LUIS DIAS
Next month, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Proms music festival 2026 will have begun, and I’ll be a radio junkie for two months. During BBC Proms 2025, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performed ‘Earth Dances’, a monumental or chestral work by British composer Harrison Birt whistle that incidentally is forty-years-old this year, composed in 1986. It has been called a “contemporary orchestral masterpiece” that “boasts tectonic shifts that surge and fissure with inexo rable, elemental force.” The geological metaphor in the title is also found in the 40-minute work’s struc ture, with the orchestra di vided into six ‘strata’, “whose changing relationships re flect those of the earth’s ge ological layers.” You could flippantly call it “rock” music, but the eruptions of sound at unpredictable points in time and space from the orchestra do evoke an Earth mantle and its subterranean layers in constant flux. In the interval of that con cert, Helen Gordon, author of ‘Notes from Deep Time’, de scribed her researches into the earth’s crust and the lay ers which inspired the Harri son Birtwistle composition. She visited 3-billion-year-old rocks in Scotland, volcanoes in Naples and earthquake monitoring in California.
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Intrigued, I read the book, the first time I really came to grips with the concept of ‘deep time’. I quote Gordon: “If human time is measured in seconds and minutes, hours and years, then deep time deals with hundreds of thousands of years, with the millions and the billions. Thinking about it engenders a sort of temporal vertigo.” “In deep time, it is not just what happened last week or last year that matters – it’s also what happened a mil lion, 50 million, 500 million years ago. It’s about the ways in which the succession of events across those millions of years can be said to ex plain why you’re here right now in this particular place, in this particular moment.” Our Earth is believed to be 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old, measured by radiometric dating. So “if 4.6 billion years of deep time is represented by 24 hours, then human won’t appear on the scene until two minutes to mid night.” We are “temporally insignificant.” I learned that “the top of Mount Everest was once a sea floor.” Gordon quotes James Hut ton (1726 – 1797), Scottish naturalist, widely regarded as “the father of modern ge ology”, in what she deems “perhaps the most famous sentence in geology” (from his 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth’, presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh): “The result, therefore, of our en quiry, is that we find no ves tige of a beginning, no pros pect of an end.” Hutton was accused of atheism, but Gor don states that “for Hutton, it was the notion of an Earth doomed to destruction that seemed heretical, incompat ible with the idea of a loving God.” To bolster his theory, he returned to the rocks or “God’s books” as he called his specimens, “wrote upon by God’s own finger.” Siccar Point, a rocky prom ontory in Berwickshire, “the birthplace of modern geolo gy” is where Hutton on a boat trip there was able to demon strate his understanding of the cyclical processes that had shaped the topography over huge expanses of time, an ongoing process.
Two vastly different types of rock juxtaposed each other, and Hutton surmised that the only way to get the two rock for mations jammed up against one another at such an odd angle was that an enormous amount of time must have elapsed between when they had been deposited at the bottom of the ocean. As John Playfair, Hutton’s companion on the boat aptly summa rised: “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” ‘Rock’ music and deep time were furthest from my mind when we went last month to Bengaluru for the week that our son was participating in the SASO (South Asian Sym phony Orchestra) workshop culminating in a concert.
We visited the sprawling 240-acre Lalbagh Botanical Garden on our last morning there. In this era of historical erasure, it is comforting that we’re still made aware the garden was commissioned by Hyder Ali in 1760, and completed by Tipu Sultan. I was also keen to visit the watchtower cum city boundary marker built by Kempegowda II. But what I was totally unprepared for was the hill it stands on, that made me “giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time” myself. The ‘hill’ (or Peninsular Gneiss to be precise) is a ge ological monument, one of India’s oldest rock forma tions, dated 2.5 to 3.4 billion years, as old or older than the rocks Gordon visited in Scotland, and just a bil lion years younger than our planet itself!
A billboard helpfully informed me it was formed in the Archean eon and composed of TTG (To nalite-Trondjhemite-Granodi orite) and was “a landmark event in the evolution of the Indian subcontinent. Its unique banded appearance represented “alternating lay ers of light-coloured feldspar and quartz with dark-colour ed minerals like biotite and hornblende”, due to “intense heat, pressure, and tectonic activity over billions of years.” Recognised as a “geo-her itage” site by the Geological Survey of India, it attracts geologists from around the world. “These gneisses also act as a basement to various schist belts [large, elongated geological zones primarily composed of metamorphosed volcanic and sedimentary rocks] of Dharwar Super group of rocks including the famous gold-bearing belts of ‘Kolar’ and ‘Hutti mines,” con cluded the billboard. Had we missed that bill board, we would have climbed that curious-look ing ‘hill’ like so many other visitors, totally unmindful of what was directly beneath our feet.
It took me a while to re cover from that “temporal vertigo.” When our human minds try to process and stoke non-existent ‘controversies’ over what happened a few decades, centuries or even millennia ago, it is sobering to register that relative to deep time, it was just “the last two minutes,” temporally insignificant. Will our species endure for another deep-time “two minutes”? But the ‘rock’ mu sic, the Earth Dance will con tinue, deep into the future. “God’s book, wrote upon by God’s own finger.” (Dr. Luis Dias is a phy sician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation. He blogs at luisdias.wordpress.com)
