Brave New Epoch
A sheet of glass stretches along the entryway of the University of Leicester’s geology department. The glass protects a collection of fossils that are mounted to the wall in swirls, as if spiraling out of primordial time. Words have been sandblasted into the glass, snippets of a quote from James Hutton, the Scottish naturalist who in the late 18th century discerned the Earth’s age and founded the science of geology: “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end… Time which measures everything is to nature endless.”
Walking to or from his nearby office, Jan Zalasiewicz occasionally casts a pensive gaze at the display. The display’s fossils will erode away eventually, though fragments of its shattered glass may endure for many millions of years. If in the far future the Earth still harbors geologists like Zalasiewicz, one of them could conceivably find a few translucent pebbles worn smooth by wind and rain, and surmise they were artifacts from a departed former world.
Zalasiewicz is a stratigrapher, a geologist who studies successive rock layers to codify the Earth’s deep history.
