Baja British Columbia

Abstract

The surface of the earth seems so fixed. And it is, in our short lives. But if we take a much longer view, we see that the earth’s surface is actually quite mobile. For any locality on earth we can ask, “How long has this place been at this place?” For some decades now the Vancouver Island region, this book’s long-running example of how the various time machines work, has been suspected of being a “suspect terrane”—a place that arrived at its current geography through continental drift. And as it turns out, that suspicion was well founded. The story of how we reached this conclusion—the time machine we used to do so—is the subject of this chapter. The story, from my point of view at least, begins on a small Canadian island north and west of Vancouver.