Precambrian

But before that, it would be required an explosion of information.

And he had simply proposed, well, maybe before the Cambrian animals, there were some pre-Cambrian organisms that didn't show up in the fossil record.

And I said, yes, but still to build them, you would still require information.

The information problem is still fundamental.

When the vast rise loomed ahead, between latitudes 83 degrees and 84 degrees, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world.

and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coast-line at last we were truly entering the white aeon-dead world of the ultimate south and even as we realized it we saw the peak of mount nansen in the eastern distance towering up to its height of almost fifteen thousand feet the successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in latitude eighty six degrees seven minutes east longitude one seventy four degrees twenty three minutes and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aeroplane flights are matters of history as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of mount nansen by peabody and two of the graduate students gedney and carroll on december thirteenth or fifteenth we were some eighty five hundred feet above sea level and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with the great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from parts lying eastward below South America, which we then thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.

in certain of the sandstones dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their nature we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments notably ferns seaweeds trilobites crinoids and such mollusks as lingulae and gasteropods all of which seemed of real significance in connection with the region's primordial history There was also a queer triangular striated marking about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake pierced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep blasted aperture.

These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range, and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and provocative.

Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.

The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward, or rather, northwestward, prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base.

It seems he had pondered a great deal and with alarmingly radical daring over that triangular striated marking in the slate reading into it certain contradictions in nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged he was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky unknown and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date, Cambrian, if not actually pre-Cambrian, as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage.

These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a thousand million years old.

Okay.

And so the, uh, there was like this blue, uh, Precambrian rock, and it was along a little creek, and it was look- almost...

The place looked almost like it was in a, a, what do you call it, another world or something, you know? But it was real.

And so and I'd been there several times.

Mm-hmm.

Now, if you do deep injection, which is going to be more deeper than like a mile or a kilometer and a half ish, you're getting kind of close to that pre-Cambrian basement rock.

And they have some already stressed faults, right? Natural there.

But if you keep increasing the pressure at that deep, deep level, you're going to induce seismicity.

The great oxygenation event transformed Earth more deeply than any invention.

Around the middle of the planet's long pre-Cambrian history, oxygen began accumulating in the atmosphere in a lasting way.

This change altered almost every part of the surface environment.

minerals formed that could not have existed earlier in the same abundance.

We planned to cover as great an area as one Antarctic season, or longer if absolutely necessary, would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea, regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd, with frequent changes of camp made by aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance.

We expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material, especially in the Precambrian strata, of which so narrow a range of Antarctic specimens had previously been secured.

We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's past.

That the Antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common information, and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail.

The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in latitude 86 degrees 7 minutes, east longitude 174 degrees 23 minutes, and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aeroplane flights are matters of history, as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mount Nansen by Peabody and two of the graduate students, Gedney and Carroll, on December 13th through 15th.

We were some eighty-five hundred feet above sea level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens.

The Precambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with the great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from parts lying eastward below South America, which We then thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.

In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments, notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as lingulae and gasceropods, all of which seemed of real significance in connection with the region's primordial history.

Ahead of you, the mountain rises.

cheyenne mountain is not the tallest peak in the front range but it is massive a broad heavily forested granite dome that anchors the southern end of the range as it meets the plains The rock is Precambrian granite, over a billion years old, among the hardest and most geologically stable formations on the continent.

And inside this mountain, behind two blast doors, each one weighing 25 tonnes at the end of a tunnel that penetrates deep into the granite, is the most famous military bunker in the world.

The decision to build inside Cheyenne Mountain was made in the late 1950s, driven by the same strategic anxiety that produced the Greenbrier and Burlington.

... that blew my mind.

So in a lot of, in a lot of places of high activity, right, if you take a look at the geology, it's, it's based in either, uh, Precambrian rock-

Mm-hmm

... or it's, it's based in, um, quartz or limestone or st- sandstone.