Read Online The Fracture Zone by Simon Winchester - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Simon Winchester
Ads: Link
snow. The train was snorting heavily through a chain of mountains, pushing through the one physical barrier that kept Austria decently apart from the most troublesome of the hundred races and the thousand languages over which at and the Turks and the ever-shifting friends of both had battled and waged war.
3
To the “Land of the Osmanlees”
I T CAN TAKE a dreamy railway journey through a range of majestic Middle European mountains to put the Balkans into their true and proper perspective. For if there can be said to be any ultimate villain behind all the centuries of Balkan misery, it has to do with mountains, and it is this: the fact that between fifty-eight and twenty-four million years ago the northern part of what is now the continent of Africa moved northward and started to collide with the southern part of what is now the continent of Europe.
This episode, which is very broadly known as the Alpine Cenozoic Orogeny, was, and still is (for it continues to this day) one of the most important tectonic events in the making of the planet—something that will bring scant comfort to the wretches who went on to inhabit the regions it created. An uncountable series of geological events took place during the early millions of years of the collision. Some of them—the forcing together and thrusting upward of crustal plates to create the great southern European mountain chains, like the Alps (part of which our train was heaving itself up and over) and the Pyrenees—were by common agreement major. Others—the forming of Italian volcanoes like Mount Etna and volcanic islands like Lipari and Vulcano, the creation of world’s best sources of pumice stones, or the making of rock veins from which Roman centurions might win obsidian and so carve razor blades and invade their neighboring countries clean shaven—were perhaps less so.
The collisions between the two great tectonic plates took a very long time. During their later phases scores upon scores of smaller tectonic plates, which had broken off from the vanguards of theprincipal ones, jostled and collided with one another, rolled over and beneath one another and the wreckage of already collided ones—leaving behind a ghastly mosaic of geology that is more complicated than almost anywhere else in the world.
Two major events tended to dominate the picture, however. The first of these was the relatively simple making of the main southern European Alpine chain. The other, more tricky to imagine, was the steady northward movement of the Arabian Peninsula along the huge fault line of what are now the Dead Sea and the river Jordan. This caused a cascade of what would finally be Balkan-related geology to happen. The Arabian Peninsula moved north and caused the creation of the Zagros Mountains of Iran, whose snow-capped higher peaks can be glimpsed south of the holy city of Isfahan. The piling up of these south Persian hills caused the entire Anatolian Plateau of eastern Turkey to be pushed steadily westward, which in turn caused enormous pressure both on the rising peninsula of Greece and, to its immediate north and most important of all, on the eastward extension of the very Alpine range that our train was currently crossing.
And it was this last that left the Balkans the geologically and topographically wild place they are today—the crushing of one newly formed mountain chain (the Balkan Mountains, largely in Bulgaria), heading westward into another (the Dinaric Alps) that was curving south and eastward. The two chains smashed into another to create a geological fracture zone that became a template for the fractured behavior of those who would later live on it. Like the complicated patterns that are made by intersecting ripples from a number of stones thrown into a pool, with sizes and shapes that can only be confirmed by the deepest calculus, so these two, or three, or four colliding ranges of hills formed yet newer ranges of hills and valleys that then trended in
3
To the “Land of the Osmanlees”
I T CAN TAKE a dreamy railway journey through a range of majestic Middle European mountains to put the Balkans into their true and proper perspective. For if there can be said to be any ultimate villain behind all the centuries of Balkan misery, it has to do with mountains, and it is this: the fact that between fifty-eight and twenty-four million years ago the northern part of what is now the continent of Africa moved northward and started to collide with the southern part of what is now the continent of Europe.
This episode, which is very broadly known as the Alpine Cenozoic Orogeny, was, and still is (for it continues to this day) one of the most important tectonic events in the making of the planet—something that will bring scant comfort to the wretches who went on to inhabit the regions it created. An uncountable series of geological events took place during the early millions of years of the collision. Some of them—the forcing together and thrusting upward of crustal plates to create the great southern European mountain chains, like the Alps (part of which our train was heaving itself up and over) and the Pyrenees—were by common agreement major. Others—the forming of Italian volcanoes like Mount Etna and volcanic islands like Lipari and Vulcano, the creation of world’s best sources of pumice stones, or the making of rock veins from which Roman centurions might win obsidian and so carve razor blades and invade their neighboring countries clean shaven—were perhaps less so.
The collisions between the two great tectonic plates took a very long time. During their later phases scores upon scores of smaller tectonic plates, which had broken off from the vanguards of theprincipal ones, jostled and collided with one another, rolled over and beneath one another and the wreckage of already collided ones—leaving behind a ghastly mosaic of geology that is more complicated than almost anywhere else in the world.
Two major events tended to dominate the picture, however. The first of these was the relatively simple making of the main southern European Alpine chain. The other, more tricky to imagine, was the steady northward movement of the Arabian Peninsula along the huge fault line of what are now the Dead Sea and the river Jordan. This caused a cascade of what would finally be Balkan-related geology to happen. The Arabian Peninsula moved north and caused the creation of the Zagros Mountains of Iran, whose snow-capped higher peaks can be glimpsed south of the holy city of Isfahan. The piling up of these south Persian hills caused the entire Anatolian Plateau of eastern Turkey to be pushed steadily westward, which in turn caused enormous pressure both on the rising peninsula of Greece and, to its immediate north and most important of all, on the eastward extension of the very Alpine range that our train was currently crossing.
And it was this last that left the Balkans the geologically and topographically wild place they are today—the crushing of one newly formed mountain chain (the Balkan Mountains, largely in Bulgaria), heading westward into another (the Dinaric Alps) that was curving south and eastward. The two chains smashed into another to create a geological fracture zone that became a template for the fractured behavior of those who would later live on it. Like the complicated patterns that are made by intersecting ripples from a number of stones thrown into a pool, with sizes and shapes that can only be confirmed by the deepest calculus, so these two, or three, or four colliding ranges of hills formed yet newer ranges of hills and valleys that then trended in
Similar Books
