Sent by Tara Sharif
“While I was looking at pictures of Kopet-Dag, Hezar Masjed, and the Tondureh National Park I thought: this looks a bit like the Dolomites with a touch of southern California, but different. And sure enough, it turns out that at least some of the mountains around Quchan are Jurassic and made of limestone, which is indeed like the Dolomites … and the Jurassic area along the Swiss-French border.”
In the 19th century the genesis of the Dolomite Mountains was one of the great geological mysteries. Fossils provided clues that the rocks composing the mountains were formed once in the sea by living organisms, but in these early days of geology almost nothing was known about the bottom of the sea and the sedimentation occurring in oceans. So how did the ocean become mountains?
During his voyage on board of “HMS Beagle” (1831-1836), young geologist C. Darwin studied Lyell’s “Principles of Geology” and the chapter about reefs in the Pacific stimulated his imagination. In Chile, February 20, 1835, Darwin had experienced a very strong earthquake and shortly afterward noted evidence of several meters of uplift in the region. In accordance to Lyell’s view Darwin imagined that mountains could rise and sink by many similar events during geological time.
Based only on the description in the book of atolls, and assuming slow movements of the surface of earth, Darwin developed a preliminary hypothesis to explain the formation of atolls in the middle of the sea. He admits in his 1887 autobiography:
“No other work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this; for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of S. America before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of S. America of the intermittent elevation of the land, together with the denudation and deposition of sediment. This necessarily led me to reflect much on the effects of subsidence, and it was easy to replace in imagination the continued deposition of sediment by the upward growth of coral. To do this was to form my theory of the formation of barrier reefs and atolls.”
These observations of living reefs in the tropical seas provided new impulses to interpret the geological relationships in the Dolomites. In 1860 the Austrian geologist Baron Ferdinand F. von Richthofen (1833-1905) visited and studied the area of the Dolomites. He discovered that the sandstone and tuff deposits, surrounding the isolate peaks of dolostone, contained large limestone boulders, some containing still recognizable fossils of corals. Based on the theory of evolution of a reef as proposed by Darwin, Richthofen suggested that the isolated peaks were the intact remains of an ancient reef, still surrounded by clastic sediments of an ancient ocean basin, in which, from time to time, landslides from the steep slopes of the reef deposited large boulders of corals.
I remembered the many earthquakes we experienced in Ghoochan and also our tea pots being lined with a hardened layer of lime and my mom and azizjoons losing some tooth to what might have been the quick calcification of any plaque they had at their gum lines.
In fact, all 3 sisters were very young (around 30) when they lost some teeth. I remember Dr. Ajami being a part of many conversations. Of course, they did not know about flossing and electric tooth brushes at that time to do a better job. So all that calcium from the sea animals sent them to the dentist office? And Choochan was a sea at some time?