📍 🇮🇳 Early Earth at Lalbagh

‘All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely Players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts…’, thus goes Jacques in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

The stage upon which all human culture, society and history acts upon, through the entrances and exists of all men and women, is the underlying geology and geography of the earth. It is this which is the ‘one man’ who plays their many parts - influencing the course of human culture and society. The geography and geology of a place is a significant contributor - from prehistoric times, whence it influenced which rocks could be made and used as stone tools, until more recent times, as to why the Industrial Revolution kicked off in Britain.

The Earth is over 4.5 billion years old, and we humans, as a species, are only around 300,000 years old - one of the many species to call this planet our home. The early Earth was a large pool of hot and molten lava, aptly called the Hadean phase for its similarities to the mythic underworld of the Greek God Hades. Rocks from this period are very rare - with only a few recent discoveries in Canada and Australia, two of the oldest landmasses, which could be dated to around 4 and 4.3 billion years. Another of these oldest landmasses is that of the southern Deccan, southern India. 

Rocks from the geological formation termed the Older Gneissic Complex (OGC) have been dated variously to between 3 and 3.4 billion years. These geological formations also preserve the fossils of stromatolites, which are some of the earliest lifeforms on Earth. They are also rich sources of various important minerals and metals, like iron and gold, and have been exploited since the most ancient of times. This outcrop of the OGC formation is located in the heart of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. This outcrop is considered a National Geological Monument since 1975. It nears the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, a rich and storied green space within Bangalore City, created over 200 years ago, in the 1760s, which houses its own lake, a museum, many smaller gardens and a glass house dating to the 1890s. 

____ Sources ____ 

>> B.P Radhakrishna and R. Vaidyanadhan, Geology of Karnataka. Geological Society of India, Bangalore, 2011.