Eight Stories about the Gunflint Iron Formation

How do some rocks become geological fieldsites? To begin answering this question, in this talk I will tell eight stories about a single body of rock: the Gunflint Iron Formation on the northern shore of Lake Superior in Ontario. These stories will address, among other things, the current status of geological knowledge of the formation, its role in the discovery of fossilized Precambrian microbiota in the 1940s-50s, environmental histories of iron, silver, and copper mining in the region, Louis Agassiz’s 1848 Lake Superior expedition in search of evidence of global ice ages, as well as local indigenous histories of dispossession and the presence of geological formations in regional creator stories. By telling these stories alongside one another, I aim to explicate how historians of science might think about the relationship between geological, political, and social histories.