Wrinkled Time: The Persistence of Past Worlds on Earth – Marcia Bjornerud

The Earth has a story that far precedes ours. Before we arrived on
the scene, the Earth was already ancient beyond belief, shaped and
reshaped by tectonic upheavals, climate changes, and mass
extinctions—an evolution She has meticulously archived in the
strata and sediment beneath our feet. In this narrated essay,
author and geologist Marcia Bjornerud orients us to read these
many-volume memoirs of our planet. Celebrating the deep
time-fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism that have
made this moment possible—she wonders what might happen to our
understanding of the past and the present if we remembered the
stories that came before our humancentric one.  Read the
essay.  Discover more stories from our latest print edition,
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