Guest Post: Cuba’s Stories in Stone

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fragmento_del_valle_de_vinales-_cubaStarting about 135 million years ago, long after the Pangea supercontinent fragmented into shards of planetary crust, one of those geological slivers began noodling toward the north and east. Near the end of the Eocene epoch, it bumped into what is now Florida. With a newborn ocean giving it a shove from behind, it overrode and then permanently glommed onto the North American crustal plate. Thus, geologically speaking, was Cuba born.

The island’s first geological maps came in 1869, from Manuel Fernández de Castro of the Spanish Geological Survey. A century later, the Cuban Academy of Sciences worked with its equivalents in Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union to produce detailed modern surveys. Today academics from Spain, France, Germany, and elsewhere publish on Cuba’s natural wonders. But one major research partner has of course been missing: American geologists. “Cuba accreted to America 44 million years ago,” says Robert Stern, a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, “and got ripped apart again 55 years ago.” 

st58overviewfg4It’s a losing deal for both sides, says Manuel Itturalde-Vinent, a geologist with the Cuban Academy of Sciences in Havana. For decades, el bloqueo has kept Cuban and American scientists from collaborating through most of the usual academic research channels. They could not share basic information about natural disasters that threatened them both; Hurricane Matthew showed how blithely a meteorological menace does not respect political embargoes.  “A hurricane doesn’t belong to anybody,” says Itturalde-Vinent.

Now, the gradual dismantling of el bloqueo is starting to trickle down to scientists. Last month in Denver, Stern marshaled the paperwork necessary to bring the world’s top minds in Cuban geology to a meeting of the Geological Society of America (whose official seal has a map that includes Cuba, along with a rock hammer). In a convention-center lecture hall featuring faux rock pillars, one scientist after another spoke about his or her own particular view of Cuban geology. They were little better in generating a coherent picture than the blind men feeling the proverbial elephant.

In part that is because Cuba’s geology has a little bit of everything. There are pristine coral reefs and thick carbonate platforms, laid down over millions of years by the dead bodies of marine organisms. There are bands of highly squeezed rocks called ophiolites, seafloor thrust skyward by the original Cuba-Florida collision. There are even sediments swept into place by the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact, which happened not too far away in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago.

That hodgepodge, or mélange as geologists might call it, is what makes Cuba so crucial to the history of the Caribbean. “Our geology is key for understanding the region,” says Kenya Núñez-Cambra, president of the Geological Society of Cuba. “If you do not have the key, you cannot complete the puzzle.”

Núñez-Cambra was on her first visit to the United States, and a bit sad that she had not had time to escape the convention center and visit Colorado’s own uplifted mountains. Itturalde-Vinent had been to America more than a dozen times, and blamed declining collaborations on funding shortfalls as much as on politics. “Today’s demonstrations show how much we need to work together,” he told the meeting. He travels with a flash drive to bring back PDFs of research papers, which take too long to download using typical Cuban internet speeds.

After the talks concluded, the speakers adjoined to another room to discuss further collaboration. Stern held up an iPhone to loop in a colleague from afar, someone he was hoping to rope into future organizational efforts. A representative of the National Science Foundation told the Americans how to apply for funds to do research in Cuba (first step: submit a white paper so the State Department can be sure it meshes with national foreign policy). Someone from the US Geological Survey talked about a new, three-year project to assess the mineral resources of Cuba. Everyone gathered for a group photograph. T-shirts bearing the logo of the Cuban geological society were passed around, as was a bottle of Havana Club rum.

Plans were hatched to bring a US delegation of geologists to Cuba in 2017, or perhaps in 2018. Itturalde-Vinent is to serve as field-trip guide. Stops are likely to include one or two places along the 3,500 miles of Cuban coastline, all of which are threatened by sea level rise. “We share the same interests in understanding natural resources,” he said. “To face the climate change, we have to share knowledge.”

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Alexandra Witze is a correspondent for Nature and a contributing writer for Science News. Her book Island on Fireabout the extraordinary 1783 eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki, was written with her husband, Jeff Kanipe.

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Photo:   Valle de Viñales in Cuba, by Ivan2010

Map:  From Geology of Cuba by Georges Pardo, AAPG Studies in Geology 58.

2 thoughts on “Guest Post: Cuba’s Stories in Stone

  1. Today, I went to the beach with my children. I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old
    daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She
    placed the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear.
    She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is completely off topic but
    I had to tell someone!

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