Sunday, August 2, 2009

REMEMBER THIS ROCK?

Lucy Corrander - Remember this Rock ? - August 1st 2009 - Second Samsung Phone

Some Rocks Erode Quickly

One minute they are there. The next they are gone.

This is what it looked like in November 2008.

(I posted the photo in January 2009.)

For a couple more 'Now' pictures.

Scroll Down for a Bigger Picture

7 comments:

Hermes said...

It looks a very soft stone, but even so that is fast.

Lucy Corrander said...

Morning Hermes.

Yes, I find the speed of this disconcerting. One thinks of rock as a symbol of strength and permanence but this rock is showing how short lived and ephemeral everything is really, even rock!

It's a symbol gone un-nervingly wrong and I'll never look at a rock in the same way again.

Indeed, without wanting to sound over-dramatic or daft, it feels like a life-turning moment - not wholly negative either because I am also feeling incredibly privileged to have been one of the few people throughout the whole of humanity to have seen, let alone to have noticed, this rock in its various forms.

Lucy

Hermes said...

What an interesting observation Lucy. Funnily enough I'm just re-watching The Ascent of Man dvd and it makes you realise how much has gone before and our relative insignificance really.

Silver Fox said...

I'm wondering if some of the change in appearance doesn't have to do with the different angle and softer lighting. - But you are the one right there looking at it!

Lucy Corrander said...

Hello Silver Fox - After reading your comment, I went back to the rock to take some more photos and have taken another close-up and another from a small distance away. There's a mobile phone in the second one to show size. The evening light is even flatter than when I took the photo yesterday - but I think it's clear, none the less, that some of the lumpy bits have broken off whereas others have become even more exposed.

I've backdated the post so it doesn't come to the top of the blog so this is the link.

http://picturesjustpictures.blogspot.com/2009/08/disolving-rock.html

If we get any any bright light of the kind under which I took the first photo - I'll try again . . . but the sun is still a bit too high in August to produce those sharp black shadows.

You are right though about remembering and comparing. I'd remembered the rock as being much bigger than it is - taller.

Lucy

Julia said...

Rocks can erode at an astonishing rate though.

I have a few lumps of Cotswold oolite in my garden. They were from my parents' garden before they had it landscaped (Mum liked nice big lumps of Cotswold stone). In a twist of fate, the quarries Cotswold stone comes from have now become my field area for my PhD studies.

Anyway, I was moving some bits and pieces around last weekend, and managed to knock a corner off the oolite. So I had a fist-sized bit of rock off the bigger block. And I had the hose on the jet setting as I was trying to clear some crud off some pots. And I pointed it at the little bit of rock, with the nozzle about 1m away from it. Anyhow, it blasted off so much of the grains (ooids) that I'd made a deep hollow in the surface within about 5 seconds.

It's a new take on the symbolism though, that something like a rock can be around for millions of years (150 million years in the case of my rock, and I expect about the same amount of time for yours) but destroyed within seconds by a human being. A point for us to meditate on...

Lucy Corrander said...

Hello Julia, thanks for your comment.

I find the disintegration of rocks, for whatever reason, brings me out in a kind of pathetic anguish.

I was once staying for a few days on Lindisfarne (off the Northumberland Coast) when a group of geology students arrived with their little hammers and seemed to be going round cracking open every easter-egg sized stone that was there.

They were clearly pleased with their cracking abilities and interested to see what was inside but I watched miserably, feeling that I was witnessing the destruction not just of history but of millenia.

Incidentally, there are so many interesting rocks near where I live now, I could easily bore the socks off regular visitors to PICTURES JUST PICTURES by turning it into 'The Daily Stone' instead!

Lucy

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