Mountains With Roots, Seas With Walls

Two of the biggest things on this planet are mountains and oceans, and both of them are keeping a secret about the part you cannot see.

Start with the mountain.

Most of a mountain is underground

Look at a photograph of a mountain. What do you see? A huge triangle of rock shoving up out of the ground. It looks like something that was placed on the surface, the way you might set a stone on a table.

It is not. A mountain has a root.

Under the visible peak there is an enormous wedge of rock driving down into the earth’s crust, and it goes much deeper than the mountain goes high. The crust underneath a big mountain range can be bulged down to several times the thickness it has under a flat plain. The part in the photograph is the small part.

Frank Press knew this better than almost anyone. He was president of the Academy of Sciences in the United States and served as a science adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and he wrote a geology textbook simply called The Earth that a generation of students learned from. In it he laid out the shape of mountains, with those deep wedge shaped roots sunk into the crust, and he made the comparison that sticks best. A mountain is like an iceberg. What you can see is not the story.

Now, chapter 78, verses 6 and 7.

It says Allah made the earth a wide resting place, and the mountains as awtad.

Awtad means pegs. Specifically, tent pegs.

Think about a tent peg for a second, because the Arabs listening to this lived in tents and knew them intimately. You hammer it in and a small part stays above the sand. Most of it is buried. And the buried part is the entire reason the peg works, because a peg lying on the surface holds nothing at all. The hidden part does the job.

That is a mountain. A short bit up top, a long bit driven down, and the down bit is what matters.

Holding the ground steady

The Qur’an says something else about mountains, and it says it more than once.

Chapter 21, verse 31 and chapter 31, verse 10 both say Allah set firm mountains in the earth so that it would not shake with the people on it. Chapter 88, verse 19 asks people to look at the mountains and how they were fixed in place. Chapter 79, verse 32 calls them firmly fixed.

So the claim is that mountains stabilise the ground.

The earth’s outer shell is not one solid piece. It is broken into great plates that grind against each other, and that grinding is what earthquakes are. Mountains form along the seams where plates meet and crumple, and those deep roots push down into the layer below, pinning the crust in place. Geologists talk about mountain ranges as a stabilising element in the crust for exactly this reason.

Pegs holding down a tent in the wind. The image is not decoration. It is the mechanism.

Now the water

Move from rock to sea, and there is a second hidden structure.

Chapter 25, verse 53 speaks of Allah letting two bodies of water flow freely side by side, one of them sweet and fresh and the other salty and bitter, and placing between them a barzakh, a barrier that they do not cross.

Chapter 55, verses 19 and 20 says the same thing again. Two seas meeting, and a barrier between them that neither one oversteps.

Read that as a flat person and you would say, well, that is just wrong. Water mixes. Pour salt water into fresh water and you get slightly salty water. Everybody knows this.

Except that on a large enough scale, it does not happen that way.

Where a great river meets the sea, the fresh water and the salt water do not simply blend into a uniform soup. They stay in distinct bodies, each holding its own temperature, its own saltiness, its own density, each carrying its own species of fish. There is a zone between them where the properties change sharply, and oceanographers study that zone as a real feature with a real structure. Below it, salt wedges push inland along the riverbed while fresh water rides over the top.

The Nile running out into the Mediterranean does this. So does the meeting of waters off Cape Point near Cape Town, where the cold current and the warm current come together and you can stand on the cliff and see the line.

And the effect is not just about rivers. The Gulf Stream is a current of warm, salty water that leaves the Caribbean and travels thousands of miles across the Atlantic, and it holds on to its own temperature and salt content the entire way, through a whole ocean of water that is right there touching it.

Thousands of miles. Surrounded on all sides by water. Still itself.

Dr Zakir Naik once put this verse in front of Jacques Cousteau, the French diver who spent his life underwater and knew the sea as well as anyone alive.

What the barrier is made of

So is there a wall down there?

No. There is nothing you could bump into. The barrier is a difference in density and temperature and salt, an invisible line in the water that behaves like a wall without being one.

That is what makes the wording so interesting. Barzakh does not mean a brick. It means a partition, a thing that stands between two things and keeps them apart.

A wall you can swim straight through, and the water still will not cross it.