Marcia Bjornerud > Quotes

“According to pioneering microbiologist Lynn Margulis, "fully 10 percent of our own dry body weight consists of bacteria, some of which, although they are not a congenital part of our bodies, we can't live without." In fact, a healthy human body has more bacterial cells than animal cells (bacterial cells are far smaller). Our own bodies are in some ways microcosms of the biosphere as a whole.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“To my surprise, I found that geology demanded a type of whole-brain thinking I hadn't encountered before. It creatively appropriated ideas from physics and chemistry for the investigation of unruly volcanoes and oceans and ice sheets, It applied scholarly habits one associates with the study of literature and the arts - the practice of close reading, sensitivity to allusion and analogy, capacity for spatial visualization - to the examination of rocks. Its particular form of inferential logic demanded mental versatility and a vigorous but disciplined imagination. And its explanatory power was vast; it was nothing less than the etymology of the world.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“With each integer on the Richter scale, there is a tenfold increase in the number of earthquakes that occur annually. On average, there is one magnitude 8 event, ten magnitude 7 events, a hundred magnitude 6 events, and so on, each year. If we consider this from an energy standpoint, the smaller earthquakes account for a significant fraction of the total seismic energy released each year. The one million magnitude 2 events (which are too small to be felt except instrumentally) collectively release as much energy as does one magnitude 6 earthquake. Although the larger events are certainly more devastating from a human perspective, they are geologically no more important than the myriad less newsworthy small ones.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“Fathoming deep time is arguably geology’s single greatest contribution to humanity. Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Little by little, over more than two centuries, the local stories told by rocks in all parts of the world have been stitched together into a great global tapestry - the geologic timescale. This "map" of Deep Time represents one of the great intellectual achievements of humanity, arduously constructed by stratigraphers, paleontologists, geochemists, and geochronologists from many cultures and faiths. It is still a work in progress to which details are constantly being added and finer and finer calibrations being made.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“More pervasive and corrosive are the nearly invisible forms of time denial that are built into the very infrastructure of our society. For example, in the logic of economics, in which labor productivity must always increase to justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply take time - education, nursing, or art performance - constitute a problem because they cannot be made significantly more efficient.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“We tend to think of the water cycle as a relatively short-term phenomenon; the average molecule of water stays in the atmosphere for about nine days; the residence time of water even in the largest lakes, like Superior, is a century or two; deep groundwater may be stored for a millennium. But there is a 100 million-year water cycle that involves the interior of the Earth, and adding water to the mantle is in fact the critical step in the recipe for continental crust.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Antipathy toward time clouds personal and collective thinking.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Those who believe that the End of Days is just around the corner have no reason to be concerned about matters like climate change, groundwater depletion, or loss of biodiversity.3 If there is no future, conservation of any kind is, paradoxically, wasteful.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“A recent analysis of satellite imagery, for example, has shown that the total "constructed" area in the continental United States is now equal to the size of the state of Ohio. Never has so much of the Earth's surface been covered by materials designed to be impervious (concrete, pavement, buildings). These surfaces not only decrease the proportion of precipitation that soaks into the substrate to become groundwater, but also change the reflectivity, biological diversity, and carbon storage capacity of the land. Not all of these changes are necessarily bad, but they will interact in subtle and unpredictable ways with other environmental changes, both natural and human-induced.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“A retrospective of how scientific perceptions of the Earth have changed over the past three centuries reveals a strong correlation between Western political and social views and contemporary scientific “truths.” This connection should make us suspect that our understanding of the planet at any historical moment is at best incomplete and at worst hopelessly wrapped up with our own self-image.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“Over human timescales, however, our disruption of geography will haunt us. Soil lost to erosion, coastal areas claimed by the sea, and mountaintops sacrificed on the altar of capitalism won't be restored in our lifetime. And these alterations will set in motion a cascade of side effects--hydrologic, biological, social, economic, and political--that will define the human agenda for centuries.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“we should all carry two slips of paper in our pockets: one that says “I am ashes and dust,” and one that reads “The world was made for me.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“It is also not the “end of nature” but, instead, the end of the illusion that we are outside nature. Dazzled by our own creations, we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted. As a species, we are much less flexible than we would like to believe, vulnerable to economic loss and prone to social unrest when nature—in the guise of Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey, among others—diverges just a little from what we expect.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“The great heaps of sediment also underscore an amazing fact about the Earth: that the speeds of tectonic processes, driven by the internal radioactive heat of the Earth are, by happy coincidence, about evenly matched 13 by the tempo of external agents of erosion— wind, rain, rivers, glaciers— powered by gravity and solar energy. In the barbershop analogy, it is as if the hair on a customer’s head keeps growing as fast as the barber can cut it. And while the tectonic growth and erosional trimming of mountains both proceed at an average pace that is deliberate, they are not so slow as to be beyond our perception.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Finding outcrops is easy in arid and mountainous areas, where naked rock lies basking in the sun. But in humid and topographically subtle areas (think Indiana), outcrops are elusive. Invariably, the few rocks that do expose themselves become veiled with lichen over time (the resourceful geologist learns to note that certain colors of lichen signify particular rock types—orange for basalt, green for granite)”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“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 enables us not only to comprehend how the Earth works at present but also to document in detail its elaborate and awe-inspiring history.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“The Proterozoic Earth somehow “understood” the fundamental principles of sustainability; geochemical trading flourished, but all commodities flowed in closed loops— the waste products of one group of microbial manufacturers were the raw materials of another.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“By now, however, we should have learned that treating the planet as if it were a simple, predictable, passive object in a controlled laboratory experiment is scientifically inexcusable. Yet the same old time-blind hubris is allowing the seductive idea of climate engineering, sometimes called geoengineering, to gain traction in certain academic and political circles.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Is it more comforting to think that the Permian catastrophe was caused by the unlikely convergence of a series of events or by a single nefarious villain? In a time when anthropogenic emissions of sulfur and chlorine match or exceed volcanic releases, when human carbon dioxide production outstrips natural rates by a factor of ten, and when growing areas of the world's oceans are becoming dead zones as a result of sewage and fertilizer runoff, I'm not sure. More recent records of climate instability are equally sobering.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“Life is endlessly inventive, always tinkering and experimenting, but not with a particular notion of progress. For us mammals , the Cretaceous extinction was the lucky break that cleared the way for a golden age, but if the story of the biosphere were written from the perspective of prokaryotic rather than macroscopic life, the extinctions would hardly register. Even today, prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) make up at least 50% of all biomass on Earth. 23 One might say that Earth’s biosphere is, and always has been, a “microcracy,” ruled by the tiny.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“This impression is a glimpse not of timelessness but timefulness, an acute consciousness of how the world is made by - indeed, made of - time.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“The rate of rebound reflects how fast the mantle beneath the crust can flow back into place, and in places the rate is surprisingly speedy. The northern half of Lake Michigan, for example, is tilting upward at a rate of about 1 millimeter per year, spilling slowly over Chicago.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“If we extrapolate this rate of overturn back in geologic time, the ocean floor has apparently been rejuvenated at least two dozen times since the Earth formed. When Earth was younger and hotter, however, the pace of convection may have been faster, and the ocean floor may have been resurfaced more frequently. But this leads to a conundrum: If convection had been faster in the past, as most geoscientists think it was, ocean crust would have arrived at subduction zones at a younger average age, still too hot and buoyant to be assimilated back into the mantle. This suggests that true plate tectonics, with rigid crustal slabs, efficient recycling of ocean crust via subduction, and water-assisted production of low-temperature melts, may not have occurred on the early Earth. Instead, plate tectonics could begin only when the Earth had reached a degree of thermal maturity, probably about 2.5 billion years ago (around the close of the Archean eon and the beginning of the Proterozoic). Before this, Earth's mixer settings—and the extent to which surface water was stirred back into the interior—were probably different. We can look to rocks formed in these distant times, Earth's record of its childhood and youth, for clues.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“But the Seventh Generation idea, articulated more than 300 years ago in the Iroquois Gayanashagowa (the “Great Binding Law” or “Great Law of Peace” 9 ), remains as radical and visionary as ever: that leaders should take actions only after contemplating their likely effects on “the unborn of the future Nation . . . whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground.” Seven generations, perhaps a century and a half, is longer than a single lifetime but not beyond human experience. It is the span from one’s great-grandparents to one’s great-grandchildren. From the standpoint of the Seven Generations principle , our current society is a kleptocracy stealing from the future. What would it take for this old idea to be adopted in a modern world that does not even acknowledge time?”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“if life first became viable after the early bombardment era ended 3.8 billion years ago, we are now almost three-quarters of the way through Earth’s habitable period. Nevertheless, we should be grateful for the great wealth of time that this planet has had as a consequence of belonging to a yellow dwarf star with a lifetime of 10 billion years. Stars just 50% larger than the Sun have a life expectancy of only 3 billion years, which on Earth would be equivalent to the time span from the formation of the planet to the middle of the Boring Billion.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“…so far, the rocks haven’t provided enough information for geological detectives to distinguish events that may have happened over thousands of years from those that happened over millions.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

“In the popular imagination, physics is perhaps the science most often associated with deep philosophical, quasi-religious questions. The Higgs boson, for example, is informally known as the “God particle,” and great physicists have the status of secular high priests.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks

“pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks

“Like inexperienced but overconfident drivers, we accelerate 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.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World