Footprints in the Moondust

• kateshrewsday

One of the great advantages of mud in the forest is that you can see precisely who has visited every puddle.

We spend ages poring over quaggy indentations around the shale-pools. It is a chronology of dogs at leisure: the great danes leave as many prints as the tiny combative terriers: some recent, some old, some haring past, some stopping to gaze into a glassy window on the sky.

Still others do not belong to dogs at all. The crows have signed the visitor’s book, and the ducks often call in to meander around this welcome water before Mac the dog mounts a charge.

Most silent of them all, the Ariels of the forest occasionally leave their calling card: the deer take their refreshment in early morning and balmy late evening, and do not pause to consider whether they might have left an uncalculated trace behind them.

We stand, and read it like a book until Mac the dog lumbers over to see why all the attention has diverted away from his visage, and stands directly in our gaze, trampling the view and obliterating the signatures of the forest.

The footprint has always held a fascination. It is like encountering a ghost, that feeling of standing in someone’s shadow: here is a personality departed. By their very absence they become an enduring mystery.

And we are drawn by footprints which are fresh. How much mystery is contained in the footprints which have been turned to stone?

Narnia’s wicked witch caused terror by turning CS Lewis’s imaginary land’s inhabitants to stone. But dinosaur footprints have been petrified without the aid of a magic wand. They were simply made in the right place, at the right time, to be preserved: and just like our forest animals they left their great scaly signatures in the soft mud.

Take the Hand Beast, Chirotherium, a creature which went for a walk at Limm in Cheshire , some 220 million years ago, when the weather was far more conducive than it is these days. His feet are disconcertingly hand-like. But unlike our inland wildlife, this creature was taking the sea air.

And so his muddy footprints were filled with sand, which bought him immortality and a place of honour for his footprint in the Warwickshire Museum.

There’s a lovely resource on fossils at BBC Nature. “The trick to becoming a fossil ” we are told, “is to die in a location where your body – or bits of it – are protected from scavengers and the elements.”

They recommend some top sites for preservation: a river bed, perhaps, or a nice resting place on the sea bed.

There are other places, you know.

And one has been revealed today. All courtesy of a little robot-satellite orbiting the moon.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter went up in 2009. It’s what Scott’s little outpost is to the Antarctic: a reminder of the great explorations that have been. It made its maiden journey round our moon as a preface. Where it took photographs, it was hoped, future manned missions would follow.

But earth is feeling a little impoverished and the people with the power say moon missions are a luxury, not a necessity.

Meanwhile, that little robot circles the moon, snap-snapping away storing up slides with which to bore posterity one long slide-show evening.

Except that recently, it has halved the height above the moon at which it orbits. It was 50 km above the moon’s surface: now it’s 25.

And it’s taken some high-res beauties which dispel all those conspiracy theories . Because on the moon, there is no weather. There is no atmosphere. There is not even much erosion.

But there are footprints.

Left by the lunar landing teams, there they are, large as life: tracks leading from the Apollo 17 landing buggy off to a little equipment post and back. And perfect double tracks pootling in the moonsand.

So are these tracks immortal remains?

They do have a shelf -life. scientists say. Little meteorites are always hitting the surface and causing micro-rumpuses.

But they have estimated how long it would take for a millimetre of rock to erode, there at our farthest outpost where a robot is guarding camp.

It would take about one million years.

And so, now man has made his mark, a few decades are just a raptor-blink in the scheme of things. It will take many moons before the tracks are covered and the gleaming buggy disintegrates into sullen decay.

Our foot signatures are a very personal sign, a mystery we leave for those after us. Hand-beast’s legacy makes children in the museum ooh and aah today: the silent deer tracks waylay us, on our way through the forest.

Who knows who, or what, will wonder at the traces of us up there on the silver disc that hangs in our sky?

Picture source courtesy of BBC News

43 thoughts on “Footprints in the Moondust”

  2. “There are other places, you know” – that makes me wonder if it’s possible to have one’s ashes scattered on the moon, Kate, or ejected from the Webb Space Telescope as it heads out into the beginning of time – I’d love my bits to mingle out there with the stardust 😀

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  3. Bluebee, there is a company here in the U.S. whose business is to carry human ashes into space to be dispersed. I don’t know if the release is in earth orbit or if if soars on into outer space, but it’s a lovely thought, isn’t it? To have originated from stardust, and ultimately to return to it.

    This post and the NASA photos coincide eerily with the opening of the movie “Apollo 18,” which of course would have been the next manned mission to the moon. And apparently the crew arrives to find some things have been moved …

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  4. Wonderful post, Kate . . . it captures the lasting imprints we may make as we trundle through life (or bounce on lunar landscapes). 😉

    Loved this:

    The footprint has always held a fascination. It is like encountering a ghost, that feeling of standing in someone’s shadow: here is a personality departed. By their very absence they become an enduring mystery.

    And this:

    The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter went up in 2009. It’s what Scott’s little outpost is to the Antarctic: a reminder of the great explorations that have been.

    Especially since I was thinking about the remnants of Scott’s outpost as I gaze at the lunar landscape.

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  5. There is quite a lot of ‘movie interest’ around the moon. With the departure of the shuttle program many of us ‘space fans’ feel as though something has gone from our lives; so maybe it’s a reaction to that.

    I always wondered what was the lifespan of those foorprints and other signs we’d been there, thanks for the info I was too lazy to dig out for myself.

    The footprints are one reason I love beach walking at first light when the tide is out. The tiny trails (oan once the hippo sized ones at St Lucia) tell wonderful stories of those who frequent the beach when we’re not frolicking there.

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  6. You remind me of a book in the late ’50 or early ’60’s by Robert Nathan, set some 5,000 later when artifacts are unearthed in North American. It was called The Weans and, if I remember correctly, they felt that there had been an invasion by another country called the Ussers. It was pretty funny for the time it was written as the archeologists are trying to figure out what a happened in a city called Bosson. You’d like it, Kate.

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      2. Now that comment is valued on two levels, Doc: first because it comes from you and your site is a continual source of learning and reflection for me; and second, because no-one’s every said ‘Way!’ to me before. I am a confirmed Wayne’s World fan and it has made my day.

  9. A beautifully-written post, Kate.

    I always believed they went to the moon; and I was shocked to learn that the last time was in 1972. It’s like we forgot how to be explorers. Does no one in government watch Star Trek?

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    1. I agree Tilly.

      ‘Footprints’ always remind me of one of the silly things we used to say as kids, along the lines of:
      ‘Don’t look at me in that tone of voice,’
      ‘Shhh, Mum’s coming. I can hear her footprints.’

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    1. It was at the forefront of my mind, Rosemary. A very beautiful analogy. But, like Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet it has become a byword; so I thought I’d sidle round it, leaving a trail.

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    1. It’s a very cool word 😀 I am having a day with Big Al today. I really shouldn’t be typing because I can hear ominous rummaging going on. But pootling is what we spend our time doing.

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  13. I think I’d like to be a fossil, Kate. Now that is something I never thought I’d hear myself say, and I say some pretty odd things at times… I like the mystery of fossils, the age, and wonder what they were doing before they were fossils. A little like the stories behind the footsteps idea but in a different time completely. I live in Cheshire and have never heard of the Hand Beast… my inner historian is telling me to jump right on that one and investigate further!
    Chock full of interest once again, Kate! 🙂

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  17. “…a waste of money…” Actually, Human-&-Robotic Spaceflight spending was the most important item in the United States Budget. The ENTIRE hi-tech world of today, both computing and materials, is an Apollo Program spinoff. In the year the Space Transportation System began, 1982, the NASA budget was five point six billion dollars, almost equal to what US consumers spent on Smoking and 10% of what they spent on Drinking. Defence was $186 billion. “Welfare” was just over $560 billion. But USA ought to let China take the reins now. The West has done its job and must now be content to retire in genteel poverty.

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  18. ‘Genteel poverty’ 😀 Thanks for putting the whole thing in proportion in your own inimitable style, Cy Quick. It’s been ages….I’m off to your to find out how you’re doing…

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