#OTD the #Titanic sank in 1912. When I was a very small child, I knew an old woman who narrowly escaped this disaster. As the governess of a US millionaire's children, she was supposed to be travelling on the Titanic. They arrived too late in England and couldn't get tickets.
Shortly before her death, she gave me some old #yarn. I haven't dared to use it to this day because it's like travelling back in #deepTime. 113 years can feel so near.
@urlyman
Here's a powerful demonstration of these realities we put together that went viral on Facebook, before I left there 
#DeepTime
https://peertube-ecogather-u20874.vm.elestio.app/w/1rfTtyc7GrShYSfo9ss9kL
"Coming face to face with the lionfish in the warming waters of the central Aegean is a reminder that the present ecological catastrophe is also a catastrophe of colonialism, one which has been unfolding for centuries."
James Bridle for Emergence Magazine: https://longreads.com/2025/02/11/here-come-the-lionfish/
@globalmuseum
I like 202025. Easy to use, self-explanatory, and a simple reminder that humans have been around at least 200,000 years, despite our extraordinarily fixation on just the past couple of millennia.
The world could use a lot more #deeptime consciousness:
https://www.facebook.com/EmpathyMedia/videos/1500760316628713/
Deep time (Evolution 
)
Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic time in his book Basin and Range, parts of which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton; his "system of the habitable Earth" was a deistic mechan...
prairie and pink Sioux quartzite
Touch-the-sky prairie, SW Minnesota
October 2024
Kinda cool that the quartzite is about 1.5 BY old that was once sandstone that formed in shallow rivers eroded from mountains that were that much older yet.
Every place a person might walk has a history, whether human or natural, that will blow your mind.
#deeptime
#time
#naturephotography
#LandscapePhotography
#BlackAndWhite
An important — but also surprising — study reports new climate estimates over the last 500 million years.
It estimates Earth's mean temperature has swung between ~10 °C and ~35 °C (~50 °F and ~95 °F), a much larger range than previously believed.
Season Two Episode Eight: 50 Million Years of Climate Change with Dr Christina De La Rocha
Have you ever thought about how dinosaurs lived on a warm, swampy Earth and how we live on one that’s cold enough to keep pretty much the entirety of Greenland and Antarctica buried under kilometers-thick sheets of solid ice and wondered, hmm, how did we get from there to here? The short answer is that it took 50 million years of declining atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and dropping temperatures, not to mention building an ice sheet or two. For the longer story of the last 50 million years of climate change, including some of the reasons why, catch this episode of our podcast with Dr De La Rocha! You’ll hear about plate tectonics and continental drift, silicate weathering, carbonate sedimentation, and the spectacular effects the growth of Earth’s ice sheets have had on Earth’s climate. There are also lessons here for where anthropogenic global warming is going and whether or not its effects have permanently disrupted the climate system. Fun fact: the total amount of climate change between 50 million years ago and now dwarfs what we’re driving by burning fossil fuels, and yet, what we’re doing is more terrifying, in that it’s unfolding millions of times faster.
Bonus content: If you want to see sketches and plots of the data discussed in this episode, you can do so at our website
what but imagination could have read
granite boulders back to their molten roots?
And how far back was back, and how far on
would basalt still be basalt, iron iron?
—Edwin Morgan certainly though so, and was inspired – by Burns & Hutton – to write “Theory of the Earth” (first published in New Writing Scotland 2, 1984)
#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #EdwinMorgan #poetry #DeepTime #geology
3/3
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun…
James Hutton met Robert Burns in 1787. Later that year, Burns chose to visit some of the sites discussed in Hutton’s THEORY OF THE EARTH. Is there an echo of Hutton’s “deep time”—oceans evaporating, rocks melting—to be heard in Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” (pub. 1794)?
#Scottish #literature #RobertBurns #poetry #Enlightenment #18thcentury #Geology #DeepTime
2/3
https://sunnydunny.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/robert-burns-and-geology/
James Hutton (1726–1797), father of modern #Geology, was born #OTD, 14 June (NS; 3 June OS). One of the first European proponents of “deep time”, the concluding sentence of his 1788 paper “Theory of the Earth” has been called one of the most lyrical sentences in all of #science. It reads,
The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.
#Scottish #literature #Enlightenment #18thcentury #DeepTime
1/3
More #CitizenScience: Participants in DigVenturers' #DeepTime project identified 12,802 previously unknown archaeological sites and monuments in England.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/27/hobbyist-archaeologists-identify-thousands-of-ancient-sites-in-england-deep-time-digventures-national-trust via @guardian
About the assumptions we make in #DeepTime.
It is a mistake to think of #nature as warm and cuddly. Many, perhaps most, #violent encounters between #humans and #wildlife are the result of the former treating the latter as #Disney characters.
One reason “#birds are #dinosaurs” made immediate sense to me was a vivid childhood memory: when I was about ten, I thought some #goslings were cute and wanted to pet them. #Mother #Goose had other ideas. Yeah, don’t do that.
It is equally a mistake to assume nature is All #Killing, All The Time. Fighting takes a lot of energy, and wild animals—including our own distant ancestors—are in constant peril of #starvation. Even a minor #injury can lead to #infection and #death.
Violence is a tool of survival, to be sure, whether in #predation, self-defense, or squabbles over #territory and #mating. Unnecessary violence is a quick road to #extinction. Most animals would rather do something else, when they can.
So before you fall back on “red in tooth and claw” as a default, look for other explanations. They’re usually more interesting anyway.
I love hollow ways
Worn-down tracks going somewhere
Peopled with travellers
