By Dr. Robert Thorson
At midnight, the glittering crystal ball will drop in Times Square. Revelers around the world will straggle home, nod off, and greet the new year with a dullness caused by sleep deprivation, overstimulation and inebriation. This behavior suggests that we give higher priority to the final few hours of the past than the first few hours of the future–perhaps because endings are more concrete than beginnings, and regrets sharper than resolutions.
Geologists don’t think this way, particularly Marcia Bjornerud, author of “Timefulness,” a profound meditation on the richness, depth and entanglements of geologic time. Her brief book on a big subject puts the ball drop in proper perspective by reminding us that the Gregorian calendar is anachronistic and by elegantly condensing the landmark tomes of geology, from James Hutton’s “Theory of the Earth” (1788) to John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World” (1998).
Ms. Bjornerud, a professor at Lawrence University, writes in the first person, warmly humanizing her chilly subject with the highs and lows of her remote field work (Arctic Svalbard), her personal epiphanies (regretfully smashing a crystal) and the intellectual thorns in her side (biblical creationists). She writes for the general reader interested in earth science who’s willing to invest some intellectual effort to get a good return.
Timefulness
By Marcia Bjornerud Princeton, 208 pages, $24.95
“Timefulness” is a perfect title, if only because the reciprocal analogy with the term “mindfulness” is perfect. In both words, the emphasis is on the syllable ful. With mindfulness, the goal is to focus on the present moment, the eternal now, as the result of transient thoughts and feelings. With timefulness, the goal is also to focus on the present moment, but to see it as one tiny detail of a complex grand sum. For geologists, the now isn’t eternal but rather the boundary between two eternities, akin to a recurring theme in a symphony of at least a dozen movements.
For four decades I’ve lectured about what I call the four strands in the tapestry of time. Ms. Bjornerud delivers them all. Most familiar is “arrow-time,” the steady, forward march of history, whether by a person, nation or planet. Next is “cycle-time,” the rise and fall of a single footstep of that march, the rise and fall of the New Year’s ball or of the countless earthly cycles operating at time scales from seconds to a billion years. “One-time” refers to the abrupt–and at times catastrophic–singularities that come out of nowhere to change the course of the forward march, events that are never repeated. “All-time” refers to unchanging universal constants such as the tug of gravity or the solubility of salt. Time isn’t one thing, it’s all these things woven together in a uniquely irreversible and beautiful way. So, when the ball drops for you this evening, remember that the arrow-time of your biography, the cycle-time of your calendar year, the one-time of your birth and the all-time of the ball’s light-emitting diodes are inextricably entangled.
Geologists own time in the same way that geographers own space. From this insight Ms. Bjornerud forges a gem of an analogy that became my favorite takeaway from her book, if only because it showcases the subtitle, “How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World.” She notes that although we’ve been repeatedly schooled about the perils of geographic illiteracy, we’ve not been schooled about the perils of temporal illiteracy: ignorance of the durations, rates and intrinsic timescales of earthly phenomena. “Like inexperienced but overconfident drivers,” she writes, “we accelerate into landscapes and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for ignoring natural laws. . . . We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as a world map from the fourteenth century, when dragons lurked around the edges of a flat earth.”
And she’s right to place the blame for this ignorance on our high-school curricula, which prioritize the more exact and more fundamental, timeless sciences of physics and chemistry over the messier, timebound sciences of geology, cosmology, linguistics, archaeology and evolution. The six chapters of “Timefulness” are bookended by two essays that could stand alone. Chapter 1 is a meditation on the meaning and multiplicity of time. Chapter 6 is an essay pleading that we break our self-destructive habits as Anthropocene tyrants and treat the Earth more respectfully. The other chapters are topical and somewhat scientific, covering in sequence the tools for telling time; the mode and tempo of planetary processes; the longue dur e of earth history; the role of geology in climate change. Three technical appendices cover the geological time scale, the durations and rates of earthly phenomena, and the history of Earth’s environmental crises, including five mass extinctions.
One shortcoming of the book is the occasional juxtaposition of poetic and technical sentences on the same topic. Poetically: “Young rocks communicate in plain prose . . . The oldest rocks tend to be more allusive, even cryptic, speaking in metamorphic metaphor.” Technically: “Argon is a compact, self-contained noble gas with completely filled electron shells and no tendency to bond with anything.” My misgivings, minor and few, are of little concern to the nonspecialist reader.
Symbolic simplicity: The year ends. The ball drops. It rises anew. Actual complexity: The geological world order is fairly stable until it isn’t. Some new development like photosynthesis, some new surprise like an asteroid or a belch of volcanic carbon, throws a monkey wrench into the world order. Mass extinction follows, a new world ramifies and stability returns, pending the next surprise.
In the present world order of the Anthropocene, we’re the big surprise. The sixth mass extinction is upon us and accelerating, and our technological prowess remains unchecked by the fullness of time.
The good news is that Earth will do just fine without us. We’ve always been part and parcel of something much older and more beautiful than ourselves