Air Date: Week of July 26, 2024

A waterfall above the Arctic Circle in Edgeøya, an island in the southeast of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. (Photo: © Mark Seth Lender)

Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence Mark Seth Lender muses on what waterfalls and volcanoes have in common, in transforming their elements of water and rock into something new.

Transcript

DOERING: Earth is a planet in motion where water carves deep canyons and rock itself turns to liquid. And that got Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender thinking.

Water! Falls!
© 2023 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

There is something about waterfalls, and volcanoes, that makes me think of them in the same way. Why? It took me a while. When I pose this as a question people say, it’s the Power. Which is true but that applies equally to the sea, especially in storm when the waves are crashing. And all that violence. But I don’t think Ocean/Volcano, or Ocean/Waterfall holds together in the same way as Waterfall/Volcano.

Waterfall/Volcano is different.

Rock is dense and cold and solid and it sinks. It stays put. Water is forgiving and pliant. It turns into mist. It returns, as rain. In a waterfall, it is the water that sinks. That falls. Not the rock over which it cascades. In a volcano, rock instead of being solid and cool is molten and hot. Ejected, into the stratosphere, rock defies its very nature!

That’s the relationship. Water that falls like something solid; rock that is liquid and flings itself into the air.

When I look at a waterfall it brings that opposition in mind, for me. Naming, saying “Waterfall” all-at-once, like that, that loses these oppositions and contradictions. Instead think, “Water, Falls.”

And really see:

Water of the rushing river gathered from a source unseen. Water only of the moment from spring melt, from storm sabered by lightning. Each source, and every waterfall that it feeds, is different. Water that was glacier, its blue ice and black ice creaking and splintering against the agency of unnatural demise…

So next time you look at a waterfall, say it out loud, this way:

Water! Falls!

DOERING: That’s Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender.

 

Links

Mark Seth Lender’s website