“NOTHING is too wonderful, or amazing to be true if it is consistent with laws of nature.”

The geological history of planet Earth is as turbulent and as bloody as human history. No less. Never has this planet been placid or peaceful in any one place for more than a short while, speaking in geological terms. All of those meandering rivers, harbouring in their wake those meaty civilisations; the verdant mountains nurturing in their womb the swaying valleys and singing streams and dancing brooks; those unchanging skies with equally unchanging constellations of stars. Birds and animals predating each other on those patchy pieces of land fancifully called continents; they have all gone through metamorphoses like nothing else.

As the world map lies before me, it sends a tingling feeling inside my entire being: outstretched swathes of uninterrupted land with rivers snaking in all directions; smooth, blue lakes; straddling with seamy mountains, and those tens of thousands of islands scattered over the sprawling land like acne on a young lad’s face. They are all there!

Despite all this feverish activity that has pervaded on the planet’s rocky surface, the face of the map still presents a sordid picture, not very different from the chaotic past of the last, say, 300 million years. One can hardly believe that things have come to settle down after the chaos of this period — for what came to pass all this while, will continue to persist all that long inexorably, relentlessly. Also, it can be trusted that what happened in the last 300 million years or so, had happened earlier too. Maybe several times; for 300 million years is a tiny portion of the whole: 4,600 million years in all.

One such cataclysmic activity took place stealthily some 50 million years ago, in our own backyard.

A piece of land not very large but large enough, broke from the master portion, Australia, and started drifting northward very slowly. A million years passed; then many more of them. The piece still kept inching towards the north, meanwhile, as it nudged forward it sighted another piece of land with which it was destined to collide sooner than later.

This piece of land that stood awaiting the onslaught was the Tibetan plate (with a more elegant name of the Eurasian Plate) which was large and spread northward although it stood steadfast where it was at the moment of impact. The impact was great and probably the most profound so far. The lower part of the present-day subcontinent banged into the apparently placid northern one. The body of land kept moving northward, as it still does. The ominous clash of lands led to many changes of far-reaching consequence.

For instance, new river systems sprouted all over the place; valleys emerged where there were few before the impact; animals of a wide variety made their appearance and even a desert or two where the sea once was. But the most far reaching of all catastrophic events in the “recent” geological history was eventful in the real sense.

The two pieces of land rammed into each other so hard, and decisively, that the region folded and buckled giving birth to a new mountain range, the Himalayas, the most elevated of all mountain ranges.

A relatively new range, it came to spawn two great regions of radically differing geographical dispensation that would have altogether different geographic, demographic and social ramifications in its wake: the Indian subcontinent, and the Tibetan Plateau. One, a harbinger of many great religions and social groups, while the other a geographical ‘bottom line’ for many great and wide-spread peoples.

The Himalayas are still growing, and the mysterious region has a geological history all its own. Its record has gone back several hundred million years since the geological research in recent times has provided us with history that has revealed strange and remarkable detail.

All because of the ominous plate tectonic movement. Where these plates clash head-on, it results in a great cataclysmic event, earth-shaking in the true sense. Where they just rub against each other and result in abrasive action, the affect is less profound. It is still horrendous.

This is how the subcontinent of Pakistan-India came into existence some 50-30 million years in the dim past; not very long ago geologically, yet pretty far into the past. Once the subcontinent settled down and its mountain ranges, rivers and valleys assumed the forms that we are familiar with, a heavy influx of people, in fact a whole migration of ‘northernly’ people began to trickle into this region from the steppes of Tibetan regions and Central Asia, and even the present day Eastern Europe.

Now we come to the Earth’s veritable atmosphere. The question that where the atmosphere came from had occupied the attention of astrophysicists for a long time — until they found the answer.

For the first 3.5 billion years, the gasses that formed the atmosphere were highly toxic and not the kind at all to harbour any kind of life — almost any life. The earliest forms arose in the seas and shallow waters which forms in turn grew in variety which was a result of the single cell multiplying itself, thereby causing the greatest revolution thus far.

Proliferation in branching out resulted. Then there was no stopping, neither any hurdle in the path of evolution, that is, gradual improvement in the quality, quantity and variety of life.

But what kind of gasses these were that kept at bay the introduction, and evolution of life forms? They were toxic, that is poisonous, but what kind of poison?

To begin with, the atmosphere was laden with carbon dioxide and methane that prevented and sort of discouraged the growth, much less the proliferation of life. Moreover, volcanoes, many of them in quick and rapid succession released gasses in abundance that, beside causing havoc added to variety in the Earth’s atmosphere. Oxygen, as it had come into being in small traces, on account of it being highly reactive grew in leaps and bounds thanks to growth and increase in flora, that is, trees and plants around the plan.

In the next issue we shall take one last look at atmosphere — its origin and the present state, and all the turbulence that attends to it. Not just that, the next two issues will explore the origin of life and bring some very interesting realities to surface. Rest assured! You better look forward to some apparently weird things in the coming write-ups!