On an afternoon walk today I observed lines and numbers sprayed on the snow with blue paint. They mark the location of some underground utilities. The temperature is a few degrees above zero so the message is legible for the moment.
When temperatures rise the snow will melt and the blue paint will dissolve and be gone. Hopefully the people who need that diagram will have made use of it by then. We who live in Minnesota are accustomed to snow and ice. However, they are not a normal message transmission medium.
Ten thousand years ago this place was under a glacier according to geologists. When another glacier period comes everything including the Jeffers Petroglyph's will be scoured away and gone.
We live in the brief time when the petroglyph's are legible in what seems like
rather permanent quartzite. Actually the time is brief in the geological time frame.
This is our opportunity to read the messages and absorb the ideas from our ancestors.
Whether we can match their technological skill in preserving our messages for future
observation is yet to be proven. I would like to think that we will do better than blue paint on snow. It will certainly take some creative work.
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