Timefulness, Marcia Bjornerud
Timefulness, Marcia Bjornerud
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Timefulness
How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

Author: Marcia Bjornerud

Narrator: Tanya Eby

Unabridged: 5 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/11/2018


Synopsis

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth's atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds of years—the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere—approach the limits of our comprehension. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.

Marcia Bjornerud shows how geologists chart the planet's past, explaining how we can determine the pace of solid Earth processes such as mountain building and erosion and comparing them with the more unstable rhythms of the oceans and atmosphere. These overlapping rates of change in the Earth system—some fast, some slow—demand a poly-temporal worldview, one that Bjornerud calls "timefulness."

About Marcia Bjornerud

Marcia Bjornerud is a professor of Environmental Studies and Geosciences at Lawrence University. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times and the author of Reading the Rocks, Timefulness, and Geopedia.


Reviews

'Timefulness' by Marcia Bjornerud is an excellent general review of how the work of geologist specialists of all kinds and from the observations of proto-scientists in earlier centuries to now, geologists have been able to determine the age of the Earth and its history. The book describes the histor......more