It’s January 2023 and everyone is playing with language generating model ChatGPT. If you’re reading this post from the 2030s or later and want to reminisce about the quaint days of AI, before it caused and/or worsened all sorts of societal problems, this post is what you’re looking for. We don’t know what happens from here. I’m not even going to attempt to make predictions or discuss the possibilities (there’s already enough of that out there). I was curious and simply wanted to see what it was like. Below are several separate chats, all with a geoscience foundation. My questions/prompts are in bold italics and the program’s answers are in normal text. Some of the chats have follow-up questions. I’ve put some additional commentary (not part of the chat) in red italic text below each segment of the chat.

What are the most important uncertainties to consider when reconstructing past climate change from the sedimentary record?

There are several important uncertainties to consider when reconstructing past climate change from the sedimentary record:

1. Age control: Establishing the age of sedimentary deposits is critical for determining the timing of past climate events. This can be challenging, especially for older deposits, as the available dating techniques become less precise.
2. Stratigraphy: The layering of sedimentary deposits can be disrupted by geological processes, making it difficult to accurately reconstruct the original sequence of events.
3. Diagenesis: Physical and chemical changes that occur to sedimentary deposits after they are deposited can alter the original record of past climate conditions.
4. Sample size: The amount of sedimentary material available for study may be limited, which can make it difficult to accurately reconstruct past climate conditions.
5. Proxy data: Different types of sedimentary materials (such as fossil shells or pollen) can be used as proxies for past climate conditions. However, the accuracy of these proxies depends on the accuracy of the assumptions used to interpret them.
6. Spatial and temporal resolution: The resolution of the sedimentary record is limited by the spacing and duration of sedimentary deposits. This can make it difficult to accurately reconstruct fine-scale changes in past climate conditions.

First thing I notice is how the program repeats the question in the first part of the answer. This seems to be a fundamental part of the behavior, as it occurs in all the answers (in various ways). It reminds me of student answers to written exam questions. The list the program provides is really quite good!! I might edit this slightly, but it captures the main issues. Impressive. The below question/answer is a follow-up question to the above.

What are some examples of the layering of sedimentary deposits being disrupted by geological processes?

There are several geological processes that can disrupt the layering of sedimentary deposits:

1. Erosion: The removal of sediment by wind, water, or ice can disrupt the layering of sedimentary deposits.
2. Burial: Sedimentary deposits can be buried by newer deposits, making it difficult to accurately reconstruct the original sequence of events.
3. Deformation: Tectonic forces can deform sedimentary deposits, causing them to fold or fault. This can disrupt the original layering of the deposits.
4. Metamorphism: High temperatures and pressures can cause sedimentary rocks to undergo metamorphism, which can alter the original layering of the rocks.
5. Diagenesis: Physical and chemical changes that occur to sedimentary deposits after they are deposited can alter the original layering of the deposits.
6. Bioturbation: The actions of burrowing animals can mix and disturb sedimentary deposits, disrupting the original layering.

My follow-up question requested some more detail about one of the items in the list in the first answer. Again, a pretty good summary! However, check out #2 (“Burial”). The program is not comprehending the concept of stratigraphy. Stratigraphy is created by burial! A sequence of events (of sediment deposition at the surface of the Earth) is generated through burial. Layers being buried is, in fact, how we conceptualize the sequence of events (processes). Another nuance is how it uses “original layering” in each item. That phrase works perfectly well for some of those, but less so for others. For example, diagenetic change more commonly alters the composition (mineralogy, isotope geochemistry, etc.) of the sedimentary material, not really the “layering”. What does this all mean? 🤷🏼‍♂️

What was the Earth’s climate like in the Eocene?

The Eocene was a geological epoch that lasted from about 56 to 34 million years ago. During this time, the Earth’s climate was generally warm and humid, with temperatures ranging from subtropical to tropical. This warmth was due to high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which acted as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Eocene was also a time of high sea levels, as melting polar ice caps caused the oceans to rise. This led to the creation of shallow seas and the expansion of shallow-water habitats, which supported a diverse array of plant and animal life. The Eocene is also known for the proliferation of mammals and the evolution of modern whales and primates.

Like a good student, the program kicks off its answer with some basic info about the Eocene. I guess it’s programmed to provide definitions of some terminology before discussing it (?). Pretty good summary for only a paragraph, it covers the general state, the proposed cause, and then the state of various sub-systems of the Earth system. If I asked this question on an quiz in my Climate History (intro paleoclimate for non-science majors) course, I would mark it as correct! Follow-up question/answer below.

Why was atmospheric CO₂ so high in the Eocene?

There are several factors that may have contributed to the high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the Eocene. One factor may have been the high levels of volcanic activity during this time, which released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Another factor may have been the warm temperatures of the Eocene, which could have caused the oceans to release more dissolved carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through a process called outgassing. The warm temperatures may also have caused increased decomposition of organic matter, releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is also possible that there were other, unknown factors that contributed to the high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the Eocene.

Nice. After talking about volcanic CO₂ it then gets into several amplifying feedbacks.

By how much would current CO₂ levels need to increase to match those of the Eocene?

The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the Eocene were much higher than they are today. It is estimated that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the Eocene ranged from about 1,000 to 2,000 parts per million (ppm), while current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are around 415 ppm. To match the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of the Eocene, current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would need to increase by more than double their current level. This would have significant implications for the Earth’s climate and the life forms that inhabit it.

It is important to note that the high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the Eocene were not caused by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels. Today, human activities are the primary driver of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that continued increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could lead to significant and potentially catastrophic changes to the Earth’s climate.

Bonus points for the second paragraph. I asked a fairly straightforward question, but the program “decided” to provide additional information to further elaborate on how Eocene climate might be relevant to modern climate change.

How did AABW (Antarctic Bottom Water) formation respond to climate change over the past 4 million years?

Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) is a type of cold, dense water that forms in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and flows northward along the ocean floor. The formation of AABW is influenced by several factors, including the temperature, salinity, and density of the water in the region, as well as the mixing of water masses and the movement of the Earth’s crust.

Over the past 4 million years, the climate of the Earth has undergone many changes, including multiple ice ages and warmer periods. During ice ages, the formation of AABW may have been enhanced due to increased sea ice formation around Antarctica, which leads to increased brine rejection and increased density of the water. During warmer periods, the formation of AABW may have been reduced due to decreased sea ice formation and reduced density of the water.

It is difficult to say exactly how the formation of AABW has responded to climate change over the past 4 million years, as the climate has changed in complex ways and the mechanisms that control the formation of AABW are not fully understood. However, it is likely that the formation of AABW has varied in response to changing climate conditions, and that it will continue to do so in the future as the Earth’s climate continues to change.

So, this is a question we are actively working on! Our NSF-funded project is led by Ph.D. student Natalia Varela (2018-2023) and is focused on sediment samples and data from IODP Site U1524 in the Ross Sea (which I sailed on in 2018). Again, note how the program dutifully provides a definition and explanation of what AABW is before addressing our question. The third and final paragraph is a classic “it’s complicated” response that all of us are used to giving. We were happy that there wasn’t a clear answer (we’ve done our homework to identify a problem to work on).

What does the current scientific understanding say about how AABW is responding to very recent climate change (over the past few decades)?

The current scientific understanding is that the formation and properties of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) have been changing in response to recent climate change.

One of the main factors that has been affecting the formation of AABW is the warming of the Southern Ocean, which is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As the ocean warms, the sea ice around Antarctica melts, which leads to a decrease in the salinity and density of the water, making it more difficult for AABW to form. Additionally, research indicates that the amount of AABW being formed is decreasing as well as its volume and temperature of the water is also increasing.

The ocean circulation is also impacted due to the climate change, where it is expected that the density of the water in the Southern Ocean will decrease, resulting in the reduction of the sinking rate of the dense water and thus less of the deep and bottom water formation. This is expected to lead to a slowdown of the global ocean circulation and potential impacts on the ocean ecosystems and global climate.

Several studies have been conducted that support the above mentioned change, for example one study using observations and models suggests that the AABW formation is declining due to warming and freshening of the Southern Ocean. Another study using the ocean observation data since the 1960s also shows that the rate of the AABW formation has decreased.

In summary, current scientific understanding indicates that the recent climate change is having a significant impact on the formation and properties of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) and is leading to a decrease in the amount and density of AABW being formed, as well as an overall warming trend, which in turn is affecting the ocean circulation and having potential consequences for the global climate and marine ecosystem.

The above was a follow-up to the first question about AABW, so it did not need to provide me a definition of AABW, which makes it feel conversational. If I were reviewing/editing/grading this text I would recommend junking that first sentence, not necessary. I don’t focus on the modern behavior of AABW (I don’t keep up on all that literature), so I’m not able to rigorously evaluate what it’s saying, but it seems reasonable given what I do know. I was intrigued (and impressed!) when it mentioned “several studies” and “one study” in the example provided, so I asked the below follow-up:

Thanks … can you provide links or detailed citation information for these studies you mentioned above?

I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have the ability to provide specific links or detailed citation information for studies. However, I can help you with some general guidance on finding research papers that have looked at the impacts of recent climate change on the formation and properties of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW).

Here are a few keywords that may be helpful in searching for relevant studies:

• Antarctic Bottom Water
• Southern Ocean
• Climate change
• Warming
• Freshening
• Ocean circulation

You can use these keywords to search for papers in scientific databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, or Google Scholar. It is also worth checking the websites of organizations that conduct research on oceanography, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), or the European Space Agency (ESA).

Alternatively, you can look into studies that were recently published on journals such as Journal of Climate, Nature Communications, or Global Biogeochemical Cycles which are the common venue for the Oceanography or Climate science research studies.

Please let me know if you have any other question or need help with your research.

Disappointing. I already know how to use GoogleScholar with keywords, we all do this everyday and have gotten pretty good at it. So, this program gets its information from what humans have written to guide it’s language generation, but it can’t connect to specific writing in a direct way. The text in the segment above says “for example one study using observations and models suggests …” yet it does not know what that one study is? Anyway, I presume the ability for this type of auto-generating text program to be able to integrate with specific info that is accessible (or, at a minimum provide a reference) will happen in the next few years 🤷🏼‍♂️. Okay, now for a couple of fun ones:

Can you describe the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum in the style of Kendrick Lamar?

I’ll note that it starts composing the text mere seconds after I hit ‘Enter’ to ask the question. It’s fast. I’ve listened to some Kendrick Lamar, but I must admit I haven’t listened to him so much that I have a solid feel for his lyrical style. The above seems pretty generic to me, but that’s consistent to all of the program’s answers in my small amount of interaction. Has a meteor impact been proposed to be the trigger for the PETM? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong, I’ve never focused on the PETM interval itself. I do appreciate the final two lines, a nice articulation of why it’s important and valuable to reconstruct past climates!

Can you describe the Pleistocene ice ages in the style of Shakespeare?

Fantastic stuff. I would’ve liked to have seen a stanza about orbital forcings (Milankovitch cycles) but I suppose I didn’t ask for the cause of the ice ages, just a description. To what extent I’ll actually use this to help me work (instead of merely experimenting), I’m not sure yet. If this “evolves” to be able to help me find specific information within journal articles then I would use all the time. For example, “Briefly summarize and point me to a handful of papers that include measurements of velocity for dense shelf water cascading processes in high latitudes.” Even if it didn’t return all or the most relevant papers, this would be a useful way to narrow down the search. We shall see what happens next!

What is rare? Is a recurring event that happens once every decade rare or common? Is an event that occurs once a century rare? Looking to the dictionary we can find that “rare” is “an event, situation, or condition that does not occur very often.” It depends, of course, on the temporal frame of reference. Someone who has well-developed timefulness skills may respond “Duh, of course it depends on the timescale of investigation.” But, would the student new to geoscience (or other areas of inquiry that work in longer timescales) or the person in your family or community who rarely thinks beyond the timescale of their lived experience consider this obvious and trivial?

In our lived experience we can naturally shift our understanding of what is ‘frequent’ versus ‘rare’ based on the timescale. For example, if you do some activity (go for a jog, a bicycle ride, etc.) once a week, this might be quite frequent for some people or contexts but infrequent for others. We’ll add phrases like “which is a lot for me” or “which is pretty rare for us” as a way to communicate the temporal reference. Or, if we don’t add that, someone will ask “So, is that often for you?”. The point is that, in the context of the range of timescales we experience, we are pretty good at incorporating the temporal reference without thinking about it too much.

Coupled with how common or rare an event is over time is the significance or ‘size’ of the event (i.e., frequency-magnitude relationship). Humans have internalized this in numerous contexts. For example, as I write this post (April 2021) the pandemic is still affecting the globe, to varying degrees, and a phrase we find ourselves saying is “this is a once-in-a-century event!”. Implicit in such a statement is that this event we are experiencing is both rare and of significant magnitude. In turn, we often link this to some vague idea of probability — because an event is significant and infrequent it’s likely not to happen again for a long time.

We can consider these ideas for timescales longer than the human lived experience and for ‘prehistorical’ times (before the collective memory or spoken/written record of humans). While this may not come as naturally to us, it’s a skill we can develop. While thinking about this, I was reminded of this 1967 paper from Gretener that I read many years ago (as part of a grad-level stratigraphy course). I won’t summarize the details of this paper here, I encourage you to read it.

Gretener’s main point, which I’ve highlighted in the image of the Abstract above, is that, given enough time, an event that is exceedingly rare becomes probable if not certain. We could apply this notion to the huge range of timescales represented in Earth history. For example, a rare event at the scale of 100,000 years might be considered ‘common’ when viewing 10,000,000 years. How can this stretching of time and the associated frequency-magnitude relationships help us think about and cope with the ‘rare’ events in our society?

Another thought-provoking paper along these lines is this 1989 paper from Kenneth Hsu. This paper focuses on extinction events but the message is very similar to the Gretener paper.

Why is this important? Related to these ideas is the notion of shifting baselines, or a gradual change in what is considered a “normal” range of conditions due to lack of memory and/or knowledge of past conditions. The idea of shifting baselines has been discussed in the context of environmental issues for decades and, more recently, for climate change. And the relationship to hazards and how we collectively assess risk (e.g., “a 100-year flood”) is particularly relevant. As geoscientists, we make the case that the enhanced temporal perspectives gained from studying Earth history provides insight into contemporary challenges. In addition to the technical insights, I think we can also highlight the development of temporal reasoning itself.

As the previous posts in this series (clock time and event time and what is an event?) discussed, my motivation in thinking about timefulness is to move towards developing activities/assignments in my courses that are more explicit about temporal reasoning. One way to do this is develop specific activities centered on temporal reasoning as the primary learning objective. And/or it could be embedded within activities/assignments that have other learning goals, but it would be highlighted and intentionally discussed as part of the activity (a temporal reasoning ‘check’).

In the context of this post, a bunch of potential ideas — e.g., analyze the frequency/magnitude relationships of well-dated sedimentation events and include a class discussion (even just 5 minutes) or reflection question about the dependency of terms like ‘rare’ versus ‘frequent’. If such temporal reasoning ‘checks’ occur many times throughout the course there could then be a more lengthy summary-style activity near the end of the semester to tie them together. 🤔

The previous post briefly discussed the notions of ‘clock time’ and ‘event time’ in the context of geological thinking. (Note that I’m using and instead of versus — I don’t think we need to pit these against each other in a way that implies a dichotomy.) For this post I’d like to explore the idea what an ‘event’ is in the context of the multiscale temporal reasoning common in geoscience and Earth history. As always, these blog posts aren’t meant to be a comprehensive and exhaustive treatment — the spirit of this is simply to share some thoughts as I read and learn.

What defines an ‘event’? A straight-up google definition is: “a thing that happens, especially one of importance”. Perhaps we could add to this with specifying that an event has a beginning and an end — that is, it is a discrete ‘thing that happens’ in the context of time such that you experience the before, during, and after. For example, we typically don’t refer to a permanent change as an event. But, as I’ll get into below, what’s temporary and what’s permanent can depend on the temporal perspective.

I was recently reading this fantastic 2020 review about paleoclimate research in Science by Jess Tierney and coauthors and decided to use a famous and well-studied Earth history event — the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) — as the inspiration for the example below. That is, what I show below is not strictly based on PETM specifics, think of it more as a generic example to illustrate a broader point.

Okay, let’s set this up. I’ll show a bunch of plots like the one below where time is on the horizontal axis and showing elapsed time progressing from left-to-right. The vertical axis is some ‘change’ in the most generic sense, it could be anything. (For example, in the context of paleoclimate, it might be the values of a measurable proxy that is used to represent temperature, atmospheric CO2, etc.) This first view shows a ‘spike’ occurring at ~1 million years. I think we would all agree this is an event with a beginning and an end, and a clear signal of temporary change in context of background conditions.

Now, let’s ‘zoom in’, in a temporal sense, by changing the horizontal axis to show this event over 150,000 years in the plot below. (If I had the coding skills I would’ve built an interactive widget for you to zoom in/out however you like but, alas, I am not so skilled!) At this scale we can see the ‘shape’ of this event. There is an abrupt beginning and a gradual transition from the peak change back to the pre-event condition.

In the lingo of paleoclimate, we might say that this event has a rapid onset and gradual recovery. In this case, the duration of the onset is only ~5% of the duration of the entire event. This is just one shape, of course. You could envision it in reverse, symmetrical, and so on.

Let’s temporally zoom in more, to the beginning of this event. The plot below shows approximately 10,000 years of time and focuses on that initial change, or onset. Here, we can see that the initial change — going from the baseline to the peak — occurs over 6,000 years. Is 6,000 years ‘rapid’? Additionally, if this was the only temporal perspective we had, would we call this an ‘event’? From this view, this looks like a permanent change.

One of the key timefulness skills is the ability to mentally zoom in and out like this with relative ease. Like any skill that eventually feels natural, it takes practice. Perhaps an additional way to practice is to transpose these geological timescales (millennia to millions of years) to timescales relevant to human experience.

The plot below is the exact same event as above, but with the horizontal (time) axis now in years. Thus, instead of the total duration as 130,000 years, we are considering this change over ~13 years. For adult humans this is a duration that has a ‘feel’ to it. Just as in the PETM-inspired event above, this change as a rapid onset and a gradual transition back to baseline.

We could then zoom in more just as we did above and see that the initial change for this ‘event’ occurred over ~7 months. Again, is seven months ‘rapid’? The obvious quick answer to these questions is, of course, ‘it depends’.

This notion of dependence on timescale-of-investigation is not a new idea in geoscience, of course. These ideas are deeply ingrained in our science and show up in many forms and in numerous contexts. To circle back to the Tierney et al. (2020) Science paper, they make the following statement near the end of the paper regarding temporary changes in climate:

Earth has the ability to recover from a rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration — the PETM is a textbook example of this process. Indeed, in every case of past CO2 perturbation, the Earth system has compensated to avoid a runaway greenhouse or permanent icehouse. Yet the natural recovery from aberrations takes place on geological, not anthropogenic, time scales.

Emphasis mine. They are making this critical point about timescales of Earth-system recovery because the audience, the reader, of their paper may not be as familiar with (or skilled at) adjusting their temporal perspective.

Those that are accustomed to thinking in this multi-timescale way — that is, those that have developed timefulness skills — might consider my examples above as obvious or even trivial. And that, I think, is the point. Could the type of thought exercises above that transpose longer timescales to the range of timescales that humans experience help people develop timefulness? I suspect that many geoscience instructors are already doing things like this in innovative and clever ways, but perhaps in an embedded or implied sense. I’d like to suggest that we be more intentional and highlight temporal reasoning when it is an important aspect of a particular lab activity, problem set, or project. And, in some cases, develop new activities/projects in which temporal reasoning is elevated, where it is the primary learning outcome.

I plan on using future posts to ponder this further and to, hopefully, develop some tangible ideas to use in my teaching. One quick idea to end this post: I could break students into small groups, give each group a different temporal view of some change (the different plots above), ask them to characterize it with both language and quantitatively, and then we convene as an entire class to discuss the differences.

How do the different ways we perceive time influence how we think (and learn to think) about deep time? As I mentioned in a post last week, a goal I have in 2021 is to read and learn about how humans perceive time with a specific focus on connecting that to how geoscientists develop ‘timefulness’. I’ll get into how Marcia Bjornerud explains timefulness, and my own reflections about what it means, in a future post. For now, consider timefulness as a mindset that is not just ‘deep time’ thinking, but the ability to connect multiple timescales, spanning the continuum from human experience to geological, to the present and with an eye on the future. In his book Deep Time Reckoning, cultural anthropologist Vincent Ialenti puts it this way:

“Learning to hop more nimbly around these timescales can inspire a more refined multiscale, multiangle, or multiperspective sensibility. This kind of multidimensional thinking must, I suggest, be cultivated during the Anthropocene.”

Yes, to hop around timescales — or, put another way, the ability to temporally zoom in and out. I’m interested in how geoscientists develop this skill and how we can more effectively facilitate others — students, each other, our communities — to learn and apply timefulness to the big challenges we face.

For this post, I wanted to briefly explore the related ideas of clock time and event time. In a social/cultural context, this is typically thought of as cultures and societies that tend towards operating by the clock versus measuring time primarily by social events. Both are, of course, in operation depending on the context. Work-related meetings are very much on clock time in my world — they start and (hopefully) end at specific times. Those running the meeting will even say things like “We only have a couple minutes left and I want to respect everyone’s time, so let’s stop here.” In contrast, a social gathering may have a clock-time beginning (although communicated with some looseness; e.g. “Come by anytime after 6pm”) but in many cases does not have a clock-time end. People leave at different times depending on their circumstances and, at some point, the event (the party) ends because it “feels” over.

“090421 Watch” by steeljam is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

We can apply this notion to geology and Earth history and to the thought processes that goes into reconstructing past conditions and events. The geologic timescale itself is a combination of event time and clock time. Boundaries between the named divisions of the timescale are, in most cases, based on the “event” that is the disappearance of notable fossils. While we have incorporated clock time (absolute ages), a task that is seemingly never ending as our geochronological tools improve, it’s important to remember that the geological timescale stands on event time. Marcia Bjornerud has an interesting passage in Timefulness about this idea in the context biologists applying molecular clock approaches to Earth history and how those findings are not always consistent with conclusions from paleontologists:

“The disagreement reveals interesting cultural differences between field-based paleontologists, who, inured to the idiosyncrasies of fossil life, are willing to embrace the idea of nonsteady rates of evolution, versus lab-based molecular biologists, who see mechanism in cellular structure and are more orthodox uniformitarians than their geologic counterparts.”

Event time and clock time is embedded in much of the research I do and am interested in. For example, we’ve been working on the sedimentology and stratigraphic architecture of outcropping Cretaceous deep-marine deposits in southern Chile for almost two decades now. Some of the work is clearly using an event-time framework in that the objectives of the research don’t require clock time to make a contribution and provide insight into, for example, fundamental processes. Indeed, a lot of physical stratigraphy research is perfectly comfortable in a relative timescale that reconstructs the order and character of events but need not assign ages to them.

But then there’s other research that does require clock time. For example, testing hypotheses about how specific tectonic or climatic events (that are well established in clock time) requires knowledge of the absolute ages. We published a paper a couple years ago that was singularly focused on sharing with the community a refined ‘clock time’ for this specific place and time in the geologic past (the phrase ‘chronostratigraphic framework’ is arguably just jargon for ‘clock time’).

And if the science is rooted in understanding the rates of processes then, of course, we need to be thinking in clock time. Numerous disciplines in geoscience have elevated questions related to rates — whether it’s landscape change, biological evolution, climate transitions, tectonic processes, and more — among the most important questions for the community to address.

I’ll close with a final thought: What is an ‘event’? The example of the party mentioned above is fairly clear cut — it has a beginning and an end and would be a discrete ‘thing’ in your memory. But, what about when an event is stretched out over time? As I write this (January 2021) we are still in the midst of a pandemic that, in the U.S., will soon be a year long. Our future memory of this may think of it as an ‘event’, but when exactly did it begin? And the ‘end’ of it will certainly not be a single moment or day on the calendar. However, historians a century from now will likely talk about what feels like forever to us as a discrete event. Events in the geologic past, whether it’s a few thousand years ago or hundreds of millions of years ago, aren’t so different. I’ll explore this idea of events in the context of temporal reasoning more in a future post.

Remember blogs? Back in the 2000s and into the early 2010s, the ‘weblog’ venue for writing and sharing on the internet was quite popular, spawning various networks and grass-roots communities of people with shared interests. It was a whole thing. This was when I was in graduate school and the first few years after my Ph.D. and I found it to be both an enjoyable way to share and learn and also a vehicle for writing about science that wasn’t a technical paper/proposal but also not trying to be journalism or public outreach. I miss that outlet.

So, for 2021 I’m going to attempt to reengage with this style of writing as a way to ‘stretch those muscles’ a bit. I thought about doing this at the original site, but decided to make my life simpler by just using this research group website and identifying as a Clastic Detritus blog post with my ‘classic’ banner image and disclaimer at the top. I’m not going to be overly ambitious about it, I’m aiming for approximately one post per month. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes! (I’m not going to have a comment thread as it would likely attract spam/trolls; you can find me on Twitter or reach out via email.)

A potential theme for some of the posts this year is exploring how geoscientists think about time. Over this recent holiday break, I reread the wonderful 2018 book Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud and also read a fantastic new book by Vincent Ialenti called Deep Time Reckoning. Both books have similar subtitles: “How thinking like a geologist can help save the world” and “How future thinking can help Earth now”. Both of these works articulate one of the most valuable aspects of ‘deep time’ thinking common in geoscience — how studying longer timescales and reconstructing Earth history is critical for understanding our present and for thinking about our future. Not a new idea, to be sure, but these two books have refreshing takes on this notion in my opinion. Thus, I’ll likely write future posts about both of these.

As I’ve progressed in my own teaching, course development/design, and interaction with students, I’ve become increasingly interested in how we, as geoscientists, think about time. It’s not merely an appreciation for the vastness of Earth’s history or gaining knowledge about important processes that occur at very long timescales. Geoscientists also have the ability to consider a huge range of timescales, and can ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’, temporally, with relative ease. We can intuitively identify and focus our thinking on a specific range of timescales for a certain question or problem. Indeed, these and similar are among the skills that Bjornerud has coined as timefulness. Deep time (long timescales and the distant past) is a key part of timefulness, but there’s more to it.

But, how do we generate this intuition? That is, how do students and novice geoscientists develop timefulness? And, how can I improve my teaching (and mentoring) to enhance that development? There’s a rich field of time-perception research as well as work by education researchers focused specifically on temporal reasoning to draw upon. For example, this GSA Special Paper from 2012 has several of insightful articles from geoscience education researchers about teaching and learning related to geologic time. My goal isn’t an exhaustive treatment of everything there is to know — I’m not an education researcher or cognitive psychologist and don’t pretend to be. My aim isn’t to write scholarly pieces suitable for journals — my goal is simply to share some aspects I found interesting in my own exploration and learning.

Again, getting back into this more stream-of-consciousness and ‘low stakes’ style of writing is an experiment. Maybe it gathers some momentum, maybe it fizzles, stay tuned. The first real post (in a few weeks time) will be about one, or maybe both, of the books mentioned above: Timefulness and Deep Time Reckoning.