Mark Twain's Geology

Mark Twain observed and recorded many geological features during his travels around the world. He saw limestone pillars in Mono Lake, California, that rose twenty or thirty feet out of the lake. In Hawaii, he watched a volcano erupting on the floor of a crater that measured ten miles in circumference. He saw beds of pure oyster shells in Anatolia, interbedded with discrete layers of clay, that had been tilted and lifted five hundred feet above the level of the sea below. But while he clearly enjoyed seeing and describing those wonders, he did not feel the least obligation to explain how or why they might have come to be. He was quite content to describe what he saw and, as he once said, leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion. The geological features that Mark Twain wrote about were often visually impressive, but they were also very mysterious. How could it be that Mono Lake's limestone pillars contained fossilized seagull eggs? Why would veins of silver-bearing quartz rock be encased in envelopes of crumbly clay? Why would springs in the blazing-hot deserts of Syria discharge water that was ice-cold? Mark Twain knew that there must be reasons why these strange things were the way they were, but he made no pretense of knowing what they might be. Because his descriptions are so vivid and detailed, however, it may indeed be possible to crack the nut and discover in retrospect how and why they were formed.That is what this book proposes to do. It begins with Mark Twain's travels in the western United States as recorded in his book Roughing it, moves on to his travels in Europe and Asia described in The Innocents Abroad, and concludes with his later writings Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The book takes each of the geological mysteries he describes, examines them in the context of what geoscience has learned since the 19th century, and sees if we can discover just how those wonders came to be.