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The Geological Sublime
Butterflies, deep time, and climate change
My group always begins in nearby Sudbury, where there’s a colony of Appalachian Browns, not a rare butterfly but one found only in wet woods, swamps, and bottomlands, a habitat I would have done well to read about before my first visit, when I waded into a field of tall sedges and spent the rest of the day in waterlogged shoes. The stones of Mount Washington admittedly have a bit more color than the Melissa Arctic, but they have the same mottled patterning, their weathered skins a maze of blackish-brown and grayish-green lichens and moss, touched occasionally with ocher highlights, the whole nicely broken up by webs of tiny fractures where the summer sun has dried things out. As for butterflies, consider the Red Admiral—bright orange-red bands across dark wings, touches of blue and white—a common species with an ancient and stable lineage: it not only appears faithfully rendered in four-hundred-year-old Dutch paintings, but ancestors of its genus lie well preserved in the Eocene fossil beds of Colorado.
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