Kashmir’s rocks hold records that belong not to one region or nation but to the entire human story, and that story is being erased
There is a ravine on the outskirts of Khunmoh, a short drive from Srinagar, that contains rock 2.68 meters thick. In those metres is preserved the most complete record anywhere on earth of the moment, 252 million years ago, when ninety per cent of marine life and seventy per cent of all terrestrial species were annihilated in a single catastrophic event.
Geologists call it the Great Dying. It is the largest extinction in the history of life. Eleven sections of this boundary exist scattered across the globe, in China, Alaska, Iran, Siberia, Wales, and elsewhere. Kashmir’s is the thickest. Kashmir’s preserves are the most legible. By the testimony of scientists who have spent careers on this question, it is the best.
This is not a local distinction. It is not even a national one. The rocks of Guryul Ravine are, in the most literal sense, the property of humanity. They record a catastrophe that shaped every living thing on earth today, including us. The Chinese team that holds the official global designation for this boundary, awarded in 2004 to the Meishan section, has itself acknowledged that Guryul is the superior archive. Science does not lie, even when politics and neglect determine the outcome.
And neglect determined the outcome. India lost the Guryul designation not because the rocks were inadequate but because, after 1989, the work stopped. Kashmir’s situation created a vacuum that China filled with a decade of meticulous research. While Meishan was being published in paper after paper, Guryul sat untouched and undefended. By 2012, quarries were eating into the mountain face. The Chinar tree that Middlemiss had used as a survey benchmark in 1910 was gone. Half the section had been carried away as aggregate.
Meanwhile, at Galandar near Pulwama, a complete elephant skull lay buried in a Karewa deposit for seven years after its discovery, unprotected and unexamined, while encroachment consumed the surrounding site and destroyed what may have been a 500,000-year-old human skeleton found nearby. Kashmir’s evidence of pre-sapiens human habitation, among the oldest in Asia, nearly vanished into a railway embankment.
The recently granted National Geo-Heritage status for Guryul and its satellite sections is welcome, but designation without protection is decoration. Industrial allocation has already compromised the demarcated zone. The approach to the site is disappearing.
Kashmir did not choose this geological inheritance. It was placed here by plate tectonics, by deep time, by the movement of continents over hundreds of millions of years. That accident of geography confers not pride alone but responsibility, to the nation, and to the world that has a legitimate claim on what these rocks contain. The question is no longer whether Kashmir’s geo-heritage deserves protection. It is whether we will act before there is nothing left to protect.
