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Roaming Rocks

Metamorphic rocks are our emissaries from the deep, travelling to alien realms and revealing the restless nature of Earth

We think that, on Holsnøy, eclogite-forming reactions were suppressed by the lack of water until several large earthquakes shattered the unusually dry rocks and allowed limited amounts of external fluids to enter along fractures, forming the localised lenses of eclogite that are so odd and remarkable. Their stories are genuinely epic: the journey of a rock like our Wisconsin schist from the surface to the centre of a mountain belt and back echoes the narrative arc of katabasis and anabasis in Greek myth: the protagonist’s descent into the Underworld, the tribulations experienced there, and the eventual return, with hard-won wisdom, to the land of the living. In the slanting rays of the late afternoon sunlight, a sense of serenity fills me as I watch students crawling across this easily missed outcrop of mica schist on their hands and knees, like supplicants approaching a holy shrine.

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