Celebrating the Earth’s 6025th.

26th October 2021. 

I’d chosen a spot above the small village of Roccamontepiano, on the edge of the Maiella National Park in Abruzzo, as a place to celebrate the earth’s 6025th birthday. It was the end of a warm autumn day, and the night quietly began its shift. I sat on a coral reef, surrounded by this spectacular and ageing earth and leant against a Gaudi fantasy of shafts and tunnels, tubes and teeth. The valves were ready to breathe and polyps all set to reach for the algae riches that would pass them. Evening lights were turning on in the scattered villages of the lowland hills and cars drifted silently around the mountain bends. In the far distance, the grey shadow of a mountain. As the light faded, I wished the earth a happy day and drank a toast from my flask, wishing that there would be many more such days to come - as you do to an ancient upon their birthday.

For on Monday 26th October 4004BCE at 0900 precisely, work on the planet was begun. James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh working in the mid 17th C, in trying to understand how the world had been formed and when, had calculated this precise date and time. He proposed that everything on the planet had been artfully and purposely placed; mountains in their positions, their heights and valleys all predetermined, the rivers running their courses into the seven seas.

As I lay with the sun setting fire to the sky, with Ussher’s theory spiralling in my head, I wondered what stories had been spun by the men and women of the village below to account for a reef at the foot of a mountain, so far from the sea. Did they ever question why there should be a reef above their village? What questions did they ask and to whom?

Had Thomas Burnet, an Anglican scholar of the 19th century, been sitting there fielding these enquiries, he’d have answered thus; when God made the earth, it was smooth like an egg shell. It was unblemished, but over the years it began to crack and fracture. Underneath the shell was water and this began to inundate the weakening crust. God, irked by man’s sin, permitted the waters to permeate the crust, creating that fatal ‘Deluge’. Sections of the earth’s crust plunged into the new abyss, and according to Burnet the physical matter of the crust was swirled about in the ‘mêlée of rock and earth'. When the waters receded chaos was left behind. 

Chaos was in the sky above now. Every hue from sanguine, to madder and sweet rose flooded the heavens in a storm of red. Clouds could not make up their minds to stay or go. A gentle wind blew. The earth beneath me was dampening and the ripe smell of falling leaves and hedgerow fruit pervaded the dew filled dusk. The words of Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 drifted around my head, “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die.”

The time to be born for this reef at least was 17 million years ago, during a period of great volcanic eruptions. CO2 levels rose very significantly, bringing a huge rise in global temperatures. It is thought that the globe was at least 4 - 5 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today, with the polar regions and the oceans even warmer than that. The Antarctic was covered in lush forests and the Artic in temperate forests. With no ice caps, sea levels rose and so we had this coral reef created over several millions of years, until the earth once again cooled and ice caps took back the liquid sea and the lushness of the earth died in the new ice-age cold.