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Deep Time by
This is a true story. It’s a late winter day in
Plano, Texas. A high school geology class is
walking along a drainage ditch near school.
As the teacher points to the white limestone rock and
lectures, the students are shivering and muttering
amongst themselves. “This is a hands-on lesson,” the
teacher explains. “I want you to look around and see
what you can find.” Then he picks up a thin sheet
of chalk-white limestone and points to the design
inscribed in the rock: a coiled, ribbed shell from a
being that roamed the earth millions of years ago.
The students split up; some kick the rocks over,
uninterested, while others look more carefully. One
or two move methodically, examining the cold limestone.
Here and there they find a clam shell frozen
and lithographed into the stone. Snail shells are
everywhere.
One student walks a little farther from the class,
eyes down, bored. He’s new, having moved recently
from New Orleans. He’s looking halfheartedly at
a bed of fossilized oysters when his eyes fall on
something odd. His interest peaks, and he calls the
teacher over.
It’s a fist-sized vertebra, and it is not alone.
This was three years ago. Four months before, a
storm of near-biblical proportions rolled over the Gulf
Coast, smashing levies and flooding New Orleans,
leaving nearly 2,000 dead and 700 missing. The
student in this story was one of thousands of
displaced people who fled from the
storm, many escaping with just the
clothes on their backs.
For many, Hurricane Katrina was a
disaster on par with the September 11
attacks four years before. Just like 9/11,
it forced us as a nation and as a species
to contemplate our mortality. What will
we leave behind when we disappear
from this world?
Everyone considers this question at some point:
when we are swallowed by oblivion, when we check
out of this life, how will we have shaped our surroundings
and what void will be left by our passing? Will it
be fame or notoriety? Material things or a new idea?
And, most important, how long will it last? A lifetime
is often considered a mere 80 years; empires rise and
fall in 500; civilizations might last a thousand.
This student, so recently arrived, stands at the
threshold of an unimaginable 60 million years of
history, in a place that was once buried under a
shallow sea. And as he’s standing there, just for an
instant, the sea comes back.
The vertebra is one of eight, quickly identified
by the teacher as belonging to Xiphactinus audax, a
15-foot monster of a fish resembling a fanged tarpon.
The following weekend, more than 20 people arrive to
help excavate the remains. Among them are students,
teachers, curious neighbors, and me. That weekend,
we uncover more than two dozen vertebral spines, a
rib, and many unidentifiable fragments of bone and
teeth. Nearby emerge the foot-long skeleton of a
smaller fish, skull fragments of another, and shark
teeth. All around are countless oyster shells and
clams, remnants of the inland sea. It is an exciting
experience for everyone, but it leaves a deep mark on
me. I am a teenager who is crazy about fossils, and
I’m having my first experience with deep time.
Humans’ concept of time is necessarily limited.
Our comprehension begins to dwindle around 500
years, and becomes fuzzy and vague as we approach
the thousands. A hundred thousand years seems an
unimaginably long time; in fact, it would encompass
all of recorded human history and a good bit of recent
Asher Elbein, Atlanta, GA
To walk on
fossils is like
staring into
the night sky
prehistory too. Even today, there are some who draw
the line, claiming the world is a youthful 10,000
years. “Isn’t that long enough?” they ask.
No, it’s not nearly long enough. Once you are
contemplating spans of time that immense, you are
beyond the realm of easy comprehension. You are
swimming in deep time. This is the time it takes a
continent to move, an ocean to advance, a mountain
range to rise, a valley to be cut from rock. In such a
concept, all human history and human achievement is
lost, with no more effect or importance than individual
molecules have on the flow of a stream. In the
words of John Playfair, a mathematician of the Scottish
Enlightenment, “The mind seemed to grow giddy
by looking so far into the abyss of time.”
The concept of deep time was introduced by James
Hutton, a friend and colleague of Mr. Playfair. Hutton
envisioned a world built by uncounted eons of cyclical
geology, shaped by winds and tides, deposition
and uplift and erosion. Most significantly, he realized
that a world like this could not have been formed out
of a recent catastrophe but instead the long processes
of geologic time. In Hutton’s words, “We find no
vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
It’s a simple statement, but the implications are
staggering.
The ultimate fate of the Xiphactinus was to be
displayed in a glass case in our high school’s library,
for the interest and edification of students. Once dug
up, it is supposed to remain and no one
imagines it might be lost once again. But
of course the school could burn down,
close, or may be ravaged by a tornado.
The bones could be sold, misplaced, vandalized.
In a mere 20 years, they could be
erased from our knowledge. That this
Xiphactinus has an impact on the world
today is also by mere chance – a fleeting
coincidence of the right conditions, the
right time, the right people. If that particular hurricane-displaced
student hadn’t been there, the creature
might never have been discovered.
What, then, of humanity? When all is said and
done, when we have bowed out of the great game of
life, what will our species leave behind? Artifacts of
one kind or another. Perhaps fossils as well, although
that is by no means a certainty. What is more likely is
that all knowledge of our existence will simply be
erased. Hurricanes will come; fossils will appear
from erosion of the hillsides, unremarked; time will
march on.
Many of us know this, in our heart of hearts, but
we refuse to acknowledge it or in many cases even
consider it. If it’s true, we say, then what purpose does
our existence serve? Must we be rendered meaningless
before deep time?
It is a sentiment we seem to both fear and find
oddly comforting. Percy Bysshe Shelley gloomily
wrote: “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’/Nothing
beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal
wreck, boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands
stretch far away.”
T.S. Eliot went still further in a famous passage
from “Choruses from the Rock,” composed over half
a century ago and reeking with a self-pitying gloom:
“And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent godless
people:/Their only monument the asphalt road/And a
thousand lost golf balls.’”
Is that indeed our fate? Perhaps so. In billions of
years, the Sun will die, and the Earth will die with it.
But by then there will have been billions more years
of marching life; it is just as foolhardy to assume we
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Photo by Sophie Burke, Belmont, MA
will have no impact as it is to assume we are the end
result. Along with every other living thing, our actions
help determine the shape of the far-off future, in ways
both subtle and immediate. To walk on fossils is like
staring into the night sky; if nothing else, it forces a
kind of perspective. ✎
Whale Song
I have never heard it, phantom whale calls,
so deep they make one cringe, so shrill they make one cry,
except before I was born.
I know,
before I developed the lips, eyelashes, fingers, brain,
I have now,
I lived in the ocean,
I floated like a little walnut,
I was the simplest creature,
I heard the whale song.
This makes me wonder,
was it only I who received this gift,
or was it you also?
Giant whales, so big, beyond my comprehension,
peaceful beauties,
we have killed you all.
We stabbed and raped and took
for no good reason.
We took our ships,
I take blame somehow, I feel so awful,
we sharpened sticks and killed your
families
peace
your song traveled across the ocean,
you swam together for centuries through the deep,
mystic water.
What were you saying? Were you speaking through god?
Are you god?
I think we should worship you.
You blinked your eyes slowly, and your tears melted
with the ocean
We drank your blood with greedy slurps.
Are we evolution’s mistake?
I want to learn your song.
My race will never learn,
I am so lost with my race.
If I could trade in my clumsy legs and sharp words,
I would gladly accept your fins and godly
demeanor.
by Jaden Gragg, Shawnee, KS
APRIL ’09 • Teen Ink
environment
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