<iframe title="Embedded in Earth’s Story: Geology, Rocks, and Time with Marcia Bjornerud" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jbK_wGS9vhc?feature=oembed" height="113" width="200" allowfullscreen="" allow="fullscreen" style="aspect-ratio: 1.76991 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> Marcia Bjornerud's work is about foregrounding the earth, instead of seeing it as merely the backdrop to human activities. Geology is the etymology of the earth. We don't have a geological record of the first 500 million years. In order to make new rocks, you need a dynamic planet. The moon doesn't make new rocks, because it's not dynamic. The Earth has always kept a record of its past, almost as if it wants to have an archive of itself. Continental shelves are the best record of the past, because they are not subject to erosion like continents, and they aren't subducted like the ocean floor. And when continents collide, they thrust up continental shelves like the Rockies, where we can study them. Continental shelves and ecotones are places where there is a sharp gradient, and there is high energy flow. That is where life thrives. Modernity creates an illusion of sharp lines and delineations, when in fact it's all a continuum. Geologists who rejected the anthropocene as a geological epoch did it on grounds that geology is not about the future. They went against the central idea of James Hutton, the father of geology, who established that there is a continuum of processes extending from the past, into the present, and into the future. He broke us from a biblical way of seeing things, where there was a discontinuity between the events depicted in the bible and the present. The importance of cycles: Venus is still active geologically, its volcanos are spewing sulphur into the atmosphere, but there is no return movement. What's beautiful about the Earth is that there is a cyclical movement. Makes me think of [[Gaia Alchemy]].