Picturing the unimaginable: deep time and space

Most of us in the mining industry have an interest in geology and the tectonic forces that shape and change our earth. We all know that the dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period, some 65 million years ago, but in reality no one can envisage 65 million years, let alone 1 million years. 

One thousand years ago England was an Anglo-Saxon country, ruled by the Dane Canute who, legend has it, demonstrated to his subjects that as a king he was not a god, by ordering the tide not to come in knowing this would fail. A thousand years is a very long time, but try to imagine that 1000 times- no one can get to grips with a million years. 

If you have ever wondered where your town was located, say 300 million years ago, you now can, thanks to software engineer Ian Webster who has developed an amazing interactive map which tracks how the globe has changed over the course of the last 750 million years.

The image below, at 300 million years, shows the old continents coming together to form the supercontinent Pangea in the late Carboniferous Period. The outline of the UK is in the centre, and Cornwall is being gripped by the unimaginable tectonic forces which partially melted the mantle, which millions of years later, in the Permian Period, solidified into granite, the cracks being infilled with minerals which were later exploited in the Cornish tin and copper mines.

Webster's software provides a wonderful insight into the unimaginable, but the photo below just blows my mind!

When I was in my teens I was fascinated by astronomy, knowing that looking at the night sky I was looking into the past, as light had to travel immense distances to reach the earth- totally unimaginable distances. I knew that light travelled at 186,000 miles per second and could travel the equivalent of nearly 8 times around the world in one second, that light from the moon took nearly one and a half seconds to reach us and from the sun just over 8 minutes. Colossal distances!

But the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light years away, a staggering 40,208,000,000,000 km.

I was also aware that our sun was just one of hundreds of billions of stars (unimaginable!) in our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth, a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. Our galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years but our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy is some 220,000 light-years wide, a fairly average galaxy size. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away and is the only spiral galaxy which can be seen with the naked eye on moonless nights.

The incredible James Webb telescope orbits the sun around 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth and the photo above is of a tiny region of deep space outside our own galaxy. The bright lights with projecting arms are stars in our galaxy, but the other points of light are not stars, but galaxies, each separated from its closest neighbour by on average 100,000 light years, and each of those points of light measure 3,000 to 300,000 light years across! Many of these galaxies are billions of light years away.

Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast Universe containing between 200 billion and 2 trillion galaxies. Totally unimaginable- marvel at the image and what it means, but don't dwell on it too long- it can truly blow your mind!