Displayed in a corridor near the reception at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate in Stavanger is a five meter long glass print of a Late Devonian core from the Embla field. Fifteen seamlessly overlapping images form a high-resolution mosaic of the most beautiful core ever recovered from the Norwegian continental shelf.
The core penetrated an amalgamation of rocks eroded from the Caledonian mountains to the west. Palaeomagnetically dated to 375 million years, this alluvium came to rest at approximately the same time as the evolution of the ancestor of all terrestrial vertebrates, be them parrots, pterosaurs, blue whales or humans.
The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
― Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
We owe our existence to a strong-limbed, flat-headed, laboriously air-breathing fish slightly younger than that core. These rusty conglomerates were deposited during the Late Devonian, when northern Europe lay just south of the equator. The eroded pebbles are among the first sediments deposited on what later became the Norwegian continental shelf.
Conferences and seminars outside the petroleum sector sometimes use public meeting rooms located near the decorative core mosaic. During one such gathering, participants stood in a queue for the coffee machine. They could not avoid noticing the beautiful rusty red and green conglomerates, the eroded remains of the highest terrestrial mountain chain the Earth has ever known. One of them scowled at the bright quartz pebbles and red silt matrix and resolutely declared, “I cannot fathom what anyone sees in modern art!”
While this anecdote may raise a smile from geologists, it demonstrates that reducing complexity from an immensely convoluted set of information demands the consilience of a vast range of disciplines. To appreciate the core’s deep meaning, the observer would have to be versed in stratigraphy, sedimentology, geochronology, paleogeography, paleoenvironments and early tetrapod evolution. We deciphered our Devonian history through linking together principles from chemistry, physics, biology, geology, and amazingly, even orbital mechanics.
The information content of this image is indeed equivalent to “modern art” when input from these disciplines remain vague or isolated and when unity of knowledge is lacking. But, with only a basic geologic understanding, the image will be appreciated in all its dimensions.
