https://therepository.org/deep-time/The pre-human Earth told through the rock: diagram first, photographic archive second.enhttps://therepository.org/deep-time/ep07-siberian-traps-erupted-for-300-000-years-and-nothing-died/https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep07-siberian-traps-erupted-for-300-000-years-and-nothing-died/Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:00:28 +0000The 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 explanation is that the Siberian Traps erupted. But the Traps were dated too, and the lava had been running for three hundred thousand years, with two thirds of its volume already on the ground, while the fossil record barely moved.https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep06-the-fern-that-did-not-cool-a-planet-alone/https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep06-the-fern-that-did-not-cool-a-planet-alone/Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:54:31 +0000A 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 flipped Earth's climate from greenhouse to icehouse. A second core, taken at the edge of the same ocean, tells a narrower story.https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep05-the-fish-was-still-breathing-when-the-impact-reached-it/https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep05-the-fish-was-still-breathing-when-the-impact-reached-it/Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:43:55 +0000In 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. The site, called Tanis, is one of the most extraordinary, and most contested, claims in modern paleontology. This episode covers both.https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep04-coal-did-not-wait-sixty-million-years-for-fungi-to-show-up/https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep04-coal-did-not-wait-sixty-million-years-for-fungi-to-show-up/Sun, 23 Aug 2026 17:45:57 +0000There 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 because trees invented a tough material called lignin, and for roughly sixty million years nothing on Earth could digest it. Dead wood just piled up. That story does not survive contact with the fossils.https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep03-earth-froze-to-the-equator-and-the-freeze-wrote-its-own-escape/https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep03-earth-froze-to-the-equator-and-the-freeze-wrote-its-own-escape/Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:55:06 +0000On 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 chemical precipitate that only forms in warm shallow tropical water. The contact between them is sharp — no soil, no transitional bed, nothing. Those two rocks should never touch.https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep02-the-air-you-breathe-was-a-planetary-contamination-event/https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep02-the-air-you-breathe-was-a-planetary-contamination-event/Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:09:12 +0000Everyone 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 before the change and kept forming long after it, and bacteria can precipitate iron with no free oxygen at all. The real evidence is a sulfur isotope signature that simply stops existing, inside about five metres of rock, in three separate drill cores.https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep01-the-mediterranean-was-a-desert-two-kilometres-below-sea-level/https://therepository.org/deep-time/ep01-the-mediterranean-was-a-desert-two-kilometres-below-sea-level/Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:00:25 +0000In 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 know is younger than the rock underneath it, and the way it came back is the part nobody teaches.