Laura Poppick's Blog

Bighorn Canyon, 2019

"At any location on earth, as the rock record goes down into time and out into earlier geographies it touches upon tens of hundreds of stories, wherein the face of the earth often changed, changed utterly, and changed again, like the face of a crackling fire."

— John McPhee, Basin and Range

When I first read John McPhee’s Basin and Range in college, it cracked something open in me. The pages gushed with gems like the passage above, language that had me falling as much in love with the art of turning science into prose as with the subject matter of the book itself. It was the first thing I ever read that made me want to become a science writer.

I began rereading Basin and Range in 2021, soon after getting my book deal. I scratched notes in margins, splattered post-its across pages, kept a long list of ideas I hoped to weave into my own manuscript.

On this second read, I paid more attention to the ways that McPhee delighted in the language of geology.

“It was a fountain of metaphor,” he writes of his early discovery of this discipline.

Pillow lavas. Volcanic bombs. Radiolarian ooze. He dishes out these low hanging fruits of geologic phrases, and the reader can’t help but delight in them alongside him.

But it’s not just geology’s terminology that makes it so fun to play with on the page. It’s also the frame of mind that geologists must adopt:

“They look at mud and see mountains, in mountains oceans, in oceans mountains to be.”

The metaphor is the science and the science is the metaphor.

Only once I dug further into my book research did I discover that one particular metaphor that McPhee included in Basin and Range was actually his own invention, not one he had plucked from a textbook:

Deep time.

This phrase, first popularized by McPhee in 1981, now appears in more than 74,000 Google Scholar search results. Geologists use it as liberally as “granite” and “schist,” but it has its origins in literature rather than research. How fitting it is for the humanities of the sciences to so openly adopt a term popularized by a purveyor of prose.

Basin and Range has now been out in the world for nearly 45 years. It is beginning to feel like a thing of the past. But in the scope of deep time, this phrase that the book introduced is only just beginning to enter the common lexicon.

“Deep time” is younger than my parents.

It’s younger than the house I live in.

It’s younger than the tree in my backyard.

We're only just beginning to have words to express the depth of narrative in Earth’s crust. The state of mind it cracks open, the language it blooms out.

One Week ‘Til Launch!

We’re one week away from the launch of Strata: Stories from Deep Time. The whole point of writing this thing was to share it with readers, and I’m so looking forward to finally being able to do that!

Media coverage has begun rolling out, including an excerpt in Rolling Stone:

And a shoutout in the LA Times as a Top 10 book to read in July:

I’m over the moon that they are recommending it as a beach read, both because they deem it that digestible, and also — what better place to read a book about ancient sediments?

Sarah Gilman’s Illustrations

I was lucky enough to work with the ridiculously talented illustrator + writer + editor Sarah Gilman on a series of illustrations for Strata. Four of those prints are now available in her Etsy shop, including this beauty:

Heat by Sarah Gilman, commissioned for Strata

I’m so grateful to be able to include Sarah’s work in the book. Go check out her shop to see more of her stunners!

Strata Launch Tour

Please come on out and say hello if you’re based in any of these cities!

7/16 • Bunker Brewing w/ Print: A Bookstore | Portland, ME7/17 • Harvard Book Store | Cambridge, MA7/21 • Books Are Magic | Brooklyn, NY**7/29 • Zenith Bookstore | Duluth, MN8/12 • Left Bank Books | Belfast, ME9/3 • The Music Hall w/ Writers on a New England Stage | Portsmouth, NH**9/4 • Twice Sold Tales w/ composer Ben Cosgrove | Farmington, ME9/11 • Mechanics’ Hall w/ composer Ben Cosgrove | Portland, ME**

**Events that require purchase of tickets

Thanks so much for following along. I wrote this book because deep time brings me real solace, and I hope it does the same for you.

Pre-Order Strata

The dreamiest of views from the cottage at Hewnoaks where I stayed in July 2019.

With the launch of Strata coming up in just two months, I have been reflecting on the arc of this project from inception to completion. It’s been a long, winding, often unpredictable journey with twists that sometimes had me wondering if I would ever really reach the other side.

But just this morning, I discovered a cyclicality to this journey that I had not yet registered:

The idea sprouted the week of July 15, 2019.

My proposal landed in the inboxes of editors the week of July 15, 2021.

My book will come out into the world on July 15, 2025.

It’s enough to give me goosebumps, and to make me feel as if I’ve been the target of a planetary practical joke. This six year journey involved a lot of bushwhacking. The path never felt clear or cyclic or rhythmic. There was a lot of tripping and dusting off and not always trusting I would find my way. But here we are. I wrote a book about the cyclicality of change and growth on a planetary level, and experienced that same type of cyclicality on a personal level.

Haha Earth, very clever.

But also, wow.

So, what happened the week of July 15, 2019? I was fortunate enough stay at the Hewnoaks Artist Residency, where I lived in a dreamy cottage with a sunroom overlooking a lake at the foothills of the White Mountains. I didn't go there intending to leave with a book idea. I had a few essays I was planning to work on, and a story assignment I needed to finish up. But as I sat down at the desk overlooking the lake, I struggled to stare at my computer screen. There were too many birds singing and insects crawling and warm breezes blowing to spend my days basking in artificial light.

The stuff of dreams. Couldn’t sit at that desk and stare at a screen.

After a couple of mornings stumbling around on my computer, I spent the rest of the week sitting in a chair outside the cottage, writing a little bit by hand, but mostly reading books by authors I admire. And it was through the digestion of those books, and the days spent surrounded by birds and breezes and beetles crawling up my arm, that the seed of the idea for Strata emerged.

A beetle friend I made while reading outside my Hewnoaks cottage.

I scrawled an outline on a blank piece of paper as fireflies blinked on one night.

It would be a book that paid tribute to the stories beneath our feet, the geologic events that created us and that continue to bring us life today. It would be about the silts and clays and sands that gather in thin layers and reveal these ancient narratives, so long as we know how to read them.

This room and light. So grateful to have had the chance to stay here.

I set out to write a book about the hidden rhythms and patterns we can find in strata, only to find hidden rhythms and patterns in Strata.

I am so curious what the week of July 15, 2026 will bring.

Book Recommendations

I’ve been reading these new releases lately and have been blown away by the immersive reporting and storytelling in each. I recommend you check them out:

They Poisoned the World by Mariah Blake

Lost at Sea by Joe Kloc

Sweet and Deadly by Murray Carpenter

Wild Seed Project’s 2025 Guide

I had the great privilege of editing this gorgeous guide written by the wonderful folks at Wild Seed Project. You can now purchase it here, or receive a free copy by becoming a Wild Seed Project member.

There will be a launch celebration at Back Cove Books in Portland, ME on Thursday, May 22! Reserve a free ticket here.

Upcoming Strata Events

Plans are beginning to coalesce for some summertime Strata events! Hope to see you at one of these, and stay tuned for updates on others in the works:

Bunker Brewing w/ Print: A Bookstore | Portland, ME | July 16

Harvard Bookstore | Cambridge, MA | July 17

Books are Magic | Brooklyn, NY | July 21

Left Bank Books | Belfast, ME | August 12

Pre-Order Strata Now

As spring unfolds and loosens leaves from buds, I'm remembering how our lives revolve around plants, and how the lives of plants revolve around the sun, and how we all revolve around each other on a sphere that revolves around an axis that dictates the happenings of each of our days.

I find comfort in these orbits that spin larger than ourselves, but that also permeate each of our cells, each of us a sack of circadian rhythms that, every day, turns to the sun for direction.

I turn to the weeping willow behind my house and see a window to decades past, when the tree's young buds opened to a cow pasture, and then to an apple orchard, and then to the small fraction of yard that I tend today. I see these passing shifts in the landscape like pages in a flipbook, the tree rooted in place as everything around it revolves, rises and falls. Through all of that change, the tree keeps knowing what to do, keeps responding to the same cues that bring the woodcocks squawking and the chickadees singing and the peepers screaming in the wetland down the road. The same rising light that pulls my face up.

I turn my face to the sun and I remember the layers and dimensions of time, how the willow is decades older than me, and how trees are thousands of millennia older than humans. But that, even in their antiquity, these limbed growths have existed for only a small fraction of Earth's entire history. That for the more than 90 percent of those 4.54 billion years, Earth did not know roots or buds, leaves or stems. No clanking branches, no leaves shivering on wind.

When I wake up to this view from deep time, I see trees in a different light. These wise old growths appear cute and funny in their soft and knobby planetary youth. I see that we are all such recent visitors here, that we have only just arrived. And that what tethers us together, what energizes us through each of our days, is our constant revolution, our spinning on an axis that whips around a sun.

This year, Earth Day turns 55 years old. The planet has seen and withstood a lot of change in those five and a half decades, including the rise and fall and rise and fall again of movements to take care of this place. On this Earth Day (Tuesday, April 22), I will remember how fortunate we are to be here. How this planet spun around the sun more than 4.5 billion times before giving us a shot at existence. How foolish we would be not to recognize that privilege, not to spend our days working to care for the sphere that sustains us.

For stories of people actively doing that work, I recommend these two newsletters:

Conservation WorksNews & ideas for ecological repairBy Michelle NijhuisWHAT IF WE GET IT RIGHT?Forward-looking musings on climate & culture from a scientist and policy nerd.By Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonSPACE on Earth

I'm so looking forward to be celebrating Earth Day at SPACE Gallery next week! We’ll start with a conversation with authors Brandon Keim and Cara Giaimo followed by a performance by Cara’s band, sidebody. Come dance/discuss/celebrate with us!

Tickets and more info here:

Strata Update

The July 15th launch of my book, Strata: Stories from Deep Time, is less than three months away! The first review rolled out this week, and I’m starting to line up some launch events, including:

July 16 | Portland, ME

July 17 | Cambridge, MA

July 21 | Brooklyn, NY

And more…

Stay tuned for details on these and other events in the months ahead.

And if you’re compelled to preorder a copy, please do so! Early sales go a long way in supporting the longevity of a book, and you can help support a local independent bookstore along the way — just call your favorite shop and let them know you’d like a copy.

Thanks so much for following along. I hope you get to spend some time in the sun this weekend ☼.

On a walk one morning last week, I took my pup down to a marshy cove not far from my home. A bike path snakes along the contours of the marsh, and we usually stick to that wide path on our walks. But on this day, the last day of winter, I decided to change up our routine. We descended past the path and down onto the matted grasses of the marsh, crunching far enough out to breathe in the mud of the receding tide but still close enough to shore to keep our feet dry.

Aster, my dog, loves our occasional visits to this part of the cove, and I love watching him enjoy it, though I am also wary of the discarded needles, broken bottles, and other sharp debris that settles along that edge. I kept my eyes to his paws, so focused on scanning for these hazards that I was surprised to, instead, find the domed head and goggled eyes of a horseshoe crab. The discarded shell lay light and flat on the matted grasses, bedazzled in a thin crust of frost that winked in the warmth of the rising sun.

Aster heard the crackle of the shell as I picked it up, and forced his nose into my palm to investigate. Not wanting him to crush it, I tossed it aside, but that only encouraged him more. He lunged and grabbed the delicate thing in his mouth, whipping his head around. I wrangled it free, threw it further out of his reach, and then carried on walking, disappointed not to be able to relish the moment any longer.

But before I could sink too deep into my disappointment, I spotted another domed head and pair of goggled eyes staring up at me from the matted grass. I bent down to take a closer look and found another one right next to it, both the same khaki color of the grass itself, as if they had all been painted from the same swatch.

I played it cool and kept walking, not wanting to pull Aster's attention to these new finds. As I walked, though, I spotted another. Then another. I counted two dozen in just as many steps, all strewn and glistening with rhinestones of frost. The remnants of a family, perhaps, who had grown too large for their shells and had, in that growth, softened and molted and left their old armor behind.

I was familiar with these animals and their life cycles because I had interned at an aquarium as a teenager. On busy summer mornings, I would plunge my hand into the icy waters of the touch tank and tenderly lift up the hulking bodies of the horseshoe crabs, stroke their smooth backs and dutifully extend my arm out to whomever arrived in front of the tank. "Would you like to touch?" I would ask, the scrambling legs dripping water into the basin below.

The young visitors usually grew close as their adults shrieked and recoiled. "They look menacing," I would calmly say, "but they are actually very gentle. See?" I would then stroke the leathery back and spiny legs and recite my favorite horseshoe crab trivia. That they have 10 eyes. That they have blue blood. That their blue blood helps scientists make vaccines. But the real crowed pleasing piece of trivia was that these animals were living fossils. That they had existed for some 450 million years, since before dinosaurs had lived here, and that they have looked pretty much the same through all of that time.

I didn't have any context for 450 million years back then. All I knew about that timeframe was the absence, then presence, and then absence again of dinosaurs. I didn't know that horseshoe crabs first emerged into a world without any leaves or stems, that they witnessed the rise of plants and animals on land and the very first fur to unfurl from wombs. I didn't know that this species had survived all five of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth history, withstanding not only an asteroid impact but also ocean acidifications, firestorms, mass poisonings—all the while molting, growing, and molting again.

With a bit more of that context now, I can sink that much deeper into the novelties of my morning walks. I can find a horseshoe crab shell and recognize it not only as something physically beautiful, but as a physical reminder that the world doesn't just end when things fall apart. That the tides keep ebbing and flowing, Earth keeps spinning, life keeps emerging. That horseshoe crabs keep growing too large for their shells, crawl out into the harsh world, harden and then soften to it once again.

Pre-Order Strata: Stories from Deep Time

Upcoming Events (in Portland, ME)

I am so excited for the official launch celebration of Mother, Creature, Kin by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, coming up on April 9 at 6:30pm at Back Cove Books. Come on out to celebrate this brilliant book and human!

I am also beyond delighted to be part of an Earth Day celebration at SPACE Gallery, coming up on April 22 at 7pm. I’ll be moderating a conversation with authors Brandon Keim and Cara Giaimo, and then enjoying a performance from Cara’s band, sidebody. Please come and join the party:

Finally, in honor of the first week of spring, I’m sharing this poem that I wrote a few years ago at this time:

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"They look at mud and see mountains, in mountains oceans, in oceans mountains to be."

—John McPhee, Basin and Range

As a kid growing up in the Hudson Valley, I had a rock collection that I kept stashed in a purple box in my closet. The stones were ones that I had pocketed during recess or out on walks with my dog or on family hikes in upstate New York. The glassy herkimer diamond that my father had popped out of a boulder with his pocketknife and placed on my sweaty young fingertip while camping in the Catskills; the rusty beige slate, no larger than my palm, that I found on the bank of a muddy river and pocketed because it looked like the silhouette of a crow.

The shapes and textures of the rocks had drawn me to them, but I didn't see much to the stones beyond their physical beauty. I considered them as inert as the purple box that held them.

Sometimes I examined the crow-shaped rock in my hands before bedtime, tracing its contours with my fingers and inventing myths about the creature I saw in the stone. I had no idea that the rock contained traces of actual true stories more fantastical than the ones I was inventing. Stories of a time before beaks or feathers had ever shown up on Earth, when continents did not yet know breath or brains, let alone young girls making up stories before falling asleep at night. I had no idea that the stone was a piece of an ancient seafloor that opened windows into earlier versions of Earth.

Now, some three decades later, I can't look at rocks without trying to decode whatever narratives they hold. But it wasn't an inherent love of rocks that got me here; in hindsight, I think it was actually my love of stories that first drew me to geology.

Like most kids in this country, my geoscience education stalled out around the fourth grade. I learned the basics of the rock cycle, made model volcanoes that erupted with baking soda and vinegar, and then moved on to the biology and chemistry and physics classes we were required to take as we got older.

It wasn't until I arrived at college and stumbled into an event the Geology Department was hosting during my freshman year that I began to entertain the idea that I might actually like this field of science. Through a crowd of students eating pretzels and chatting with professors, I found myself drawn to a table with a pile of yellow hardcover books. I opened one and flipped through dozens of blank waxy pages followed by a collection of illustrations of sediments and timescales and map symbols in the back.

These books, I was told, were the Rite in the Rain field notebooks that I would need to purchase if I were to enroll in the geology classes offered that year. The waxy texture of the pages helped repelled water, so we could write on them even in the rain. While my other classes required heavy textbooks full of glossy charts and information that lacked any sort of narrative, these geology classes called for empty pages that we would fill with our own observations and craft our own versions of narratives of how we understood the world around us.

I enrolled in my first class not for the rocks but for these notebooks (and, of course, for the promise they held of spending time outside).

Before long, I declared myself a major, imagining building a career as a detective of deep time, filling my office bookshelves with dozens of yellow spines. But I also enrolled in poetry workshops and literature classes, and loved seamlessly floating between the worlds of science and writing, feeling how the one informed the other. How poetry came to me while peering at a mineral beneath a microscope lens and how geology came to me while working layers into my prose.

"They look at mud and see mountains, in mountains oceans, in oceans mountains to be," writes John McPhee in Basin and Range.

Only once I discovered John McPhee’s achingly vivid take on geology in Basin and Range did I realize that I could maybe exist in both these worlds, all of these worlds, at once. In the science and literature, past and present, lyric and literal. Maybe I could help make sure that others don’t miss out on the gifts of geology, just because they mistakenly assume it’s dull and boring. Because they still see rocks as inert objects, rather than the frayed fibers of our own beginnings.

Reading Recommendations

If you're looking for geology books beyond John McPhee’s classic Basin and Range (first published in 1981), here are some other more recent gems:

Timefulness, Reading the Rocks, and Turning to Stone by Marcia Bjornerud

Trace by Lauret Savoy

Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr

When the Earth was Green by Riley Black — just published this week, I can't wait to dig in!

And last but not least — not a geology book per se, but one that I had the honor of witnessing evolve over the past few years and am so excited to see out in the world on April 8th! By the lovely and brilliant Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder: Mother, Creature, Kin.

Preorder STRATA: Stories from Deep Time

Did you know that we live on an ancient watery sphere of rock that has been spinning through space for some 4.54 billion years?

I sometimes remember this when I am waiting for a traffic light to turn green, or for a cashier to ring me up, or for the sun to rise. In these mundane moments of daily life, I remember, like waking from a dream, how much time and energy and light and life went into bringing us all here into this moment. How unlikely each of our lives are, and yet here we are.

Here at the grocery store or at a traffic light, but also here enjoying sun on skin, or salt on tongue, or the soft rattle of a dry leaf in wind. Each moment and sensory experience that fills our days comes from the culmination of the billions of years that came before us. The sun more ancient than the wind more ancient than the leaf.

Our limited human minds can’t easily conceive of the layered timescales that exist and persist all around us. We struggle to envision the deep past as anything more than a smudged brushstroke of hiccups and evolutions that eventually landed us on Earth, with a few extinctions and an ice age thrown in beforehand.

In truth, though, this planet’s history contains narratives just as granular, wild, and often mundane as our own existences. The sun rising and later setting, wind blowing and then calming, change erupting and subsiding and erupting again. The granularities of these eons of hours, minutes and seconds have, collectively, woven the vast tapestry of bedrock that we walk atop each day.

“It’s almost as if Earth wants its biography to be read,” writes Marcia Bjornerud in her recent (and wonderful) book Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.

Aren’t you curious what, exactly, happened through all those years before we arrived? Don’t you think it’d be cool to look out at a landscape and have a sense of the stories it holds? Which ancient dramas keep you company each day?

The world today feels on the brink – or, actually, already toppling over a brink – of destruction that will take a long time to pull ourselves out of. We have a lot of work to do and a lot to mend. But in the background of all that rightfully demands our attention, Earth’s long and storied past is coming into sharper focus than it ever has before. Thanks to the steady and focused work of Earth historians around the world, we are now learning with incredible clarity what came before us. With those narratives at hand, we may glean lessons and find grounding that could land us on a more stable path forward.

Put another way, we are only just now learning how to read Earth’s biography.

Don’t you want to know how?

⟡⟡⟡⟡

This is what I hope to share with you in this newsletter and, eventually, in my book Strata: Stories from Deep Time, that will be coming out on July 15th (now available for preorder!). I want to offer you this deep time lens that you can hold in your back pocket and whip out whenever you’re bored or lonely, or concerned about the future, or even when you are feeling full and contented. I have found that this lens can add a sparkly dash of awe and wonder to basically any moment of any day.

Just yesterday, an earthquake shook across southern Maine, rippling into my feet and chest as I drafted this post, and thankfully causing no injury or destruction. While the cause of the quake remains unknown, one state geologist speculated that it could have just been Earth’s crust rebounding from the last ice age.

That is, the rumbling in my chest and feet may have been the earth shivering off a tremor from an event that ended some 10,000 years ago.

I’ve never felt such a tangible reminder of Earth’s vast and varied timescales. I floated through the rest of the day with my bones rattled and renewed, remembering that what feel like millennia to us are the equivalent of just a couple of seconds in the span of Earth’s 4.54 billion year history.

Deep time is the metronome and the anchor, the ballast and the buoy that keep me steady as I face the travails and the unknowns of life and the world we face with today. I am writing this newsletter in hopes that you too may have access to this sense of grounding I find in the immensity of time and the ways it has written itself into the ground beneath our feet.

Thank you for joining me.

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