Old Canvas Expeditions
Specialist African Safaris - More than just a game drive

ROMANCING THE STONE - ADVENTURES IN THE EARTH SCIENCES

"Africa is the Earth’s oldest and most enduring landmass. Ninety-sever percent of the continent has been in place and stable for more than 300 million years, most of it for more than 550 million years and some for as much as 3600 million years. It is a story of accretion that records a large and significant fraction of the history of the Earth. Incontestable forces assembled a continent as millions of years flitted by. This is a timescale on which the average human lifespan is close to irrelevant. Consider: 5 million years spans all of human evolution; 670 million years encompasses the evolutionary history of all animal life, 3600 million years goes back to the beginnings of life itself.

Africa has seen it all, and preserves the evidence. The mountain-building episodes and deep geological dislocations which distinguish the landscape of other continents are less evident in Africa. Rock formed more than 1000 million years ago still lies in the horizontal plane – undistorted; many ancient sediments are hardly touched by metamorphic processes. No other part of the world reveals so much of the Earth’s structure and history so clearly, from the beginning to the present."

John Reader - Africa
Penguin Books
1999

ROMANCING THE STONE - ADVENTURES IN THE EARTH SCIENCES