Rocks and Goose-Pimples

Most travellers regard landscapes as backdrops. They see rocks as static, just sitting there.
But they don’t.
In the Blue Mountains, I stood close to the spot Charles Darwin stood at in 1836. Darwin was awed by those enormous excavations into the ground. ‘Subsidence’ he concluded. But Darwin was wrong. Weathering had changed a raised plateau into a skeletal landscape - threequarters of the original mass removed. Masses of rock gone somewhere else. I became aware that geology is not about something static; and that rocks move. They move more than we do because they have more time to do so - 60 million years at the Blue Mountains.
The walls of Banded Iron Formation in the Pilbara are oxidized layers of refuse when early life had learned the trick to eat via photosynthesis. One can almost hear the munching of those tiny critters. Again, geology is not about something static - it’s archived activity. That rock has things to say.
In the ancient Macdonnell Ranges there are sheer cuts through rock, billions of years old. An autopsy of old body Earth. Touch a rock - it’s like touching part of the original package. These rocks are not alive, but not quite dead either - infused with the stuff of Earth’s memory.
And a connection to the beginning.
That’s when rocks give me goose-pimples.
Greetings - Klaus and Rusty

(Those ‘Blue Mountains’ have been inscribed on the World Heritage List. If interested, have uploaded 2 short clips of them on my site).