Bill Guyton, Glaciers of California. California Natural History Guides, 59. University of California Press, 1998. Link.
Source: borrowed from San Diego Public Library

I love thinking about glaciers and rocks and geological time-scales for the same reason I love the poems of Leopardi (and J.H. Prynne and Susan Howe and...): solid, silent, seemingly timeless objects draw the mind vertiginously into an imaginative re-creation of their eternal formation the longer they sit there silently and refuse to explain themselves.

There is of course a paradox in this Romantic notion of imagination. This paradox is what Calvino reminds us of in Six Memos for the Next Millenium when he quotes Leopardi on the poetic values of language: "Le parole lontano, antico e simili sono poeticissime e piacevoli, perché destano idee vaste, e indefinite." ("The words distant, ancient and similar words are highly poetic and pleasurable because they evoke vast, indefinite ideas.")

This also works for boulders, glaciers, mountains. The massive granodiorite boulders standing like sentinels in the California coastal sage and chaparral landscape have a definite, precise mass that can be weighed (theoretically, given a scale big enough). And yet they also have a sort of vagueness to that mass, a uselessness and indefiniteness that comes from the mystery not only of their specific formation but also to the mystery of geologic time that they evoke.

I kept thinking about this as I read this wonderful guide to California glaciers. It's more or less as accurate as can be to say that glaciers formed in the Yosemite Valley around 1.5 million years ago, retreated and reformed at least three times since then, carved out massive canyon walls and left a lake that eventually settled and dried into a lush, flat meadow plain. But it's also impossibly useless, almost dizzying, to describe a process that, in human terms, might as well be infinite.

Guyton's book is a delight to read because it explains these difficult processes and obscure concepts in plain English, and does so with a charm that lightens the heaviness of the topic. Guyton respects the early pioneers of glacial study from the 1860s, quoting liberally from the field notes and journals of Whitney, Muir, King, and Matthes, and describing the outline of the debates over the glacial history of Yosemite and the High Sierras, thereby offering a history of glaciology as well as a history of glaciation.

Guyton identifies 108 modern glaciers in California. (Of course, he is writing in 1998. That number has shrunk considerably in the last thirty years, and the consensus is that they will be gone by the end of the century.)

One jarring moment in the final paragraphs of the chapter on modern glaciers cheekily describes the warring camps as the debate over man-made global warming begins to grow heated. Like all geologists, Guyton knows that climate change (slow warming and cooling processes over eons) is simply a fact of deep time. Writing as a professor emeritus (aka real old guy) in 1998, he is bemused at the reduction of changing temperatures into the good/bad binary. Glaciers might disappear soon! Possibly! Or warming global temperatures will increase precipitation and cloudy conditions along coastal regions, and actually increase glaciers! Possibly!

But about thirty years on, it's clear that it's not the simply the fact of temperature change but the speed of the change that will tell on the long-term viability of elements in our natural world. Guyton has well-founded, comprehensive knowledge about glaciers that he built over his decades of geological study and field research. But he's only operating on a human scale himself. As so many technological innovations outstrip the human scale, it's hard to count on deep knowledge that is nonetheless only the length of a human academic career being reliable enough to withstand the shrinking of deep-time processes that the Industrial Revolution (and its roided-up younger sibling, the Computer Age) inaugurated.

And, within the human world, it's a sobering reminder that old-guy wisdom about the world is all well and fine as long as the young guys have the same respect for tradition and the natural world that the old guys used to. In 2026, that's no guarantee.