Rambling Through Time

There’s a seafloor in Central Park. It crops out from under fallen ginkgo leaves, in black hunks sparkling with muscovite. This familiar rock was laid down as deep-sea muck half a billion years ago in a strange ocean haunted by alien exoskeletons, and gelatinous things that pulsed and squirmed.

But you can’t find fossils in this Central Park seabed — they were all cooked to schist tens of millions of years later in titanic continental collisions that pushed snowcapped mountains into tropical New England skies. As you can imagine, this was all a very long time ago — but then again, you can’t imagine it.

This is the central insight of geology. The world is old beyond comprehension, and our story on it is short. The conceit of the Anthropocene, the supposed new epoch we’re living in, is that humanity can already make claims to its geological legacy. But if we’re to endure as a civilization, or even as a species, for anything more than what might amount to a thin layer of odd rock in some windswept canyon of the far future, some humility is in order about our, thus far, infinitesimal part in the history of the planet.

Read The New York Times story by Peter Brannen - “Rambling Through Time.”