Terra Affirma: Chaos Creates

Bodies: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Chaos Creates
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Illustration by Sarah Gilman

Terra Affirma: Chaos Creates

Why you can trust us

By Sarah Gilman

< 1 MIN READ

Nov 21, 2022

An illustrated panel features a blue background with stylized, stratified mountains in banded shades of brown, red, blue and green. Handwritten text reads: Terra Affirma: Chaos Creates by Sarah Gilman.
It was born, as so many of us are, from a collision.

Islands rose in an ocean, then swam east and embraced a continent, heaving rock and seafloor from water onto dry ground. Corals and shells and heavy sediments that had waited in the dark, deep as secrets, now reemerged like them too鈥攚hispering new life into being.

These accretions came in waves over millions of years, at least 10 island chains one after the other, breaking over a bioregion now named for the Klamath Mountains, on the Oregon-California border. Mountain ranges pressed upward beneath the formations the islands left behind, stirring and bending and burying them, and then eroded away. Rivers flowed west across them, and as today鈥檚 ranges lifted, the water cut deep fissures through them, giving their pieces slowly back to the sea.

An illustration on a blue background shows stylized mountains, now with evergreen trees and snowy peaks. Handwritten text reads: This chaos was creative: Fragments of each configuration rendered the earth a rich mix鈥攁n accumulation of memory and experience where a self could root in the flesh of the land and begin to grow.

But the Klamath Mountain region also remained the same, even as most of the rest of the continent changed violently around it. Shallow seas rose but didn鈥檛 submerge it. Ice sheets descended from the north and glaciers grew from the peaks, but neither covered it. Plants and animals took refuge here when the climate heated and when it cooled. Some stayed. Some spread from its center and retreated back, spread and retreated back, as if this place breathed, as if it had a heartbeat. Because it does.

An illustration on a blue background shows the same stylized mountains, now with trees burned from flames rising into the sky, above green shrubbery and floral growth. Handwritten text reads: Now, the radical topography 鈥� rumpling from 100 feet above sea level to 9,038鈥攆ragments the climate. West, near the coast, 100 inches of precipitation fall per year, feeding dense temperate rainforest. East, a fraction of that moisture nourishes dry forests, chaparral, and scrub. In summer, the water turns off like a faucet. The land burns both because it needs to and because it is warming like everywhere else, blackened trees stitching many skylines. Even so, the high peaks still hold snow past late spring, and in the canyon bottoms, the cutting rivers still flood. Five other biotic regions edge into this tangle: the mountains of the Cascades, the Coast Range, and the Sierra Nevada twining with the desert Great Basin and the oak savannas of the Central Valley.

The wise know that diversity makes resilience, makes beauty. More than 3,500 different kinds of plants thrive here, and they, in turn, spin off habitats for countless living things. Ocean sediments form patches of soil and rock called serpentine laden with heavy metals that inhibit plants from absorbing basic nutrients. Freed from competition, at least 200 tenacious species have evolved to live only on this hungry substrate.

Illustrated animals, including a beaver, newt, hummingbird, snake, and weasel sit among purple, yellow, pink, and green flowers. Below the illustration, handwritten text on a blue background reads: In the fens, cobra plants鈥攖he last surviving member of their ancient genus鈥攍ure insects into their fat, hollow stems, providing for themselves what the soil cannot.

Along some remote trails grow great thickets of electric pink Siskiyou kalmiopsis, one of the oldest living members of the heather family, found nowhere else on Earth. After a giant wildfire, its flowers riot back like their lives depend on it. Their vigor offers a memory of all this place has been, and a vision of a future too, if it repeats its own history as haven, even as it washes itself out to sea鈥攁nd if we learn the lessons it has to offer. Perhaps out there beneath the waves lies a 12th self, a 13th, a 14th, and on, the continued accretion of earth rewriting what is possible, this place reborn jumbled and hybrid, as we all are and must be, again and again and again.

Sarah Gilman is a writer and illustrator covering the environment, natural history, and science. A contributing editor at聽Hakai聽and聽bioGraphic聽magazines, her work has also appeared in聽High Country News, The Atlantic, and more.

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Bodies: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Chaos Creates

Bodies: In Depth

Terra Affirma: Chaos Creates

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