Deep Time Archives
The pre-human Earth told through the rock: diagram first, photographic archive second.
Siberian Traps Erupted for 300,000 Years and Nothing Died
The worst extinction in Earth's record is dated to at most sixty thousand years, by uranium clocks inside crystals in five thin ash beds at a quarry in eastern China. The usual exp...
The Fern That Did Not Cool a Planet Alone
A drill core taken 250 kilometres from the North Pole has a four-metre band that is almost solid fossil fern spore. The popular version says this one species single-handedly flippe...
The Fish Was Still Breathing When the Impact Reached It
In a fossil site in North Dakota, there is a fish with a bead of impact glass lodged in its gills, not swallowed after death, but caught in the exact structure it used to breathe. ...
Coal Did Not Wait Sixty Million Years for Fungi to Show Up
There is a black band of coal running through a cliff in Nova Scotia, with fossil tree trunks still standing above it in growth position. The usual story says that band exists beca...
Earth Froze to the Equator, and the Freeze Wrote Its Own Escape
On a hillside in northern Namibia you can put one hand on each of two rocks. Below: unsorted glacial rubble, with stones dropped out of floating ice. Above: pale dolostone, a chemi...
The Air You Breathe Was a Planetary Contamination Event
Everyone points at banded iron formation as the proof that Earth's atmosphere filled with oxygen. It is not the proof. Banded iron was forming for hundreds of millions of years bef...
The Mediterranean Was a Desert Two Kilometres Below Sea Level
In 1970 a drilling ship in the middle of the Mediterranean pulled up rock salt from under three kilometres of water. Rock salt only forms when seawater evaporates away. The sea you...