Today we did something new for both Christine and me, and went to visit the city of Darmstadt. Following the German language propensity for fusing two words into one, Darmstadt could be translated into English as the Large Intestine City. Almost as musical as our own city of Manteca.
But Darmstadt is a city where the last Duke, Ludwing IV, was a supporter of the arts and several new buildings were built at the start of the 20th century in Art Nouveau style, which here in Germany is called Jugendstil. This style became very famous because of the work of Gaudi in Barcelona. In Darmstadt is very prominent in the district called Mathildenhöhe, where the Wedding Tour extends its five colorful tops high into the air and can be seen from a long distance (it is called the wedding tower because it was built for the marriage of Ludwig). The tower is surrounded by an art museum fountains, sculptures, a peculiar park where trees are arranged in a geometric pattern, and a small but very beautiful Russian Orthodox church. This cluster is called the Artists’ Colony and is recognized as a UNESCO site.
Christine was in tourist mode, so we walked quickly to the Herren Park (unfortunately very dry and dusty because there is no irrigation), the downtown area, along one of the sides of the large Technological University campus (which includes the Operation Center of the European Space Agency, and the GSI Center for Heavy Ion Research), and under construction an accelerator Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR)), and the Hill of the Roses, which is a combination of (dry) park and a well-tended rose garden, where a very large variety of roses are collected.
Darmstadt is also famous because the Messel Grube Eocene fossil site. Today the Grube Messel is a hole in the ground, from which oil shale was mined starting in the 1880’s and until the 1960’s, to distill kerosene out of it by heating it under pressure. The leftovers, which were now enriched in polyaromatic petroleum hydrocarbons (PAHs) as a result of the heating, were then accumulated in a gigantic pile by the side of the mine. Well, it turns out that PAHs are carcinogenic, so five years ago Gustav had the task of evaluating how bad the problem was, and then figuring out a way to remove those contaminated soils to a hazardous substances landfill. The most interesting aspect of the site, however, is that the black shales, although very thick, had a limited geographic distribution, and the company mining them concluded that they had been accumulated in a deep lake during the Eocene (56 to 34 million years ago), and by looking further at the geology concluded that this deep, circular lake had been born as a maar during a phreatomagmatic explosion. Now that is not something you see every day, but … wait … there is more to this story. Germany at the time was this warm, sticky place, and the lake was chocked with algae (that is where the petroleum hydrocarbons came from) among which swam crocodiles, otters, turtles, and a few frogs and fish. The frogs attracted some waterfowl, and the surrounding trees were teeming with lemurs, snakes, birds, and insects. There were so many insects! And all of these critters duly died and sank to the bottom of this euxinic lake, where they quickly fossilized among the black, stinking mud that accumulated relentlessly on the bottom of the lake. The unique conditions thus led to the formation of one of the most amazing fossil treasures ever, which have provided us with beautifully preserved fossils of the dawn of the Age of Mammals.
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