Five Billion Years of Solitude (18 page)

“The transit of Venus couldn’t have been more different,” he went on. “Right as it began everyone was running and rushing around,
stumbling over themselves to see it and exclaim how wonderful it was. But then it just went on for hours. People got quiet. It gave everyone time to reflect and more meaningfully sense for just a short while some small part of this much greater, grander picture of our place in things.”

I asked Laughlin what he had reflected on during his long silence on the mountain.

“The transit,” he began. “That period when a terrestrial planet hangs in front of its star. It reminded me that there is only a fleeting moment in the universe’s entire history in which it can have planets with water on their surfaces around a star like the Sun. And here we find ourselves in its midst, at this profound boundary in the history of the Earth, in this instant of time where a major geological age is ending and another one of our own making is beginning. There’s no way to predict what exactly will happen during the transition, but I don’t think we’ll just fade away. We have yet to make our maximum impact, whatever it may be.”

The Big Picture

W
hen the alarm woke Mike Arthur at a quarter to six, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and shuffled into the kitchen of his two-story white farmhouse to put a pot of coffee on. As it brewed, Arthur went to a window and looked out at the surrounding valley, surveying the twenty-six acres of pasture and woodland that he tended with his wife, Janice, and their two college-age daughters. It was dark in the glen, more than an hour until the first rays of sunlight would crest the larch-lined hilltops. Only the murmur of a nearby creek broke the thick arboreal hush that hung around the farm. In the glen’s early-morning serenity, uncorrupted by the sound of cars or planes, televisions or radios, it seemed
for a moment not to be late October, 2011, but long ago, in a time before clocks, before calendars. Before man.

The coffeemaker beeped its completion, and Arthur turned from the window to pour a cup, which he left cooling on the counter. He stepped into overalls, then pulled on a jacket over a chest and shoulders broadened by a youth spent surfing in California and preserved by an adulthood of farming in central Pennsylvania. When he stepped outside, Arthur was surprised to find the autumnal air so warm he couldn’t even see his breath.

Trailed by his sheepdogs, Arthur walked to the barn to give water to his flock of Icelandic sheep and change their hay. Next, he fed the free-range chickens and gathered their eggs, then entered a small greenhouse to check his crops of organic kale and chard and his seedlings of seasonal vegetables. He adjusted the vents to allow more of the cooler outside air to flow in—by the afternoon, it would be another unseasonably balmy day, and he didn’t want the plants to bake.

Back inside, Arthur showered, then turned to the bathroom mirror and spread shaving cream across his cheeks and beneath his jaw, up against the edges of a full-grown white goatee that tapered to a point at his chin and swept out into prominent whiskers beneath his nose. His face was rugged, reddened, and lined from years of exposure, and his high forehead was topped by a peak of long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail. All that, plus his slight paunch and burly frame, made him look a bit like Saint Nick, by way of Santa Monica. As he shaved, Arthur thought back to two decades ago, when he and Janice had begun their farm. Had the growing seasons and temperatures really changed since then? There could be no doubt about it: most passing springs and autumns now seemed more fleeting, faded into longer, hotter summers and milder, shorter winters. Next year, he thought, maybe he’d risk moving some of the more cold-tolerant vegetables out of the greenhouse to clear room for delicate out-of-season produce, which he could sell for a premium price at nearby farmers’ markets. He splashed water
across his face, dressed, gulped his coffee, kissed Janice goodbye, and hopped in his car to drive twenty miles west to his day job in the town of State College, at Pennsylvania State University, where he was a professor of geology.

Mike Arthur was a sedimentary geologist. Viewing walls of rock with alternating bands of limestone, sandstone, shale, and coal was for him like reading stories, ones written in stone. He was also a geochemist. With the help of a hammer, a sample bag, and a bit of laboratory wizardry, he could discern the subtle chemical signals in rock layers that revealed ancient, long-vanished environments—the flora and fauna, the weather and geography, and how each former world developed, flourished, and finally passed away, largely forgotten but for those lithic memories.

Paleoclimates and past global climate changes were his specialty, as seen through his research emphasis, the formation of black shales. Black shales are compactions of clay, mud, and silt formed in deep water and made the color of jet by their heavy loads of organic carbon. Organic carbon—the stuff from which plants and animals are made—is normally quickly eaten and recycled in a water column. But when organic detritus drifts to the stagnant bottom of a deep body of water, the absence of sunlight and oxygen can stave off the creatures that would otherwise churn through and consume the remains. Undisturbed, layers of carbon-laden silt and mud accumulate, compress, and sink deeper beneath the Earth’s surface, where a slow geothermal simmer cooks them into black shale. Given sufficient heat, pressure, and time, a fraction of the carbon in organic-rich black shale transforms into petroleum, and further cooking will crack the oil into methane and a handful of other volatile organic compounds collectively and colloquially known as natural gas. To Arthur, instances of worldwide black shale deposition were signposts of past pulses of global warming: as temperatures climbed and sea levels rose, the deepening, tepid oceans would have lost much of their ability to mix oxygen-rich surface water to the
bottom. Anoxia would set in, and rich deep-sea ecosystems would dissolve into sulfurous, bacteria-infused black mud.

Arthur’s research into black shales initially took him around the country and the world, but by the early 1990s he had decided to settle in Pennsylvania. There, he realized, a good bit of the crucial evidence he needed to study black shales—and the Earth’s fluctuating climate over the past 500 million years or so—could essentially be found right in his backyard, in the Allegheny Plateau. The Allegheny Plateau boasts some of the world’s largest black shale deposits. In their finest details, the shales and their surrounding rocks told of the comings and goings of mountain ranges, glaciers, and vast inland seas in Pennsylvania’s deep past.

Pennsylvania’s rocks are also intimately linked to our planet’s climatic present and its future. The inexorably rising temperatures—temperatures that were sending glaciers and polar ice into retreat, strengthening storms, shifting animal migration patterns, and making Arthur reconsider his greenhouse seedlings—in a way had come from the very ground beneath his feet. The additional warmth came chiefly from rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, CO
₂
, a gas prodigiously produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is transparent to visible light but absorbs a good fraction of infrared light—that is, light we perceive as radiant thermal heat. Sunlight readily passes through the gas on its way to shine on Earth’s surface, but when the warmed surface re-radiates that light skyward in the infrared, it becomes trapped by the absorptive blanket of CO
₂
. This is the basis of the well-known “greenhouse effect,” and CO
₂
’s greenhouse effect is believed to be the primary architect of Earth’s climate now and for the last half billion years. Humans had been gradually raising the atmospheric levels of CO
₂
and other greenhouse gases for thousands of years, mostly through agriculture, but the rate of increase had greatly accelerated in the industrialized boom times of the past century. Much of that sudden surge had its roots in the rocks of the Allegheny Plateau, which runs through Pennsylvania and into portions of surrounding states.

•   •   •

T
he largest known anthracite coal deposit on Earth was discovered in northeastern Pennsylvania in the latter half of the eighteenth century, supposedly when a hunter building a campfire accidentally set a nearby outcropping of crystalline black rock ablaze. By the mid-1800s, Pennsylvania anthracite had supplanted wood as the preferred method for heating homes in the United States, and coal mining had become a major industry throughout the Allegheny. At about the same time, Pennsylvania gave birth to the global petroleum industry, when drillers of salt wells found their work hampered by thick, viscous upwellings of black “rock oil.” The first petroleum refinery was built in Pittsburgh in 1853, and the first oil well in the United States was drilled near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. Petroleum found its killer app in Henry Ford’s Model T, which first rolled off a Michigan assembly line in 1908. The U.S. natural gas industry was actually birthed just north of the Pennsylvania state line, with a well drilled in Fredonia, New York, but the black shale deposit from which it came proved to have its bulk in Pennsylvania territory.

Riding on the surge of ancient carbon, Pennsylvania’s economy boomed. Oil wells and mine shafts soon suffused the Allegheny rock, and refineries, pipelines, and railroads sprouted like weeds across the state. Like most booms, this one was short-lived. Output from the state’s oil fields had already begun to decline by the dawn of the twentieth century, and was progressively overshadowed by immense newly discovered fields in Texas, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf of Mexico, and elsewhere. By the 1950s, Pennsylvania’s Allegheny rocks still contained abundant coal and gas, but in a world increasingly addicted to oil, market forces dictated that those less-profitable fuels simply be left in the ground.

Pennsylvania’s energy fortunes sharply rebounded in the first decade of the new millennium. As oil production from conventional,
easily accessible reservoirs peaked, energy companies devised new methods to wring more oil and gas from harder-to-reach, “unconventional” source rocks. The most successful new method was hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which squeezed previously inaccessible natural gas from deeply buried shales. When a gas-bearing shale lies beneath miles of rock, as it does throughout the Allegheny, the resulting pressure can lock gas within the formation. Pumping millions of gallons of high-pressure, chemical-laced water down a borehole, however, splinters the shale rock, and granules of sand or ceramic added to the slurry prop open the fractures. The locked-in gas, now liberated, streams through the cracks and back up the borehole, to be collected, compressed, and sold.

Fracking, combined with technology for drilling wells not only down but also laterally across layers of rock, offered a way to tap the biggest black shale formation in the Allegheny: the Marcellus. It was named for a small town in upstate New York where it jutted from the ground in sheer, flaky cliffs of carbon, and its expanse stretched westward from New York’s Finger Lakes to the eastern half of Ohio, and south down to Maryland and West Virginia. But the Marcellus’s concentrated carbonic heart could be found a mile or more beneath most of Pennsylvania, conveniently abutting major, energy-hungry metropolitan areas across the northeast United States. Comparing production rates of Marcellus fracking operations with the deposit’s extent, thickness, depth of burial, and shale porosity, one of Mike Arthur’s Penn State colleagues, the geologist Terry Engelder, estimated the formation might hold nearly 500 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. That would be enough to make the Marcellus the second-largest known gas field on Earth, enough to supply the entirety of the United State’s energy needs for two decades.

As word spread of Engelder’s Marcellus evaluations, energy companies great and small swooped in, buying up leases by the truckload in rural communities. A new boom began. Some farmers with huge tracts of land overlying productive parts of the Marcellus became millionaires overnight. Restaurants, motels, and other businesses sprang
up to meet the needs of an inrushing flood of new workers. But the boom had a dark side, too. Long stretches of backwoods roadway buckled beneath roughshod convoys of heavy trucks, and sylvan forest glades disappeared beneath parking-lot-size concrete drill pads and miles of snaking pipeline. Natural gas linked to nearby fracking operations found its way into well water, and concerns grew about the possibility of fracking’s proprietary chemical cocktails contaminating regional lakes, rivers, and aquifers. Public opposition soared, particularly in major cities served by the vulnerable watersheds. Penn State, keenly aware of its long and lucrative association with the oil and gas industry, attempted to walk the line between opposition and support. It formed the Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research in 2010 to engage with and educate all the region’s stakeholders on the pros and cons of further developing the shale. The university chose Mike Arthur to serve as codirector of its new center.