"There's comfort in knowing just how much came before us"

We spent a delightful hour last week chatting live with Laura Poppick, the author of August’s book of the month, Strata: Stories from Deep Time.

As always, the Q&A was open to subscribers and Laura took time to talk through the book and its ideas with me and answer your questions. We discussed a range of topics, including how Strata came together, why people are desperate to learn more about deep time, the nature of research and how to write about awe-inspiring ideas.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Given the professional history you lay out in the book—studying geology in college, working in a stratigraphy lab and in the field, and then becoming a science and nature writer—this really feels like the story you were destined to write. Does it feel that way to you?

“In hindsight it definitely does feel like a book that was building over the course of 20 years. But obviously I didn't set off 20 years ago thinking “this will eventually become a book”—it happened far more organically than that. As an undergraduate student I studied geology and… I quickly found myself kind of falling in love with how it allowed me to see the world in a different way. And I thought, for a bit, that maybe that would be my future, that I would become a geologist. So I spent a year working in a geology lab, deciding whether or not this was something I wanted to pursue. I ended up moving on to become a science journalist after that, because I was, in part, so inspired by the research that was happening and how little of that research was being conveyed to the public… I saw this gap that I wanted to help fill. 

“About a decade into writing these shorter news stories and magazine stories, I wrote a story about stratigraphy, which felt a little bit like a return to my roots... It was writing that story that kind of got me thinking ‘there's so much more here’... and I felt like I had something to contribute that maybe others wouldn't… It felt to me that if I'm going to write a book, I want to be something that I uniquely can do in a way that other people might not.”

What was the story?

“It was this 2,000 word story that I'd written about a paleontologist who studies dinosaurs but uses the rocks to understand the lives of dinosaurs better. She actually appears at the end of the book, but that story actually was the origin of the book because I wrote a version of that story first. At the end of that field trip with her, I said “I feel like I need to write a whole book on stratigraphy”. She said “you should.” And then here we are, five, six years later.”

But you didn’t just write a book about dinosaurs. You wanted to write about the not-dinosaur part. What was your argument to convince the publisher?

“My hope with the book was to kind of help people see beyond the dinosaurs and beyond the last Ice Age. These are two events that people are most familiar with, which is great and understandable, but there's so much more. I wanted folks to be able to see further back in time, to see all the dynamic ways the Earth has changed through time. Ultimately, I decided on these four events [the arrival of air, ice, mud and heat] as kind of examples of ways that the Earth has changed in the past to give us context for modern change. So that's one argument I made.

“It was a combination of that and also providing context and sources of awe and appreciation for the planet. That felt like an important point to make, but also one that I wanted to be really careful with. 

“There's a sense of grounding that comes with the idea that Earth has changed so many times in the past, and that change we're going through now. If we're in a crisis, and the earth has seen other crises before. That is true. But that's not to say that this is all natural, normal, inevitable, that we can throw up our hands and not do anything about it. That's not the point at all. 

“The point is that we have agency to help the earth kind of readjust from the ways that we've treated it in recent centuries, and that the earth does have these built-in systems that historically have been pretty resilient. Can we rely on them to be resilient with us doing what we're doing? We will see. But I wanted to help the readers see some of those systems at play within the ocean and the atmosphere and the continents that help stabilize the planet through change.”

There’s a lot about long-view perspective around at the moment, both backwards in deep time, like your book, and forwards too. It makes me think about one of our previous book club picks, Empire of AI by Karen Hao, about the rise of AI and the people behind it. These AI proponents seem to take a very long, long, long view forward on humanity, and their conclusion is basically that what’s going on today doesn’t matter much because technology will fix it in the future. 

I saw Sam Altman of OpenAI suggest recently that eventually we’ll be able to surround the solar system in a Dyson sphere and capture all the energy—so this long view forward can go to some really weird and terrifying places. Do you think we’re getting better at understanding deep time, or is it that we’re desperate to see beyond the horizon? 

“I lean towards the latter. I think that people are looking for something that's grounding. There's something that compels me about it as well, there’s this unending source of awe. There's something tangible about it—you can literally hold the rock and think about these things—but there's also something intangible about it that makes it kind of alluring as well. 

“Folks that I have talked to have expressed a sense of comfort that they find in just remembering how much came before us. I think that's important to think about, but if you really want to help shape the future, the past matters, and what we do today does matter, because, as you can see through the book, we're here today because of very small changes that all ripple out. We are here because at one point a microscopic bacteria created oxygen for the first time. That's like a tiny, microscopic event, so I would say that our behaviors today absolutely matter. 

“One thing that I think has happened as I spend more time immersed in the book and immersed in the material, immersed in thinking about deep time, I can feel how short [a lifetime] is. So short. I'll be walking my dog and see a tree, and that tree might be older than all of us. But trees have existed for hundreds of millions of years. But the earth existed without trees for billions of years before that. These different scales are fun to play around with.”

On the flipside, most of our knowledge is so new. Something like plate tectonics, which is now consensus, is only about a century old and was only really validated in the 1960s. How did you balance those theories and competing ideas—especially when they aren’t resolved yet?

“Honestly, in some cases that presents a real challenge in covering any kind of science where there's always new theories coming out. Stratigraphy and Earth history, like many sciences, has really come into its own since the end of World War II. There were a lot of new innovations that came at that time that made their way into geology and Earth history studies. That's 70 years ago—so only in that time have we started really snowballing our knowledge. 

“There were many times where I was trying to decide which version of the story to tell: am I telling the story that came out in 1950? Am I telling the story that came out in 2000? The story that's coming out now?Part of what I was hoping to do is to show how we gathered this knowledge in the past 70 or so years, and there were definitely moving targets where actively people are debating these things. I tried to be clear that all of this is up for debate. Most of this is not certain. There are aspects that are certain, but the narratives themselves are still a little blurry.”

World War II really did mark a dramatic change, didn’t it? Not just in geopolitics, but really in the story of scientific advance. So much effort went into basic research at that point (which reminds me of the underlying message of last month’s book, The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog.)

“It was interesting as I was trying to trace back how we know about some of these pivotal

moments in Earth history, like the rise of oxygen, like the rise of animals, and it was striking. I didn't realize until I started researching the book, how much World War II kind of played into it, and like the decades, like 1950s and 1960s set the stage, set the foundations for all of the research that we covered. There was almost always some sort of Genesis in the 60s.

“A lot of geology research, even climate research or earth history research, when you actually trace back, a lot of the funding comes from exploration for minerals and for resources. Maps are created to locate these resources, and then once those are established, then you start discovering other things about those rocks. So that's something I write about: after World War II, there was this rush to find uranium. But in finding it, they also learned about ways that the atmosphere was—the state that they found their uranium in, these like kind of sand grains helped them piece together the fact that, at that time those same grains existed, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, because uranium would disintegrate in in water with dissolved oxygen gas in it—and these were sand grains that were clearly like rolling around in water. 

“So that's an example of someone that had been set off to look for and verify where certain economically important mineral deposits were, and then he learned something else. The same with certain technologies, like ones used to date rocks… those are all tied back to efforts within the war, and then they just kind of translated out to other needs and research uses.”

You show the evolution and argument of scientific theories in the book, too. These are people who argue and change their minds and fight over the theories they have. Sometimes they seem to come to an agreement in the middle over time, sometimes not?

“So, Snowball Earth has been very polarizing. This is the idea that there were a few times in Earth history when the entire planet would have been covered in ice, all the way down the equator. It's still polarizing for some people. But when Paul Hoffman, who's the researcher who's really kind of championed it, when he started working on it in earnest in the 90s, he couldn't convince people. Probably the majority of people would be like, no, this can't happen, this doesn't make sense. How could life kind of survive that? How could Earth spin out of it? There are all these open questions that he didn't have the answers to. 

“I talked to him a few years ago, and he said I didn't expect in my lifetime for that to change, but it has. He feels that there's still people who don't fully believe it, but that there are more and more people who are absolutely willing to at least accept that it's a possibility, if not a probability. 

“I had to decide how much to go into all these debates and decide how interesting the debates might be to people who aren't used to thinking about these things. Ultimately I try to convey that it's good science, but they're still figuring out the details. I think that's part of the lesson there. In not being quite sure, you refine your science, you strengthen your approach, and that's all part of the scientific process. It’s OK not to be quite sure.”

Some of the experiments in the book do seem kind of crude to extrapolate much from, though. There’s a small riverbed model using alfalfa grass and flooding it over and over; there’s dropping xantham gum in water. Are these really able to tell us much, given that they’re trying to model things that take millions of years?

“That's a fair question. I think what is kind of cool about geology is that it can be a very macro science, where you have to zoom out and think about the real basics, the real elements that make things work. And so I think in the case with the xanthan gum, which was trying to understand how silts react with organic material, in that case the researcher was trying to emulate a river, so she put a stir bar in a beaker. Obviously she knows that's not a river, but it's one way to emulate a river. And it was published in Science, which is a very respected journal. And then, of course, you have to do follow-up work to understand the intricacies of it. But I think that these crude ways of at least getting at the basics are super valuable and important still. And I think that's what's fun about geology. It can be very qualitative, but it’s not always a quantitative science. It's sometimes a qualitative science.”

You talk a lot in the book about how stratigraphy and geology can teach us ways to approach the climate crisis. But it didn’t seem to go too far down specific ideas that it can show us. Are there examples?

“The more that we learn about changes in the past, the more clear it becomes how unique this current crisis is in the speed of it. So we know that the more work that's done in stratigraphy will continue to help us understand how this moment is different. One piece is just under scoring again and again how quick this is happening, and how harmful that speed is. That said, at a certain point, this is a political issue, it's not just a knowledge issue. I don't know how much additional stratigraphic knowledge will push the folks in power to make those changes.

“I will say, though, that another way of thinking about this is that more and more folks in power are thinking we can just geo-engineer the climate—that we can just feed the clouds so that they reflect more sunlight, or we can pump carbon into the sea floor. And in order to actually understand those processes, we need to know how the earth works and how the earth works over geologic timescale. Looking at the stratigraphic record can show us—in detail that we would not get by just looking at the present—how processes unfold over thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, to understand the feedback loops. And that is critical to understand, in my opinion, before we start geoengineering the planet, because there will be these implications that we don't fully understand.”

You have some great descriptions of place in the book, and do a lot of travel. We go to the Arctic Circle, the Australian Outback, the Atlantic coast, mines, and many other places. Where would you most like to go back to?

“Svalbard. I went there when I was 20 years old, and that's what I wrote about. And in my proposal, I suggested that it'd be wonderful to go back and see how things have changed. That didn't end up happening, it just wasn't within the budget. But I would love to go back to Svalbard. That would be really, really special… just because it's such a dynamic place. 

“I have looked at satellite images, and it's a little bit heartbreaking, not only for the place specifically, but for what it means for the planet. But I think that's part of what I love so much about the Arctic: it's just so clear. You can just fly over and see, Whoa, there's the change. There's nothing hiding it. There's no vegetation hiding the landscape. And so I think you can see both the change and also the resilience. There are healthy bird populations. There are healthy fish. Amidst this change, there is still life. And I think there's something hopeful in that.”

Who were your inspirations when you were writing Strata?

“As a geology writer, an obvious answer that is true for myself and probably other geology writers is John McPhee, who wrote Basin and Range and other geology books. That was a book that I read in college that kind of made me want to become a science writer: he does a beautiful job, kind of, coming up with these metaphors and these ways of quickly describing geologic processes. So that was very inspiring to me as well. And when I got my book deal, my first order of business was to reread that book, and I made a list of lines that I loved. 

“I also reread a couple books by Marcia Bjornerud [see newsletter passim] who's a wonderful geology writer and geologist. She's written Reading the Rocks, Timefulness and Turning to Stone is her most recent one. I really admire her writing. She writes really clearly and beautifully about geology. 

“Another science writer who I really admire is Sy Montgomery, who writes mostly about animals, but I really admire how she captures the narratives of research and of scientists and helps you see them as characters. She did that really well in the Soul of an Octopus, which was a book that I really liked, and so that she inspired me to try to do that as much as I could with the characters. I chose to just at least try to present them as real humans with personalities.”

What about books that you turn to for inspiration in general? Any favorites that you return to again and again?

“I'm a real sucker for Annie Dillard. I do love her writing. I love John Steinbeck. Honestly, I find the ways that they perceive the world just to be so granular in a really beautiful way. I'm a sucker for Mary Oliver, too. I love reading her poetry and other forms of poetry. I read all sorts of writing, not just non-fiction, and I am inspired by all genres, and try to kind of weave those in. I just reread Grapes of Wrath this summer. And oh my goodness, the first opening kind of section of that book I just find stunning, just how he describes the change of landscape, in a way that only in rereading it did I remember that he inspired the way that I kind of wrote some of my opening sections of my book. I find his brain, a lot of it, really stunning.”

What’s next?

“I’m excited about hopefully writing another book. I do have a few ideas that have been circling around. I've seen them as separate ideas, but lately I’ve been seeing how they could connect. So I haven't fully landed on what the next book will be, but it is fun to start feeling that energy moving in a new direction now that this one's complete. But we will see. But there's plenty more to write about geology if that's the direction I choose to go.”

⌘

We can’t wait to see it.

Thanks so much to Laura for giving us her time. Just a little over a week to go until I announce September’s book —and it’s one I’m really excited about sharing with you all.

Onwards

Bobbie