The Earth has a story that far precedes ours. Before we arrived on the scene, the Earth was already ancient beyond belief, shaped and reshaped by tectonic upheavals, climate changes, and mass extinctions—an evolution She has meticulously archived in the strata and sediment beneath our feet. In this narrated essay, author and geologist Marcia Bjornerud orients us to read these many-volume memoirs of our planet. Celebrating the deep time-fulness of Earth—the four billion years of dynamism that have made this moment possible—she wonders what might happen to our understanding of the past and the present if we remembered the stories that came before our humancentric one. 

Read the essay. 

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

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