Someone once tried to explain the concept of infinity to me by saying that if an eagle flew past a mountain every million years and touched it lightly with its wingtip, by the time the mountain had crumbled to nothing, that might equate to one second of forever. This still does not grasp the vast reality of eternity, but does help our mortal and time-bound minds to gain some insight into the nature of the universe and our incidental place within it.
The world began on 23 October 4004 BCE, according to the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, James Ussher in 1650, who worked this out by adding up all the documented ages of key people in the bible.[1] The planet is now believed to be at least 4.6 billion years old, in part due to research undertaken into the cliffs on this beach by John Phillips (1800-1874), the first keeper of the Yorkshire Museum in York. Nicknamed the dinosaur coast, this 40 mile stretch of coastline, from Sandsend in the north to Filey in the South, is embedded with fossils that date back up to 200 million years, from a prehistoric age when Scarborough was a sub-tropical home to the abundance of life at that time.
John Phillips was orphaned at the age of seven and brought up by his uncle, William Smith, who was known as the Father of English Geology and had created the first geological map of Great Britain in 1815. Following in his uncle’s footsteps, Phillips also became a highly respected geologist whose significant contributions include Illustrations of the Geology of Yorkshire, published in two volumes in 1829 and 1836. Crucially, Phillips built on his uncle’s investigations into rock strata and associated fossils to read the different geological eras of the planet.
Phillips was part of an important and ongoing debate between scientists and the church about the age of the earth following the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859. Darwin challenged the church’s calculation that the earth was 6,000 years old, saying that it was at least 300 million. Phillips used geological evidence to argue against Darwin’s “abuse of arithmetic” to claim that the planet was one billion years old.[2] This was an incredibly radical proposition, but one ahead of its time.
On the beach at Scarborough, with the actual and imaginary weight of history holding up the earth behind it, Katie Paterson invites us to make scale versions of five of the earth’s mountains. First There is a Mountain takes place around the British coast this summer and beautifully illustrates the artist’s rare ability to encourage us to appreciate the profound in the detail – the Sahara desert, for example, now being home to the “tiniest grain of sand”, which the artist had chiselled down to 0.00005mm using nanotechnology.
Formed in minutes, present for hours, then returned to the sea by a tide that ebbs and flows without a sense of past or future, the sandcastles that form First There is a Mountain represent a microcosm of existence and make us fundamentally more aware of the life cycle of the mountain, of the planet, of ourselves.
[1] James Ussher (1650) Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world, the chronicle of Asiatic and Egyptian matters together produced from the beginning of historical time up to the beginnings of Maccabees.
[2] Joe D Burchfield (1974) Darwin and the Dilemma of Geological Time. Isis, Vol 65, No. 3, The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society, pp. 300-321.
