All the Earth is sacred – it's just that some places seem alive, and it is easier to be aware of that spiritual connection.
I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
The place where we grew up or currently reside is more than physical space. It defines who we are, how we think about ourselves and others, and the way we live.
- Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson, quoted
http://wisecounsel.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/geographical-psyche-does-your-location-shape-you/
http://wisecounsel.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/geographical-psyche-does-your-location-shape-you/
Artist depiction of an Asteroid Impact
In my previous blog,"Connecting the (wrong) Dots", I related how three geographical locations, baKoni-Boskop-Kromdraai, may have subliminally informed the course of my life.
These are places akin to what the Scots and Irish call "thin places" or what Eric Weiner calls "the Geography of Bliss". (For a thoughtful reflection on "thin places" see click here.)
Another place, and the most primal of all, is the Vredefort Dome in South Africa not far from where I lived as a teenager. The Vredefort Crater is the largest known impact crater on Earth. When I was 11, my father had been transferred from the gold mines of Pilgrims Rest to the fabulously rich gold reefs of Blyvooruitzicht, "Happy Prospect". This was a move, literally from the Blyde River Canyon to what was during the 1960s, one of the richest gold mines on the planet, Blyvooruitzicht.
During those teen years we would often drive down across the northern crater rim of the "Vredefort Crater" to Parys for Sunday picnics along the Vaal River. The Vredefort Dome is now a World Heritage Site. The geological significance of those Sunday picnics only dawned on me much later in my life.
Vaal River near Parys, South Africa
The Vredefort Crater
The asteroid that hit Vredefort is estimated to have been one of the largest ever to strike Earth (at least since the Hadean eon some four billion years ago), thought to have been approximately 5-10 km (3.1-6.2 mi) in diameter...
The original crater was estimated to have a diameter of roughly 300 km (190 mi), although this has been eroded away... The remaining structure, the "Vredefort Dome", consists of a partial ring of hills 70 km in diameter, and are the remains of a dome created by the rebound of rock below the impact site after the collision.
The crater's age is estimated to be 2.023 billion years (± 4 million years), which places it in the Paleoproterozoic era. It is the second-oldest known crater on Earth, a little less than 300 million years younger than the Suavjärvi Crater in Russia...
The dome in the center of the crater was originally thought to have been formed by a volcanic explosion, but in the mid-1990s, evidence revealed it was the site of a huge bolide impact, as telltale shatter cones were discovered in the bed of the nearby Vaal River.
The crater site is one of the few multiple-ringed impact craters on Earth, although they are more common elsewhere in the Solar System.
The nearby Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC) and Witwatersrand Basin were created during this same period, leading to speculation that the Vredefort bolide's mass and kinetics were of sufficient magnitude to induce regional volcanism. The BIC is the location of most of the world's known reserves of platinum group metals, while the Witwatersrand basin holds most of the known reserves of gold.
Vredefort Crater (Photo: NASA)
[For more about the Vredefort Dome and some dramatic photos see the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Obsevatory Web Site at http://www.hartrao.ac.za/other/vredefort/vredefort.html.]
Incredibly, because of an asteroid impact two-billion years ago, my father ended up working at the Blyvooruitzicht Gold Mining Company Limited! Indirectly, my life's course, to my great astonishment and amusement, had ancient Paleoproterozoic antecedents! Suddenly Paul's assurance to the Ephesians took on a new meaning for me, “He chose us in Christ before the world was made to be holy and faultless before him in love, marking us out for himself beforehand, to be adopted sons, through Jesus Christ. Such was his purpose and good pleasure” (Eph 1:4-5 NJB).
Here was the genesis of my interest in cosmology, catastrophes, and apocalyptic cataclysms! Curiously, the move from Pilgrims Rest to Blyvooruitzicht also marked a switch in theological perspectives. We moved from the Dutch Reformed Church to the Methodist Church. This shift was to have a huge impact and consequence on my life's trajectory too.
Cybernetics of Landscapes and Geography
This brings me to a long held conviction, the conviction that we are assigned our time and place in the Universe by God. Geography somehow imprints itself on our psyches and instinctual behaviours. An instinct is defined as an "inborn pattern of behaviour in response to specific external stimuli" in this case, a geophysical location. It is also described as "an intuitive judgement or feeling about the best way to act, not based on rational conscious thought" (WordWeb). That is, geography modulates our instincts, effects and affects our destiny. Landscapes impinges on our lives! Vredefort did!
This field of study and research is sometimes called "Human Geography", "Cognitive Geography", or "Psychogeography". Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
Christian environmentalist, Steve Lummer, writing about "Geography Affects Destiny" explains...
Author of Wild Goose Chase, Pastor and Adventurer Mark Batterson reminds us of this very thing when he points us to Genesis 15 where we see an amazing illustration of God's desire to get us "out there".
God took Abraham outdoors to look up into the nighttime sky. He told him that his offspring would outnumber the stars in the sky. What God did may be just as significant as what He said. He led Abraham outside for an object lesson that he would never forget. He would never see the stars in the sky the same way again. Every time he looked into the nighttime sky, he "remembered the promises of God."
Why did God take him outside? Because held up inside the tent, Abraham's vision of God and God's amazing future for him was limited. He could not see the potential of God's promises. God wanted him to get a glimpse of just how big a God He was. Taking him outside was God's way of telling Abraham not to put limits and ceilings on what He wanted to do through him and for him.
The same point could be made when God relocates Abram from Ur to settle in Canaan. Steve Lummer continues, describing his own boyhood experience. It echoes my own...
What a great place to grow up as a child. Little did I realize at the time, but that place of adventure and exploring was a set up by God.
I found an amazing passage this morning out of Acts 17:26-27 that explains why we live where we do and why we live when we do.
According to Acts 17, God places us in certain geographical locations at certain times in history for a real specific reason. "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him."
Time and time again, a Voice calls me from my "tents", my comfort zones and says, "look up into the nighttime sky" and see the bigger picture. Thirty years before its discovery in the 1990s, an asteroid from long, long ago had cast its spell and was to reverberate through my life and choice of interests and careers.
Impact craters indeed make ideal sand pits and ponds for Sunday afternoon family picnics for boys in which to play and cosmic nurseries for new life to spawn!
For further reading:
D. R. Montello, Cognitive Geography, University of California – Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~montello/pubs/CogGeog.pdf
Harm de Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape
Vredefort, Miscellanuous Books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Vredefort
Abiogenesis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life
What is Astrobiology, http://astrobiology.com/1998/04/what-is-astrobiology.html
Celestial Impact Events, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event
©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za
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