November 6th, 02012 by Alex Mensing NPR’s Robert Krulwich
recently shared on his blog a fantastic stitching together of
processes that operate on vastly different time scales: geology,
economics and politics. It took the eye of a geologist – Steven
Dutch – to recognize the deep-time significance of a narrow
corridor of counties running through Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia and into the Carolinas that voted majority Democratic in
the 02008 U.S. presidential election. That swath of land is
largely populated by African Americans, which is the most
immediate part of the answer, but the story begins about 100
million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. The Deep South
had a shoreline that curled through the Carolinas, Georgia,
Alabama and Mississippi, and there, in the shallow waters just
offshore, were immense populations of floating, single-celled
creatures who drifted about, trapped sunshine, captured carbon,
then died and sank to the sea bottom. Those creatures became
long stretches of nutritious chalk. Whe