Erosion Questions

Devonian fossils from the Rockford Fossil Bed

This week geologists came to talk about the Decorah Impact Crater, which got me thinking about change on a geologic timeframe.

This poem was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater's, Poems are Teachers, "Try on a Pattern from Nature" p. 117. In this case, the pattern is the big time-frame pattern of geologic time: Create. Destroy. Create. One of my goals is to use April Poetry Month to explore this terrific resource.

Erosion Questions

he said the meteorite struck during the Mid-Ordovician,
right where we stand now; that
the crater filled with water and
became a brackish pond, or even part of a shallow sea, that
over time it filled with mud; that
it teemed with life, that this mud turned to shale, which then
eroded off the rest of the landscape except
for the crater because something that is already missing
cannot go away; he said that
the fine sediments preserved even soft-bodied creatures well enough that
they could even be named; that
he has examined only one cubic meter of shale; that
95% of the species in the shale no one had ever seen before; that
without this crater an entire world of creatures
would have been lost to time; and
I wonder: what of these lost worlds, and
what of ours, and
why does this make my heart ache so?

– Steve Peterson