Basalt and Gneiss
Today it is all about rocks...sort of
Cool News : I’ve been away from Substack long enough that there is a raft of new features. I cannot resist the shiny object. The cool new feature, to me is polls. These are for our shared enjoyment and hope you agree. I’ll never use this to spam you I promise. I don’t think I even get access to your answers. If I determine otherwise I will let you know. Just seems like fun.
Today starts with one of my favorite past times, namely tennis. I’ll get right to it instead of going down the rabbit hole. On the most recent Sunday, a group of my tennis pals decided we would skip the asphalt and go slide around on clay. Having played on the asphalt on Saturday morning, (a three-shirt day thanks to the humidity and temps in the 90s) I was looking forward to the relative coolness of the surface. I recently returned BRIEFLY to Twitter (mrkjmsdln) and almost immediately you see something dumb you cannot resist (not my dog profile picture). The story of the moment was the willingness to watch others play a game instead of playing yourself on Twitch. I imagine I am contributing to the sedentary tendencies of Americans when I advise that asphalt can range from 40-60 degrees hotter than the air temperature when playing tennis. Wear shoes. HAR-TRU, a type of clay court is about 20% cooler than asphalt. Despite what Twitter advises about Twitch viewers, I don’t think I will be likely to watch a webcam of strangers play tennis.
Way back in 1985/1986 when I FIRST ventured to Minnesota, I confess to not knowing that much about my destination. I remember doing the Sunday New York Times crossword with my Mom on Sunday evenings on our front porch as a young kid. What the heck does this have to do with today’s topic? The New York Times Crossword, if you frequent it is a pretty easy puzzle on Monday and gets progressively more difficult as the week moves along. The Saturday puzzle is for the masochist, at least in my estimation. The Sunday puzzle, much larger but more moderate in difficulty is just right. For those that enjoy a crossword puzzle, or frankly most any sort of puzzle, there is a reward for becoming a regular. Crossword puzzles benefit from vowels as it is difficult unless you are Croatian or Serbian which seems not to need so many vowels. While I couldn’t remember his name exactly, there was a great American volleyball player whose name seemed impossible. Google was my friend, so here you go Bob Ctvrtlik (pronounced stuh-VERT-lick). The kind of words that come to the rescue with a nice frequency of vowels are words like “Minnesota city” Edina. I think Edina was one of the few things I knew about Minnesota in the beginning.
Edina is a long-standing affluent suburb of the Twin Cities. I remember after first moving to the area, I noted that even the youth baseball fields had brick dugouts and not those rather vulgar chain link cages the rest of us were used to. All kidding aside, Edina, MN is a great place to be. One of my observations about Minnesota in general and Edina specifically is that almost everything is built for the duration. The first indoor-covered shopping center in America was built there in the 1950s. The best part of the Wikipedia article is that Frank Lloyd Wright came to the grand opening and promptly panned this wonderful new piece of ‘architecture’. I agree with Mr. Wright as Southdale is definitely no Falling Waters. A mall, of course, is not a big deal nor some amazing milestone. What is a little more interesting, at least to me, is that the shopping center was CONSISTENTLY maintained for now almost 75 years rather than build, demolish, rebuild as seems common elsewhere. In disposable America, the solution seems often to demolish and start again. Who knows where the rubble goes? A different approach reflects the psyche of the community. A pleasant place to be rather than short-term development and redevelopment.
So finally our story brings us to Edina and thereabouts. You see, despite our short but wonderful summers, the City of Edina has some newly available, PUBLIC, clay tennis courts! This is the sort of thing I can get excited about. Two of our foursome winters in Florida so they will probably take advantage of my lack of graceful footwork. Nevertheless, I am excited. To be precise, we are not playing on red clay courts that aficionados would associate with the French Open and the king of clay Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros (they used something akin to crushed terra cotta as a surface). We will be playing on Har-Tru courts. They are characteristically green and I have always assumed they are a synthetic concoction that is easier to manage. After graduating from school, I played regularly on clay courts and have always enjoyed the variation.
A guy like me cannot just enjoy the courts. Instead, I decided to look up HAR-TRU and down the rabbit hole, I went. I hope you are hanging on and enjoying this so far. In my younger years, I played regularly on clay and am sure I will enjoy this latest get-together. HAR-TRU is made from billion-year-old Pre-Cambrian metabasalt found in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It is a natural green stone that is extremely hard and angular — two very important qualities when it comes to tennis court construction. Wow, Pre-Cambrian metabasalt sure is a mouthful. Right up my alley. For starters, basalt is pronounced BUH-salt. So I guess, yet again, coming firmly up against some beautiful rocks (they are exposed typically in mountain ranges) like the Rockies and the Appalachians. You can see the characteristic green in lots of the western canyons also. The Rockies’ basalt came from the center of the Pacific Ocean, the big heave that created the Western coast of the United States. I think all of this is going to make me appreciate the courts even more on Sunday. The key though will be hoping that our experienced sliders have an off-day. Kudos to our master planner Aaron who creates a wonderful and varied tennis opportunity for all of us.
REGARDLESS of the outcome, I will get the particular pleasure to know I am sliding around on one billion-year-old rock that bore witness to the Cambrian explosion. Without engaging the contrarians, suffice to say that this rock has a lot of great fossils embossed in it way back when. We are so fortunate that our Earth left us with such great clues. While we have some older fossils, it was during this period (about half a billion years ago) when things really started happening. In the grand scheme of things, it was the Cambrian Explosion, a comparatively short forty million years or so that so many of the forms of life on Earth emerged. To a geologist, I think the Chinese adage “may you live in interesting times” was probably perfect for this period.
Well, I wrote this before playing. I hope I feel as excited about Pre-Cambrian metabasalt after the fact. We shall see.
So now it is time for the postscript. Today was GREAT! We got in three quick sets. While it might seem STRANGE to some of you, one of my favorite aspects was afterward. Clay courts accumulate debris on the lines which are nailed down to the surface. Similar to the Zamboni at hockey games, to enjoy clay tennis, you need to clean them up after you are finished. While at a private club, that gets taken care of, a public court leaves that for the players. Aaron and the two others in the foursome cheerfully dragged the courts and cleaned the lines for the next players. It’s kinda nice to leave things better than you found them and that is part of my definition of community. By the way, and for the record, all I did was take photos of the other three as they prepped the courts. I take pictures when I can throughout the summer and make a tennis album for the end of the season. While I have never LOVED yard maintenance I think I would not mind spreading a topcoat on a tennis court. The spreader looks just like my fertilizer spreader. Why is it that using it, for one thing, seems like work and the other seems like fun?
So what about today’s title? We’ve already beaten the basalt to death. The gneiss (pronounced nice) is a different matter. Gneiss rock is about the oldest stuff on Earth. There are some examples of it in Minnesota including Morton gneiss in the southwestern portion of the state. It is about 3.5 billion years old. At the absolute outside limit, something like us started roaming about six million years ago (actual homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago). One way to look at that is we came along about 99.83% of the way in the history of this cool rock of ours. To me, a better way to look at it is that finally, someone (us) came along who was smart enough and interested enough to figure it all out. That is pretty cool. Regardless of your point of view, looking at something 3.5 billion years old is a sight to behold. If you are interested, here is what they look like. If you are interested in how we figure out the age of rocks, take a look here.
Finally, if you just want to see a productive use of old rock, take a look below:
I’ve been away from Substack for a while. I am a sucker for the polls as a new feature. Let’s play
Time for a tune as is the tradition.
Always love an opportunity to express my anti-tennis feelings!
This was a gneiss post. 🤡