While we like to use metaphors like “on solid ground” in English, on a geological scale the stuff below our feet is anything but. It’s full of shifting planes of material with varying densities. There are faults and fractures, often with ribbons of fluid running through them. There are sediments, clays and bedrock. Not to mention, on an even bigger scale, gigantic tectonic plates rubbing against or pulling apart from one another. In some places, the ground is like a tower of toy bricks just waiting to topple.
Chris Baranuik digs into the world of drilling, fracking and man-made earthquakes. Living on one of the biggest basalt plains, I feel like I am continually reminded of the living earth. I remember talking with a school that surfaced an area with astro-turf, only for the earth to bend and shape the surface leaving it undulating. The hills and the earth are most certainly alive.