T I M E F U L N E S S
T I M E F U L N E S S
How Thinking Like
a Geologist Can
Help Save the World
M A R C I A
B J O R N E R U D
P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
P R I N C E T O N A N D O X F O R D
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
vi
Prologue: The Allure of Timelessness
1
1 A Call for Timefulness
6
2 An Atlas of Time
21
3 The Pace of the Earth
62
4 Changes in the Air
93
5 Great Accelerations
126
6 Timefulness, Utopian and Scientific
159
Epilogue
180
A P P E N D I X E S
I Simplified Geologic Timescale
184
I I Durations and Rates of Earth Phenomena
186
I I I
Environmental Crises in Earth’s History:
Causes and Consequences
190
Notes
193
Index
203
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
I am grateful to the many people who played a part in the evo-
lution of this book: my colleagues David McGlynn and Jerald
Podair; Princeton University Press editors Eric Henney and
Leslie Grundfest, and associates Arthur Werneck and Stephanie
Rojas; copyeditor Barbara Liguori; and illustrator Haley Hager-
man, whose work is timeless. Thanks also to my family— my
parents, Gloria and Jim; sons, Olav, Finn, and Karl; and beau,
Paul, with whom I am lucky to spend my time on Earth.
The epigraph to chapter 3 is taken from “Blowin’ in the Wind”
by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1962 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed
1990 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International
copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
T I M E F U L N E S S
P R O L O G U E
T H E A L L U R E O F
T I M E L E S S N E S S
Time is the one thing we can all agree to call supernatural.
— H A L D O R L A X N E S S , U N D E R T H E G L AC I E R , 1 9 6 8
For children who grow up in wintry climates, few experiences
in life will ever elicit the same pure joy as a Snow Day. Unlike
holidays, whose pleasures can be diminished by weeks of antic-
ipation, snow days are undiluted serendipities. In the 1970s in
rural Wisconsin, school closings were announced on local AM
radio, and we’d listen with the volume turned way up, trem-
bling with hope, as the names of public and parochial schools
around the county were read, with maddening deliberation, in
alphabetical order. At last our school would be named, and in
that moment anything seemed possible. Time was temporarily
repealed; the oppressive schedules of the adult world magically
suspended in a concession to the greater authority of nature.
The day stretched luxuriously before us. An expedition into
the white, muted world would be first. We would marvel at
the new geography of the woods around the house and the
inflation of familiar objects into puffy caricatures of themselves.
Stumps and boulders had been fitted with thick cushions; the
mailbox wore a ridiculously tall hat. We relished these heroic
reconnaissance missions all the more knowing they would be
followed by a return to the cozy warmth of the house.
2 Prologu e
I remember one particular snow day when I was in the eighth
grade, that liminal stage when one has access to the realms
of both childhood and adulthood. Almost a foot of snow had
fallen in the night, followed by fierce winds and biting cold. In
the morning, the world was utterly still and blindingly bright.
My childhood companions were teenagers now, more in-
terested in sleep than snow, but I could not resist the prospect
of a transformed world. I bundled myself in down and wool and
stepped outside. The air felt sharp in my lungs. Trees creaked
and groaned in that peculiar way that signals deep cold. Trudg-
ing down the hill toward the stream below our house, I spotted
a dab of red on a branch: a male cardinal huddled in the heatless
sunshine. I walked toward the tree and was surprised that the
bird didn’t seem to hear me. I drew closer still and then realized
with repulsion and fascination that it was frozen on its perch
in life position, like a glass- eyed specimen in a natural history
museum. It was as if time had stopped in the woods, allowing
me to see things that were normally a blur of motion.
Back inside that afternoon, savoring the gift of unallocated
time, I heaved our big world atlas off the shelf and lay sprawled
on the floor with it. I’ve always been drawn to maps; good
ones are labyrinthine texts that reveal hidden histories. On this
day, I happened to open the atlas to a two- page chart show-
ing the boundaries of time zones around the globe— the kind
with clocks running across the top, showing the relative hour
in Chicago, Cairo, Bangkok. The pastel colors on the map ran
in mostly longitudinal stripes except for some elaborate gerry-
manders like China (all one time zone) and a few outliers, in-
cluding Newfoundland, Nepal, and central Australia, where
the clocks are set ahead or back relative to Greenwich Mean
Time by some odd noninteger amount. There were also a few
places— Antarctica, Outer Mongolia, and an Arctic archipelago
called Svalbard— that were colored gray, which, according to
Prologue 3
the map legend, signified “No Official Time.” I was captivated
by the idea of places that had resisted being shackled by mea-
sures of time— no minutes or hours, wholly exempt from the
tyranny of a schedule. Was time there frozen like the cardinal
on the branch? Or simply flowing, unmetered and unfettered,
according to a wilder natural rhythm?
Years later, when, through coincidence or predestination, I
ended up doing field work for my PhD in geology on Svalbard,
I discov
ered that in some ways, it was indeed a place beyond or
outside time. The Ice Age had not yet loosened its grip. Relics
of human history from disparate eras— whale bones discarded
by seventeenth- century blubber renderers, graves of Russian
hunters from the reign of Catherine the Great, the torn fuselage
of a Luftwaffe bomber— lay strewn across great barren swaths
of tundra as if in a poorly curated exhibition. I also learned
that Svalbard’s “No Official Time” designation was actually due
Norwegians about whether to observe Moscow or Oslo time
there. But on that long- ago snow day, liberated temporarily
from quotidian routines, on the cusp of adulthood yet still snug
in my parents’ house, I had glimpsed the possibility that there
were pockets where time remained undefined, amorphous—
where one might even travel between past and present with
equal freedom. With a dim premonition of the changes and
losses that lay ahead, I wished that that perfect day could be
my permanent home, from which I might venture but always
return to find everything unchanged. This was the start of a
complicated relationship with time.
I first traveled to Svalbard as a new graduate student— more
specifically, as a seasick passenger aboard a Norwegian Polar In-
stitute research ship— in the summer of 1984. Our field season
could not begin until early July, when the sea ice had broken
up enough for safe navigation. Three long days after leaving
4 Prologu e
mainland Norway, we at last reached the southwest coast of the
island of Spitsbergen, the area that would be the focus of my doc-
toral work on the tectonic history of the mountain range there,
the northernmost extension of the Appalachian- Caledonian
chain. In my miserable state of mal de mer, I was actually happy
that the waves were too high that day for our small group to be
carried to land by rubber boat, because it meant we’d have the
luxury of a much quicker, drier trip by helicopter. We flew from
the top deck of the pitching ship, with all our gear and food slung
like a bag of onions in a net under the helicopter and hanging per-
ilously over the heaving seas. As we approached land I remember
searching the ground for some object to provide a sense of scale,
but the boulders, streams, and patches of mossy tundra were of
indeterminate size. Finally, I saw what looked like a weather-
beaten wooden fruit crate. It turned out to be the hut we would
live in for the next two months (see figure 1).
Once the helicopter had left and the ship had vanished over
the horizon, our camp became detached from late twentieth
century. The hut, or hytte, which was actually quite snug, had
been built from driftwood by resourceful hunters in the early
1900s. We carried World War II– vintage bolt- action Mausers
as protection against polar bears. We had no way to commu-
nicate with the world apart from a prearranged nightly radio
check- in with the ship, which would slowly circumnavigate
the archipelago taking oceanographic measurements over the
course of the summer. We heard no news about current affairs;
for years after that summer and the field seasons that followed,
I would discover embarrassing lacunae in my knowledge of
world events that had happened between July and September
(What? When did Richard Burton die?).
On Svalbard, my perception of time becomes unmoored
from the normal measures. It is partly the 24- hour summer
daylight (not to say actual sunshine— the weather can be quite
Prologue 5
F I G U R E 1 . The hut on Svalbard, Norwegian arctic
awful), which provides no cue for sleep. But it is also the single-
minded focus on the natural history of an austere world that
has so little memory of humans. Just as the size of objects is
difficult to judge on the tundra, the temporal space between
past events becomes hard to discern. The few human- made
artifacts one finds— a tangled fishing net, a decaying weather
balloon— seem older and shabbier than the ancient mountains,
which are robust and vital. Lost in my thoughts on the long
walks back to camp each day, my mind washed clean by the
sound of wind and waves, I have sometimes felt as if I stood
at the center of a circle, equidistant from all stages of my life,
past and future. The sensation spills over to the landscape and
rocks; immersed in their stories, I see that the events of the past
are still present and feel they could even be replayed again one
day in a beautiful revelation. This impression is a glimpse not
of time less ness but time ful ness, an acute consciousness of how
the world is made by— indeed, made of— time.
C H A P T E R 1
A C A L L F O R
T I M E F U L N E S S
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit (Everything changes, nothing perishes).
A B R I E F H I S T O R Y O F T I M E D E N I A L
As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly
about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is
“History of Earth and Life,” a survey of the 4.5- billion- year saga
of the entire planet— in a 10- week trimester. But as a human,
and more specifically as a daughter, mother, and widow, I strug-
gle like everyone else to look Time honestly in the face. That
is, I admit to some time hypocrisy.
Antipathy toward time clouds personal and collective think-
ing. The now risible “Y2K” crisis that threatened to cripple
global computer systems and the world economy at the turn of
the millennium was caused by programmers in the 1960s and
’70s who apparently didn’t really think the year 2000 would ever
arrive. Over the past decade, Botox treatments and plastic sur-
gery have come to be viewed as healthy boosts to self- esteem
rather than what they really are: evidence that we fear and
loathe our time- iness. Our natural aversion to death is amplified
in a culture that casts Time as an enemy and does everything
it can to deny its passage. As Woody Allen said: “Americans
believe death is optional.”
A Call for Timefulness 7
This type of time denial, rooted in a very human combination
of vanity and existential dread, is perhaps the most common
and forgivable form of what might be called chronophobia. But
there are other, more toxic varieties that work together with the
mostly benign kind to create a pervasive, stubborn, and dan-
gerous temporal illiteracy in our society. We in the twenty- first
century would be shocked if an educated adult were unable to
identify the continents on a world map, yet we are quite com-
fortable with widespread obliviousness about anything but the
most superficial highlights from the planet’s long history (um,
Bering Strait . . . dinosaurs . . . Pangaea?). Most humans, includ-
ing those in affluent and technically advanced countries,
have
no sense of temporal proportion— the durations of the great
chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous
intervals of environmental instability, the intrinsic timescales of
“natural capital” like groundwater systems. As a species, we have
a childlike disinterest and partial disbelief in the time before our
appearance on Earth. With no appetite for stories lacking human
protagonists, many people simply can’t be bothered with natural
history. We are thus both intemperate and intemp o rate— time
illiterate. Like inexperienced but overconfident drivers, we ac-
celerate 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. This ignorance of planetary history undermines any claims
we may make to modernity. 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. The dragons of time denial still persist in a
surprising range of habitats.
Among the various foes of time, Young Earth creationism
breathes the most fire but is at least predictable in its opposition.
8 Ch a pter 1
In years of teaching geology at the university level, I have had
students from evangelical Christian backgrounds who earnestly
struggle to reconcile their faith with the scientific understand-
ing of the Earth. I truly empathize with their distress and try to
point out paths toward resolution of this internal discord. First,
I emphasize that my job is not to challenge their personal beliefs
but to teach the logic of geology (geo- logic?)— the methods
and tools of the discipline that enable us not only to compre-
hend how the Earth works at present but also to document in
detail its elaborate and awe- inspiring history. Some students
seem satisfied with keeping science and religious beliefs sepa-
rate through this methodological remove. But more often, as
they learn to read rocks and landscapes on their own, the two
worldviews seem increasingly incompatible. In this case, I use a
variation on the argument made by Descartes in his Meditations
about whether his experience of Being was real or an elaborate