experience with the earth, and electronic images are a
poor substitute.\
\
Finally, I hope that feelings of guardianship can find expression in the
art of the future. For me, the message found in the harmonic folding and
in the music of climate beneath the wasting drums at WIPP demands more
sacrifice than the simple avoidance advocated by concret markers at the
surface. Maybe art can help us recognize the disharmony and danger that
comes from not seeing connections between Earth\'s creations. Maybe
then, guardianship will be rooted in a praedial urge to know and protect
Earth as our permanent home.**

![](media/image29.png){width="2.25in" height="1.7708333333333333in"}\
***Roger, during Castile Project, Circa 1969***