Underland

MacFarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: Norton 2019. Print

First Sentences:

We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet.

Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon's face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil. tarmac, toe .... 

The underland keeps its secrets well.

Description:

"The underland" is defined as the "world beneath our feet" in Robert MacFarlane's highly engrossing new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. MacFarlane sets out to explore and experience various underland manifestations from caves to underground cities and melting glaciers, sharing his feelings about each physical environment, as well as the literature, history, and people who explore these hidden worlds.

MacFarlane explains that underland areas, throughout history, have have been used for three purposes for humans:

• To shelter what is precious (memories, messages, fragile lives
• To yield what is valuable (minerals, visions, information, wealth)
• To dispose of what is harmful (waste, poison, secrets)

MacFarlane notes the "long cultural history of abhorrence around underground spaces, associated with 'the awful darkness inside the world,'" (Cormac McCarthy). Mankind has described the underworld through stories full of fear, disgust, dirt, mortality, and the "disturbing power of claustrophobia." Not wonder we know so little of this portion of our own earth.

MacFarlane sets out to experience each sub-surface land first hand, including:

• The Mendips limestone burial sites in England
• The intricate Invisible Cities and Les Catecombes under Paris
• The Starless Rivers that run underground in Italy
• The caves with Red Dancer paintings in the isolated caves of Norway
• The Hiding Places in Finland
• The Moulin (melting holes) in the glaciers of Greenland 
• The Onkalo in Finland built to store radioactive waste safely underground for eons

What makes this extensive book so compelling is the combination of science, folklore, and curiosity MacFarlane brings to each experience. He thoroughly researches the limestone caverns carved over countless ages (incomprehensible numbers of years are called "dark time") by dripping water. We can hardly imagine such a span of time. MacFarlane imparts this information as he inches belly down through tiny cave passageways. 

He also shows us the 8,600 year old honey fungus with a root system that spreads for miles underground. This underground network helps trees share nutrients (via the "wood wide web" - yes, that is the official term) and breaks down rocky mountains into sand over deep time. 

We read the historical literary references which portray trips to the underland to rescue people or to convey the dead with coins on their eyes to pay for the river crossing to the underworld. Poe wrote of the Maelstrom in Norway and Jules Verne of the Icelandic volcano, both of which lead to worlds hidden below the Earth's surface.. 

We hear the roaring water from the sunless rivers MacFarlane explores and view the animals that live in these waters without light. He even finds an inflatable dingy used by extreme cavers to float themselves upward towards a tiny opening in the ceiling as the only way of escape when the rivers cause the cavern to flood. Imagine! 

He also describes the dangers of the thawing arctic underworld as ancient burials are now exposed: animals that died of anthrax, skeletons of people with smallpox viruses, radioactive waste deposits abandoned after the Cold War. All were thought to be permanently buried for thousands of lifetimes. Now, these dangers have recently been revealed and released by melting permafrost and glaciers..  

We share his joy in examining the 65,000 year old wall painting in sacred places deep in French caves. We also talk with scientists searching  deep in the quiet salt caves of Yorkshire, England for infinitesimal signs of dark matter that makes up the universe. And it is equally powerful in the opposite way to learn of the deep foiba sinkholes and limestone caverns in Yugoslavia used by Communists and Fascists to dispose of "enemy" civilians and military victims, alive, wounded, or dead. 

I especially was struck by the timelessness of the deep time references. When considering the vast number of years, centuries, and millennium, why should mankind care what happens today since everything, including the human species, will be gone? MacFarlane offers a positive answer:

To think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. 

A deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epoch and beings that will follow us.

Underland offers so many fascinating experiences with both the worlds under our feet and the people, past and present, who discover, study, and incorporate these environments into their lives. I cannot even begin to cover a fraction of the interesting facts and stories MacFarlane shares. I simply can say you really need to read this fascinating narrative and immerse yourself into the worlds below the surface of our Earth.

Darkness might be a medium of vision, and descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation. Our common verb "to understand" itself bears an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it. "To discover" is "to reveal by excavation, "to descend and bring to the light", "to fetch up from the depth." These are ancient associations.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

MacFarland, Robert. Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit.   

MacFarland examines the world's highest places from his own personal experiences and literary accounts from figures like Mallory, Lord Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.