Many think of geology as a science subject. But what if I were to tell you it was also a foreign language, written by Mother Nature herself, as an autobiography of planet Earth through its life. Let me explain.

Being able to speak a foreign language (that being any other than English) is a skill that I really wish I could do, and yet unfortunately struggle to achieve. I took Spanish for three years at school, and even did a refreshers course at university. However, despite all this, I only really know the basics like ‘Me llamo Ed, tengo veintiséis anos, y vivo en Leicester’.

The main issue I find is that if you want to really get good at a foreign language, the best way is to immerse yourself in it and I don’t really have a good way to do that. Whilst on a two month internship in Mexico, my Spanish improved far more than those three years at school! Everything from making some local friends who forced me to speak Spanish (as an encouraging way to make me improve), or directing taxi drivers to the science department of geology, not the education of science department (happened multiple times).

Sadly that internship ended and my Spanish quickly deteriorated with it. This was playing on my mind whilst hiking up the mountains in the Lake District for my PhD when I had a sudden epiphany! I do know a foreign language, fairly fluently. I might not be able to speak it, but I can read and translate it. Probably the oldest language in existence. A language written in rocks. Geology.

We geologists spend a lot of our time looking at rocks, making observations of the shapes and structures in. From the observations, we interpret how the rocks once formed, thousands to hundreds of millions of years ago. However, when looking at the rocks, we are in reality reading them.

This realisation that we are reading the rocks then reminded me of the geology library cartoon, with a fault running through it. I think the main aim of the cartoon is to illustrate how faults offset neatly layered rocks that look similar to bookshelves. However, what if we replaced the books with rocks? Most geologists would still be able to pick up a rock, examine it, and tell you the historical events that occurred to make the rock. Really, it’s not too different from reading a regular history textbook

Sure, geology is not like most modern languages. It is not one that we can speak. Nor is it one that we can easily write down on a piece of paper. However, one ancient language does come to my mind that is very similar, Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a written only form of language that used lithographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements to convey messages. It’s use of these symbolic ‘words’ is sort of a halfway house between the shapes we read in the words and words we write in modern languages today. It was even caved into stone sometimes.

So, if geology is a very ancient language that recorded historical events in Earth’s life, who was the writer? The answer to that would be Nature itself (or Mother Nature). The igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks across the globe are in essence carved, compressed, and sculpted by Nature to form an autobiography of events that stretch back billions of years into the past!

Although, it appears in recent decades/years we humans have been learning to replicate Nature’s ability to write the geological language. We have been making our own artificial anthropogenic rocks and materials, such as cement, steel, and even plastic, which will become incorporated alongside natural rocks and exist side-by-side long after our species.

And on that sobering thought, I’ll leave my mad hill walking daydreams alone. Maybe I will go and pick up one of my Spanish course books and give it another go… Wish me luck!