The Tower of London. Photo: Photo: xiquinhosilva / flickr CC.
Eye - 07 December 2012
From the Tower to trowels
The tower on the twelfth
A Friend will be celebrating her seventy-second birthday next week with a vigil at an infamous spot where many people lost their heads.
Judy Moody-Stuart, of Ditchling Meeting, intends to stand, from twelve noon to twelve midnight on 12 December, at the Tower execution scaffold in Trinity Square Gardens. It is just outside Tower Hill Underground and opposite the Tower of London.
‘The vigil’, she said, ‘is in memory of those whose lives have been cut short by “man’s inhumanity to man” – to quote the Scottish poet Robert Burns. I have chosen the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year two thousand and twelve because it is my birthday. I never liked the decimal system and, in a way, it is a little personal protest. I blame Napoleon for what happened to our lovely pounds, shillings and pence and sixteen ounces in the pound.’
Judy told the Friend: ‘Apart from Thomas More’s, Anne Boleyn’s and other high profile deaths, there are all the merchant sailors whose ships went down in wartime convoys, and, worldwide, how many, many more?’
She added: ‘Lucky me, still able to stand, who just wants to remember them with respect.’
She has a question that she will ask people who may stop and wonder what she is doing: ‘“What does love require of us?” I’ll have an umbrella, and I intend to spend the tweleve hours contemplating the answers, with love.’
Trowel attraction
What impact do we have on the planet? What can we learn from the earth itself?
Well, American scientists investigating greenhouse gases are hoping to find out by putting the soil from a Pennsylvanian Quaker graveyard under the microscope.
London Grove Friends Meeting in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, has attracted the trowel of geoscientist Anthony Aufdenkampe, of the National Science Foundation’s Christina River Basin Critical Zone Observatory on the borders of Delaware and Pennsylvania.
‘These soils have been undisturbed for centuries, if at all, and they hold the key to understanding how humans have altered the landscape,’ Anthony said.
He added: ‘They’re providing us with a new understanding of the critical zone – the region between the top of the forest canopy and the base of unweathered rock: our living environment – and its response to climate and land use changes.
‘It all starts with bedrock and with rotting soil. To scientists, this putrid rock, as the Greeks called it, is known as saprolite. It’s the first stage of the continuous transformation of rock to fertile soils, and needs thousands to millions of years of mixing by water, plants, microbes, worms and other organisms.’
For centuries researchers thought that these building blocks of life stayed close to home – that the molecules in a falling leaf didn’t travel far before meeting their ultimate fates. They returned to the atmosphere as greenhouse gas, or became incorporated into the soil.
Now scientists at the Christina River Basin are testing the idea that erosion and the mixing of soil minerals with carbon in fresh plant remains – and subsequent burial downslope or downstream – is the key to what happens to the carbon, and to the greenhouse gases it forms.
Scientists once believed that they could understand whether a forest or a field was storing greenhouse gases by studying small research plots alone.
‘Now we know that we need to look carefully at all the forms of carbon that leave a plot and flow downhill and downstream,’ Anthony explained. ‘Soils under ancient trees and in old cemeteries provide a geochemical reference that we can use to estimate human-caused erosion elsewhere on the landscape.’
