Welcome to the View from Deep Time
What we're doing here and where we are going
Did you know that we live on an ancient watery sphere of rock that has been spinning through space for some 4.54 billion years?
I sometimes remember this when I am waiting for a traffic light to turn green, or for a cashier to ring me up, or for the sun to rise. In these mundane moments of daily life, I remember, like waking from a dream, how much time and energy and light and life went into bringing us all here into this moment. How unlikely each of our lives are, and yet here we are.
Here at the grocery store or at a traffic light, but also here enjoying sun on skin, or salt on tongue, or the soft rattle of a dry leaf in wind. Each moment and sensory experience that fills our days comes from the culmination of the billions of years that came before us. The sun more ancient than the wind more ancient than the leaf.
Our limited human minds can’t easily conceive of the layered timescales that exist and persist all around us. We struggle to envision the deep past as anything more than a smudged brushstroke of hiccups and evolutions that eventually landed us on Earth, with a few extinctions and an ice age thrown in beforehand.
In truth, though, this planet’s history contains narratives just as granular, wild, and often mundane as our own existences. The sun rising and later setting, wind blowing and then calming, change erupting and subsiding and erupting again. The granularities of these eons of hours, minutes and seconds have, collectively, woven the vast tapestry of bedrock that we walk atop each day.
“It’s almost as if Earth wants its biography to be read,” writes Marcia Bjornerud in her recent (and wonderful) book Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.
Aren’t you curious what, exactly, happened through all those years before we arrived? Don’t you think it’d be cool to look out at a landscape and have a sense of the stories it holds? Which ancient dramas keep you company each day?
The world today feels on the brink – or, actually, already toppling over a brink – of destruction that will take a long time to pull ourselves out of. We have a lot of work to do and a lot to mend. But in the background of all that rightfully demands our attention, Earth’s long and storied past is coming into sharper focus than it ever has before. Thanks to the steady and focused work of Earth historians around the world, we are now learning with incredible clarity what came before us. With those narratives at hand, we may glean lessons and find grounding that could land us on a more stable path forward.
Put another way, we are only just now learning how to read Earth’s biography.
Don’t you want to know how?
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This is what I hope to share with you in this newsletter and, eventually, in my book Strata: Stories from Deep Time, that will be coming out on July 15th (now available for preorder!). I want to offer you this deep time lens that you can hold in your back pocket and whip out whenever you’re bored or lonely, or concerned about the future, or even when you are feeling full and contented. I have found that this lens can add a sparkly dash of awe and wonder to basically any moment of any day.
Just yesterday, an earthquake shook across southern Maine, rippling into my feet and chest as I drafted this post, and thankfully causing no injury or destruction. While the cause of the quake remains unknown, one state geologist speculated that it could have just been Earth’s crust rebounding from the last ice age.
That is, the rumbling in my chest and feet may have been the earth shivering off a tremor from an event that ended some 10,000 years ago.
I’ve never felt such a tangible reminder of Earth’s vast and varied timescales. I floated through the rest of the day with my bones rattled and renewed, remembering that what feel like millennia to us are the equivalent of just a couple of seconds in the span of Earth’s 4.54 billion year history.
Deep time is the metronome and the anchor, the ballast and the buoy that keep me steady as I face the travails and the unknowns of life and the world we face with today. I am writing this newsletter in hopes that you too may have access to this sense of grounding I find in the immensity of time and the ways it has written itself into the ground beneath our feet.
Thank you for joining me.