Prehistoric Erosion (and Lovecraft)

[Durkoala]

I recently managed to finally read At the Mountains of Madness. While I enjoyed it for the most part, I had a lot of trouble accepting that a city made from normal stone could still be standing and recognisable after being abandoned since at least the Cretatous.

I don't know much about geology, so can somebody please tell me if an abandoned city, admittedly one built more solidly than most human constructions, could survive several million years in Antarctica? For the unaware, the City is found on top of a colossal mountain range in Antarctica (it may or may not have always been on there: I can't remember if Lovecraft belived in plate tectonics), was built long ago by the Old Ones (nonhumaniod aliens) before dinosaurs exsisted (as the Old Ones bred dinosaurs for beasts of burden, ignoring the fact that there are many dinosaurs that are unsuitable for that) with no unearthly materials. Parts of it were underground, but aside from buried in ice, it was still mostly intact; it was still possible to make out weathered carvings in places and even find fragments of carved wood from the Cretaceous!

So, how likely is this? There's some details I can't remember, but I'l try and edit those in later

[Yora]

How likely? Very little.

If the ruins do indeed predate the dinosaurs, than the ground on which the buildings are standing wouldn't be flat ground anymore. Maybe there are some parts on the earth surface that never crumpled up, but if it's in the mountains that is almost impossible. Also, I am pretty sure ice ages were global and not limited to the northern hemisphere, which means the antarctic would have been covered completely by much thicker glaciers than it is today. Glaciers are not only extremely heavy, they are also constantly moving. Relatively slowly, but when a wall several miles high and thousands of miles long moves into something, there is no way anything will remain standing and not be pulverized.

[Jeff the Green]

Even leaving that out, repeated freezing and thawing is not at all good for rocks; it exfoliates them.

[factotum]

I've been thinking about this, and the stuff about the ice would sort of work in the stated situation--namely, the city is in a ring of mountains that block it from the outside world. The ice surrounding the city, therefore, has presumably built up from compacted snowfall over the millennia rather than being the result of water freezing, and provided there's no gradient for the ice to start moving like a glacier, it might be possible for the ice covering to protect the city from the elements and preserve it thereby.

As for the geological processes, I don't know enough about Antarctica to answer that. I'm pretty sure there are no tectonic plate boundaries crossing the middle of the continent, though, so earthquakes and volcanoes around the area of the city ought to be next to nonexistent. That does beg the question of how the underground sea they find near the end of the novel remains liquid, though.

[Brother Oni]

That does beg the question of how the underground sea they find near the end of the novel remains liquid, though.

It depends on how deep underground the sea is. Given that the Earth's core is molten, one of the quirks of going underground is that the temperature stabilises at a constant low level (I think about 4C) and going deeper increases this temperature. While it is most noticeable for deep sea drilling, in the normal ocean the heat flux is minor (~1 W/m2 gained by the ocean from the crust compared to up to 1000 W/m2 lost between the ocean and the atmosphere).

In a comparatively enclosed system like an underground sea though, the heat loss to the atmosphere would be significantly less, so I could see it still being liquid.

[Yora]

I've been thinking about this, and the stuff about the ice would sort of work in the stated situation--namely, the city is in a ring of mountains that block it from the outside world. The ice surrounding the city, therefore, has presumably built up from compacted snowfall over the millennia rather than being the result of water freezing, and provided there's no gradient for the ice to start moving like a glacier, it might be possible for the ice covering to protect the city from the elements and preserve it thereby.
With enough time and enough ice, and I think in this case both are a given, glaciers can level mountains. Some geologists think that the mountains of Norway were originally five times as high as they are now, being pretty much obliterated by glaciers. The amount of ice in Greenland is so heavy that it pushes the largest island in the world through the crust and now that the ice is melting the rock is starting to rise again. There are estimates that it will soon rise 2 inches every year, and that's with most of the ice still in place. The forces involved with the movement of supersize glaciers are unimaginable. I don't think there can be any protected mountain valley that would survive an ice age in the antarctic.

[Durkoala]

Thanks for the enlightenment. This seems to confirm my suspicions that Lovecraft was speaking with his posterior.

A bit of further skimming reveals that the city was built pre-dinosaur, in it's heyday in the Jurassic/Cretacous, evacuation was started in the Cretaceous and the city was completely abandoned by the pilocene era (I can't remember exactly what was going on then, but in story the proto-human was known to the city-builders).

There was also a river running through the city, which had dried up by the time of its rediscovery. Would that have been an adequate start for a glacier, even if it was no longer flowing by the time of the ice age?

Also, could (possibly treated, possibly not) wood fragments have survived for that long, if the intense cold had prevented bacteria from breaking it down and it had been sheltered from the wind?

[hamishspence]

In a world where "Kadath" (mountain range in the centre of Antarctica much taller than the Himalayas) actually exists - the geological history might be a bit different to our world's.

[Durkoala]

I was sort of ignoring that, but given that Kadath has been said to be the home of the missing gods of earth (I haven't read the dream-quest of unknown Kadath yet) and they probably don't want their house or back garden collapsing, so we sort of have an excuse for the mountains still being mostly intact.

[factotum]

The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath, though, as its name suggests, is set in the world of dreams, not the (mostly) real Earth that "In the Mountains of Madness" takes place in. So, they can't be the same mountains and the same gods, even if the mountains have the same names.

[Bulldog Psion]

The idea of a city that astoundingly ancient is a pretty appealing one, in a way. However, to have even a remote chance of anything being left, I'd say it would have to be located in a continental craton (which is geologically stable for billions of years, possibly) under huge alluvial deposits.

I actually don't think that such a survival of remnants would be impossible. The Sanagasta Geologic Site (http://www.academia.edu/1286742/The_geology_and_paleoecology_of_the_newly_discover ed_neosauropod_Cretaceous_hydrothermal_nesting_sit e_in_Sanagasta_Los_Llanos_Formation_La_Rioja_NW_Ar gentina) from Argentina preserves visually identifiable hot spring basins and other geothermal formations from the Cretaceous period.

If hydrothermal structures can be preserved for 70 million years or so, in considerable detail, I don't see why worked stone blocks couldn't be preserved also, as long as they were buried in some fashion.

Edit: Kadath always seemed like another plane of existence to me, with no correspondence to the actual Earth other than maybe a few coincidental features.

[Frozen_Feet]

It would be impossible for a city to survive completely intact.

It would be possible for a city buried deep within a geologically stable location to survive in part.

Basically, it depends on how large the city was, how deep underground it extended, and how tall the mountains were. You'd expect all parts on the surface or close to it to be ground to dust or carried away by movement of the glacier (this means you might find some ruins of the city significant distances away from the original spot). Those parts dug deep into the bedrock might survive if they can just withstand the accumulating weight of ice. Even the collapsed parts could contain some decipherable information - see fossils.

[hamishspence]

The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath, though, as its name suggests, is set in the world of dreams, not the (mostly) real Earth that "In the Mountains of Madness" takes place in. So, they can't be the same mountains and the same gods, even if the mountains have the same names.
In The Dunwich Horror it's brought up as well (by a guy reading the Latin translation of the Necronomicon, converting it to English in his head)- though the "Old Ones" in that seem a little different from the Elder Things of At The Mountains of Madness - possibly more like the gods in Dream Quest:


The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.

They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraved, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly.

Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

[Bulldog Psion]

It would be impossible for a city to survive completely intact.

It would be possible for a city buried deep within a geologically stable location to survive in part.


Exactly. Lovecraft's standing city would be possible only with a "pocket dimension" or some other kind of time-bending magic. Or materials with properties so overwhelmingly durable that the elemental forces of the Earth could not shift or alter them.

Since the city appeared to be made out of regular stone, if I recall correctly, and there was no hint of planar boundaries or whatever, one must agree that Lovecraft was talking out of his posterior for the sake of drama. :smallwink:

[Brother Oni]

Since the city appeared to be made out of regular stone, if I recall correctly, and there was no hint of planar boundaries or whatever, one must agree that Lovecraft was talking out of his posterior for the sake of drama. :smallwink:

To be fair to the man, geological science back then wasn't as advanced as it is today.

[Durkoala]

@Frozen feet: the city extends out to an unstated but enormous extent (fifty miles of flying over it is suffiecent to cross the width, but it's length is too great for the hurried experdition to measure.) and is recognisably a city enough for the protagonists to recognise it as such despite the wear, inhuman architecture and Lovecraft's general attitude of 'It's really old evidence of non-human intelligence? AAAAAHH!' that most of his protagonists share. It's buried in fifteen to fifty feet of ice, on a mountain plateau twenty thousand feet high, but surrounded by peaks. There's an empty river bed, also buried in ice.

The city is intact enough for the team of explorers* to wander around, and even learn most of its history from conviently pictorial carvings, although it is better preserved below the ground and ice.

A group of frozen (not fossilised**) Elder Ones were discovered as well, estimated to be as old as 40,000,000 years.

...
*technically, they're a group of paeleontologists (spelling), but their belief that dynamite is an effective fossil-hunting tool means that I refuse to refer to them as such. I know this was how it was done once, but it's horrific.

** in fact, not entirely dead either. This is waved away as them being extremely hardy. :smalleek:

@ hamishspence: The Elder Ones/Things are entirely different beasts to the Old Ones you quoted, although the Elder things are also confusingly refered to as the Old Ones.
IIRC, The Elder Things are entirely material, and colonised the world and began the process of making life. There's also the Mi-Go, which come from Pluto, and apparently are partly composed of a different type of matter. The Star-spawn (of Cthulu) are also not made of regular matter, and there was a three-way war between them all for earth. The Star-spawn lost* when their city and leader sank beneath the waves, The Elder Things died out from a combination of the war, climate change and their serving Shoggoths turning on them and the Mi-Go apperantly decided that earth wasn't really worth it after all and mostly left.

The Deep Ones are a race of fish-men-things that were around in the war. They seem to have learned the art of creating Shoggoths, and so far have done better than the Elder Things. They're also one of the heaviest examples of Lovecraft's Xenophobia, as they interbreed with humans and so contaminate the European gene pool. they also are a lot closer to humanity than any of the above, and their direct confrontations usually end with them losing.

Great Cthulu is commonly considered to be one of the strongest beings on earth, although his single lovecraft appearance wasn't very impressive (he didn't get to show his full powers, though). He is like the Great Old Ones, but he is fairly weak in comparison to them and is refered to as their high priest on earth.

The Great Old Ones are a nebulous group of godlike beings: Yog-Sothoth, for example, exists independantly of time, but has some kind of designs on earth, which require him to send half-human children to ready the way for him. I don't know much about them, beyond the fact that they are the Big Lovecraft Names. They include (I think) Shub-*****rth, Azathoth, Yog-sothoth and maybe Nyarlyhotep, however you spell it.

There's also a bunch of other things like ghouls, the creations of Herbert West, the creatures of Ib and a vampiric colour that are general detritus that are generally weaker than all of the above, but occasionally mentioned in other stories.

Please take into account that I may got some of those wrong.:smallredface:


*actually, peace was forged between the Star-spawn and Elder things, then Cthulu found he should have given more priority to geological stability when he was choosing where to build his house, then the MiGo arrived to war with the Elder Ones.

[hamishspence]

@ hamishspence: The Elder Ones/Things are entirely different beasts to the Old Ones you quoted, although the Elder things are also confusingly refered to as the Old Ones.
Yup - the Dunwich Old Ones seem more like "Great Old Ones".


Great Cthulu is commonly considered to be one of the strongest beings on earth, although his single lovecraft appearance wasn't very impressive (he didn't get to show his full powers, though). He is like the Great Old Ones, but he is fairly weak in comparison to them and is refered to as their high priest on earth.

The Great Old Ones are a nebulous group of godlike beings: Yog-Sothoth, for example, exists independantly of time, but has some kind of designs on earth, which require him to send half-human children to ready the way for him. I don't know much about them, beyond the fact that they are the Big Lovecraft Names.
The Call of Cthulhu game, probably in order to make things make a little more sense to the players, splits them up into "Outer Gods" (more mystical - Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth etc) and "Great Old Ones" (a bit more solid - Cthulhu, Ithaqua, etc).

[Max™]

I don't recall the city being made of normal stone, actually, I could swear they commented on it being impossible for a city made of stone to survive that long.

[Telok]

I don't recall the city being made of normal stone, actually, I could swear they commented on it being impossible for a city made of stone to survive that long.
There is also the fact that later expeditions failed to even locate the entire mountain range. I recall some of those, and possibly other later, characters discussing the possibility of something interdimensional going on.

Another thing to note is that Lovecraft did not write his stories in any sort of fixed universe or world building. While the mythos is a common thread through them, and many people and places reoccur, they are not a series or sequels of each other except in the loosest and most forgiving sense.

One cute little Lovecraft factoid. He kept a very active circle of letter writers going. Most were other weird and pulp fiction writers. These guys swapped ideas and stuff all the time, some of the old letters are quite amusing. At one point Lovecraft wrote one of his friends into a story and kiled him off. That friend did the same thing to Lovecraft.

Edit: Spelling errors from the tablet post. I'll look up and post the kill-a-pen-pal reference later.

[Bulldog Psion]

I'm just now reading the story again. Despite its implausibility, it certainly manages to conjure up the majesty -- and oppressiveness -- of that amount of time passing. And the weirdness that would come from discovering the wrecked city of some ancient, ancient sapient species long extinct. The wizard still manages to cast his spell with simply the mere force of his words and ideas. :smallbiggrin:

Anyway, here are my takeaways from the reading that seem pertinent to this discussion:

* The city is located on a "tempest-swept" plateau 20,000 feet high, and is somehow partially embedded in a sheet of clear ice dozens of feet deep.

* The parts above the ice are "weathered and crumbling* and only survive at all because they are so "massive" that they could not weather away in the time passed. The "massiveness" is described as "preternatural." However, he later states the outer faces of the blocks are 6 feet by 8 feet, which is decently big, but not what I'd call "preternatural."

* The city is enormous, at least 100 miles across.

* (Edited out part about Lovecraft not understanding geologic timescales -- it appears early in the story that he doesn't, but later it emerges that he has a good, if not exact, grasp of them.)

* The stones are very ordinary in composition -- "Jurassic sandstone," mostly. He had to pick something that would erode at a colossal rate if exposed, to boot. :smallyuk: However, the stones are also described as "night-black," so I must wonder if the classification as "sandstone" is really accurate. Never heard of night-black sandstone before.

*And then, he goes and shows me wrong about his ideas of time-scales with this paragraph:


The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects - but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand million years - rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells - rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life

So, he conceives of these "Old Ones" as being on Earth at least a billion years ago. He does have some idea of geologic timescale.

* He goes on to say:


The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late date - perhaps two million years ago-as checked up by geological, biological, and astronomical features - and embodied an art which would be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings

and


One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years - to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous - and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the oldest domestic structure we traversed.

So, he's got the Cretaceous off in time a little, but still knows it was tens of millions of years ago.

*The oldest building they find is (somehow) dated to 40 million years old. It is basically the foundation of much more massive structure.

*The Old Ones are described as being incredibly tough, able to fly through space, and colonizing Earth and generating life here to serve them. They were practically immortal, unless they died from violence. They then ruled for billions of years, and only disappeared 2 million -- or 500,000 -- years ago when the Ice Ages started, forcing them to fall back into subterranean, undersea cities, where they eventually went extinct due to the cold. They also had a war at that time with the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu, it seems. And became "decadent," which of course was a big part of pre-modern thinking on civilizations.

So, I'd say that logically, it's a big heap of contrivance that doesn't stand up to examination even on its own terms.

We can assume that the city was in continuous use since the Cretaceous, meaning it would have been repaired up until it was abandoned 500,000 or 2 million years ago. Which, I agree, is a much more reasonable timeframe for survival of a massive city in a relatively stable area of the world as Lovecraft's hypothetical plateau of Leng seems to be.

Anyway:

* It's ridiculous that a bunch of creatures that can fly through space without protective gear are wiped out by the Ice Age.

* A 20,000 foot plateau would have been mighty cold regardless of what the rest of the Earth's climate was like, so there's another bit of illogical blather.

* The materials are absurdly inadequate to survive that long. Exposed sandstone would be long, long gone.

* These aren't the first glaciations to happen on Earth, though Lovecraft's era probably didn't have that information yet.

Basically, the story is thrown together poorly. It looks great on the surface, but it's got some logic holes bigger than R'lyeh in it.

Those could have been solved easily by having the Old Ones wiped out in their war with the Star-Spawn. And through the use of exotic materials that would resist weathering, even across tens of millions of years.

In short, Lovecraft made a highly imaginative story. He just didn't push his imagination quite far enough. So we're left with an intriguing creation that is flawed by glaring logic failures that could have been fixed, unfortunately, by a few extra sentences of text and a tiny bit more mental effort.

OR ....

... we can say that we're overthinking this, and that the human narrators are unreliable through fallibility and ignorance, and they described as "sandstone" something that is very different, and they used these terms just because they had no conception of the materials they were looking at. That kind of fixes it as long as you're agreeable to that bit of "suspension of disbelief," I guess.

And after all, what would a couple of guys from 1931 be able to figure out about a stone-like substance made by high-tech and semi-eldritch beings that had existed for billions of years, by walking around and looking at the ruins for a couple of hours with a flashlight? I doubt a modern materials scientist could figure out much in 5 or 6 hours with no laboratory, dealing with the creations of an ancient, powerful, utterly alien species that was also able to make Shoggoths.

I doubt even their conclusions would be much more useful in determining what they were actually looking at than a skilled Neanderthal flint-handaxe-maker would be able to determine the exact properties of billet aluminum or modern composite materials by looking at them for a couple of hours.

I suppose it's also possible to go along for the ride, recognize the narrator's descriptions as being inexact due to massive knowledge limitations relative to the ancient, advanced, alien complexities he was looking at, and just enjoy the weirdness and spookiness with an appreciative cry of "Tekeli-li!" :smallwink:

[Max™]

Yeah, I inserted in my head that they had no spectrographic, radiographic, or other such types of analysis equipment, and could only go off of "it looks or feels like sandstone" there.

All I know is, I want the movie made, and I want a scene with an entirely black imax screen except for a tiny bit of illumination in the bottom corner from a pair of flashlights as the explorers come in, echoes from their breathing, and then the reveal as one pans the light up, and up, and up, and across, and illuminates massive fantastic carvings you barely get a glimpse of at first.

[Bulldog Psion]

Yeah, I inserted in my head that they had no spectrographic, radiographic, or other such types of analysis equipment, and could only go off of "it looks or feels like sandstone" there.

Heck, it could even BE sandstone -- just sandstone infused with some substance that binds the grains together with incredible tenacity, creating something so durable that it will, indeed, last for tens of millions of years. These creatures were supposed to be super high tech, and possibly sorcerous also.That could be the source of the unusual color of the stone as well.


All I know is, I want the movie made, and I want a scene with an entirely black imax screen except for a tiny bit of illumination in the bottom corner from a pair of flashlights as the explorers come in, echoes from their breathing, and then the reveal as one pans the light up, and up, and up, and across, and illuminates massive fantastic carvings you barely get a glimpse of at first.

That would be an absolutely awesome scene. :smallcool:

[Max™]

All I could think of upon hearing about del Toro wanting to make it was how great it would be to play around with the big expanse of a movie screen to really get the "this is not a human structure and you should be creeped the hell out" across.

[Telok]

All I could think of upon hearing about del Toro wanting to make it was how great it would be to play around with the big expanse of a movie screen to really get the "this is not a human structure and you should be creeped the hell out" across.

This (http://laughingsquid.com/artist-ra-paulette-is-hand-carving-stunning-sculpted-caves-in-sandstone-cliffs-in-new-mexico/) popped up on usenet a couple weeks ago. Does that look about right?

[Slayn82]

I've read this essay (https://heteromeles.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/interstellar-civilization-cthulhu/) some time ago (and it took me almost an hour to find it again), that deals with this Geological Paradox, and a few others, by drawing a paralel with Vernal Pools. Multiple colonizations on the same site would have happened in this scenario, because galactic civilization takes away all the resources, and then migrates from planet to planet while geological cycles replendish them.

Expanding on this idea, when the stars are right (maybe overlaying laser emissions and mass distribution of those stars allowing a natural Alcubierre drive), they travel from planet to planet. Couple it with improved biotechnology to create improved bodies "in situ" and some form of transfer of conscience (allowing much cheaper and safe galactic travel, by not needing to transfer much mass), and you have immortal beings pretty much on Lovecraft's description. They build very durable infrastructure, in places where geological conditions will deal minimal damage, send very little mass on their early stages, create life or recruit servants to help them, craft a few spaceships and send them to relay points, send a few probes to find new planets to infest. So, a little of Zerg, a little of Ctulhu, a little of market analyst.

[Max™]

This (http://laughingsquid.com/artist-ra-paulette-is-hand-carving-stunning-sculpted-caves-in-sandstone-cliffs-in-new-mexico/) popped up on usenet a couple weeks ago. Does that look about right?

Scale it up 5 or even 10 times, and I could swear I recall the stone being greenish black stuff, did I just make up some head-canon there or what?

Checked, there was pre-cambrian slate in there as well as the newer sandstone and other materials used in the more recent parts of the city.

[Wardog]

With enough time and enough ice, and I think in this case both are a given, glaciers can level mountains. Some geologists think that the mountains of Norway were originally five times as high as they are now, being pretty much obliterated by glaciers. The amount of ice in Greenland is so heavy that it pushes the largest island in the world through the crust and now that the ice is melting the rock is starting to rise again. There are estimates that it will soon rise 2 inches every year, and that's with most of the ice still in place. The forces involved with the movement of supersize glaciers are unimaginable. I don't think there can be any protected mountain valley that would survive an ice age in the antarctic.

Another example of real natural forces being even more awesome and implacable than Lovecraft imagined. And yet, I doubt anyone reading this thread was thrown into an existential panic by the knowledge that the deep geological time would laugh at be utterly oblivious our puny civilization as it ground its remains into nothinness :smallsmile: