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- What makes Strata special?
There are lots of things I appreciated about August’s pick of the month, Strata by Laura Poppick—but I wanted to highlight a couple of things she does particularly well that drew me into the book.
First was Poppick’s approach to scale. In particular, she has to wrestle a lot with time—vast, unending tracts of years piled upon years that she has to describe to us in ways that are comprehensible. These epic epochs are one of the most difficult things for us all to comprehend, going not just far beyond the horizon that a single person can see, but way beyond even humanity’s long-term view.
For humans, “recorded history” is something like 6,000 years. By comparison the Mesozoic, which you might crudely think of as the time of dinosaurs, not only ended some 66 million years ago (six orders of magnitude longer than we have understood time) but was itself 185 million years long—more than 30,000 times longer than anything we have written down.
This is one of the hardest things for any of us to understand. It’s why Darwinian natural selection can feel difficult to grasp and why evolution (even if it feels logical) still seems challenging to some—we’re talking millions upon millions of lifecycles for a random change to play out in the record, not a quick, chosen adaptation that can happen in any kind of relatable period.
Describing time is certainly one of the common struggles that I see in science writing, and Poppick uses a simple, useful metaphor to give it context. At the very beginning of the book is a diagram of an outstretched arm with a series of annotations.
“Reach out your arms and imagine Earth’s 4.54 billion year history as a timeline that extends from the tips of your right hand to the tips of your left,” she writes. Oxygen appears in our atmosphere only at the left shoulder—that is, history has traveled across a whole arm and most of the chest before we even reach the possibility of breath as we understand it. From there, the diagram shows us landmarks on our own bodies: ice appearing at the wrist, mud at the base of the thumb and “Us” at the very tip of the finger.
This image may well be a common description in the classroom, but it was new to me, and very useful. If these outstretched arms represent geologic time, then we are at the smallest and most sensitive edge of it all.
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Second, Poppick uses the senses terrifically. While we wrestle with time, she also brings her descriptions alive by describing things in visceral, sensational terms. We are invited to drag our fingers across the Earth’s core, and to hold rocks up to our faces with her. We feel cold air against our cheeks when she is underground, and smell the loamy soils that hide our planet’s history inside them when she tramps the land. I can hear the rattle of stones underfoot as Poppick explores Australia’s outback, and see the evidence hiding in the land when she examines the Atlantic coast.
Her evocative sense of place makes all these places stand out from each other, distinct and alive. There are mines, dry deserts, rocky shores, mountain stretches—all real and fully realized.
Sometimes, it’s just silence; contemplation. At one point, she describes the almost-meditative act of studying the layers of earth in captivating style.
“If you follow other types of scientists into the field, you’ll find it’s often go, go, go. It’s searching for that one bird or chasing that one eruption or motoring the boat upriver to collect that one water sample. In stratigraphy, the pace reverses. It’s stop, stop, stop. Look at what’s in front of you. Let the rocks wash over you. Let the stories speak for themselves and take form in your mind’s eye. Let them inhabit you until you’re not on a roadside in Ireland, but on an arid continent beneath the equator, a river flooding before you, and nothing much larger than your face growing on land.”
“To an onlooker, this might not look like much at all. Pencils behind ears, hands on hips, eyes on rock. Steady breathing in and out. But telescope into the mind of the stratigrapher and that onlooker would find a river unspooling and surging over cobbles and pebbles, rearranging itself through mazes of sandbars.”
Fantastic.
I’m excited to talk about this in detail when Laura Poppick joins us for a live Q&A on Thursday August 21 at 3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific. I hope you’ll be able to join us too, or at least send in your feedback and questions on the book by pinging me at [email protected].
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Before we go, I’ve been doing some stock-taking after last week’s email, and wanted to remind everybody that we have some copies of picks from previous months that you can order individually.
I’d highlight a few earlier, which more recent club members may not have gotten their hands on.
All of these are available, and prices include shipping.
Until next time,
Onward
Bobbie