I'm pretty new to learning about geology, and I don't think I could have asked for a better book to read. Laura Poppick's writing is insightful and informative, and you can't help but be swept along. Highly recommend.

"This is what I want for you in reading this book. I want you to bask in this current moment, in the awe that we get to be here at all."

I love the dual nature of the phrase “deep time.” As Laura Poppick’s beautiful science and nature book, Strata, shows, it refers not only to the physical depth of the minerals, fossils, relics, and other materials that allow scientists to study Earth’s history, but also to the profundity of a study that connects our lives to the many millions of years that came before us.

Strata combines all of the best elements of nature writing. The overarching natural and geological themes remind me of those from one of my favorite nature books, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. Furthermore, I love the way that Poppick brings in the social and human sides of science.

I enjoyed “meeting” the author and the other scientists she worked with, in particular reading about her own awe at and gratitude for the Earth (as evidenced by the quote above from her introduction). And I appreciated the look at things such as efforts toward making geoscience more inclusive for indigenous people and incorporating their traditional beliefs.

A few other notes:

It’s always a good sign when a nonfiction book offers such interesting facts that it makes you pause to tell someone something that you just learned. Like that flowers are millions of years older than grasses — fascinating!

Between reading Chet Raymo’s Honey from Stone recently and the news in this book that Dingle’s earth contains traces of some of the world’s oldest land plants, I think I need to make another trip out to the peninsula soon and go exploring.

The section on knowing so much about the scientific elements of dinosaurs (their anatomy, etc.) but still so little about the “social” side of them (how they acted and how they relate to each other) and how scientists are theorizing on these things, was so interesting.

Thank you so much to the author, W.W. Norton and Company, and Netgalley for providing an advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I’m going to leave you with a passage that really spoke to me, because I think if you are the perfect audience for this wonderful book, it will be all the convincing you need to read it:

"If that asteroid had landed just a few minutes later in water just a few hundred meters deeper, everything could have been different. Less rock may have vaporized, less solar radiation may have been blocked. Sauropods and stegosaurs and tyrannosaurs and all the rest of them may have clawed their way through and come out on the other side, never opening up the space for those small, hairy beings to rise to dominance.

We grew from that devastation, that piece of space debris thrown randomly down to Earth. That wreckage brought with it the possibility of bouquets and dance parties and fresh-baked pastries; orchestras and paintings with pigments in heartbreaking hues. It brought the possibility of narratives, of stories passed down through mouths and later through hands and ink and paper and now silicon. Of people who could weave stories from stone.

This hits me not only when I'm sitting with strata but when I'm out in the world in a wholly human experience. I'm at a concert at a small stadium, my shoulder brushes the arm of the man sitting next to me. He slurps soda from a plastic straw and bobs his head as he mouths the words to nobody. Everyone is sweaty and we all know the song. When the stage lights flicker from fuchsia to yellow to alien green in tempo with the bass, we scream and cheer because we get to be here. The lights flash again and for a moment, in the darkness, I'm not here but floating through the depths of an Ediacaran sea. I'm swimming through the brine of those sightless, earless, boneless beings.

I'm remembering the ice ages that they sprang from and the mudlessness of land in those days. I'm remembering the lunglessness and soundlessness and now I'm remembering to breathe and turn back to the music. .

But I can't take my mind off it. How, after all those epochs, after everything Earth had been through, the thing that made this moment possible may have just been that random piece of space junk."