## Metadata - Author: [[Laura Poppick]] - Full Title: Strata - Category: #books ## Highlights - If you reach out your arms and imagine Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history as a timeline that extends from the tip of your right hand to the tip of your left, the arrival of oxygen gas falls around your heart, at about 2.4 billion years ago, give or take a couple hundred million years. ([Location 196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DK4613C4&location=196)) - “For all of time it will probably stand as the most important article ever written in the field,” writes William Schopf, a graduate student who helped Barghoorn pen that manuscript, but who humbly declined authorship himself because he didn’t feel he had contributed enough. Spurred by this new paper on the Gunflint Chert, geologists went searching for evidence of ancient life in black cherts around the world. Papers flooded out, claiming to have solved Darwin’s dilemma and showing how fossils had been in those seemingly lifeless rocks all along—they had simply been microscopic. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DK4613C4&location=255)) - by “how the earth works,” Woody meant how air, rock, water, life, and ice all interact in the web of feedback loops that geoscientists call the Earth system. Together, the five facets of this system—the atmosphere (air), lithosphere (rock), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (life), and cryosphere (ice)—orchestrate the global climate and, in turn, the underpinnings of our lives. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DK4613C4&location=412)) - We live our lives within recycled landscapes and those recycled landscapes live within us. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DK4613C4&location=417)) - The science is the poem and the poem is the science. Everything on this planet connects with everything else, from the microscopic contents of the air we breathe to the macroscopic movements of continents and ocean currents. ([Location 418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DK4613C4&location=418)) - Understanding the intricacies of these interconnections has become ever more critical as geoengineering gains traction as a potential antidote to our climate crisis. If we are to seriously consider tightening our grip on the planet as a way to heal it, we have a strong imperative to first understand how the planet works. The strata can tell us how the behaviors of ancient environmental engineers have rippled through the Earth system on geologic timescales, which in turn can tell us how this system might respond today if we shoot aerosols into the sky to deflect solar radiation or pump carbon into the deep sea. We can learn that if we are not mindful, our manipulations will cause more harm than good. When Woody arrived at Harvard, the field of geobiology—the study of the interconnectedness of the Earth system—was still relatively new. But while this was a new way of thinking in modern Western science, many Eastern religions and Indigenous cultures had long recognized the cross talk between life and Earth, and how that ancient dialogue led to the evolution of the world we inhabit today. ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DK4613C4&location=423))