Strata Quotes

“And you think you’re special? You’re not fucking special.” Nobody is, he says. At least not in the scope of geologic”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“Together with colleagues at Memorial University, Myrow decided that this appearance of Treptichnus pedum was a decent marker of the beginning of the Cambrian, since up until that point it had never been found in rocks older than the Cambrian, and it sat just above rocks that were identifiably Precambrian. Myrow and his colleagues put forth a proposal for the Fortune Dump (now called Fortune Head) to be designated the Precambrian-Cambrian golden spike,”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“Mistaken Point contains the oldest and most extensive collection of fossils, and for that reason has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site to protect them. To visit, you must arrange for a guided tour with staff at the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, a seventeen-kilometer stretch of coastline with more than one hundred fossil surfaces, a motley grab bag of passports back to deep time.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“Aboriginal people of Australia—the planet’s oldest continuous civilization, which has persisted for as long as 75,000 years—refer to the creation of the world as Dreamtime, a period that must date further back than the 6,000 years allotted in the Bible, considering that their civilization has existed close to 70 millennia longer than that.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“Nothing is set in stone, because our understanding of the stones keeps changing, as do the stones themselves.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“We live our lives within recycled landscapes and those recycled landscapes live within us.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“as humans, we’ve raised the bar for global change. To understand what happens to a world when life overtakes the systems that it runs on, we can look to the past and see what has happened before us.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“evidence of life on the planet that dates at least as far back as those 3.5-billion-year-old filaments.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“Great Oxidation Event. (This term is still used today, though some prefer the term Great Oxygenation Event.) Research on this event, called the GOE”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“organisms named blue-green algae were not algal at all, but rather were bacterial. By the end of the century, most researchers had accepted this categorical snafu and had begun calling these organisms by their new name: cyanobacteria, in reference to their blue-green, cyan hue.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“organisms that use the power of the sun to tear apart water molecules to make sugar, and release oxygen as a sort of exhale: things that photosynthesize.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“The fashionably late arrival of oxygen may sound like a planetary sigh of relief. Finally, the possibility for life larger than one cell, with lungs and lips and all the rest of it. But scientists familiar with oxygen’s highly reactive habits suggest its arrival was more like a nightmare.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“It’s the third most abundant element in the universe,”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“But free oxygen—two atoms of O bound together by a pair of shared electrons, liberated from any other material but itself—didn’t emerge as a gas until more than halfway through Earth’s existence.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“Strata from the very earliest eon, the Hadean, have all but melted back into the mantle. We’ll pass over these very earliest days and make our way into Earth’s second eon, the Archean.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“You share this in common with every other animal on Earth, save for one lone parasite of Chinook salmon that somehow doesn’t need it. Well done, Henneguya salminicola.”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“when rachel carson published The Sea Around Us in 1951—a book that reads to me like”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time

“Earth’s second eon, the Archean. Spanning from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago,”
― Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time