Strata: Stories from Deep Time with Laura Poppick

In this episode of the Book Science Podcast, I talk with science and environmental journalist Laura Poppick about her book, Strata: Stories from Deep Time (Illustrations by Sarah Gilman). We explore the geologic lens, a way of seeing the world that transforms ordinary landscapes into a 4.5-billion-year narrative. From the Great Oxygenation Event to the surprising role of mud in Earth history, Laura explains how geologists decode the Earth through layered rock. We also discuss the her "lyric preludes", which use poetry to set the scene. We also talk about stratigraphy as a contemplative, almost meditative practice of paying attention to the planet's oldest archives.

Beyond the science, we delve into the human side of research and the personal sacrifices involved in field work. Drawing on our shared experiences of working abroad, and we reflect on how studying deep time provides a humbling perspective on our own lives. Whether discussing the literal taste of dinosaur bones or the ancient smell of prehistoric lakebeds, this conversation emphasizes that science is a powerful tool for connection, both with each other and with this our only home, the Earth.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The Great Oxygenation Event (2.4 billion years ago)
• Rise of plants and the evolution of mud/rivers (458 million years ago)
• The Ediacaran period (first visible life)
• Stratigraphy as meditation and mindfulness
• Deep time and Earth's history
• Field work in South Australia and Dingle, Ireland

Find Laura Poppick:

• Laura's website
• Laura's substack
• Laura on bluesky
• Laura's science book recommendations: View the List

Book Science:

• Website: TrippCollins.com
• Show notes & transcripts: https://www.trippcollins.com/episodes
• Check out the Book Science Book Shop on BookShop.org
• Instagram: @booksciencepodcast

Transcript

Tripp Collins 0:00

Hey everyone. Welcome back. I am excited about sharing this conversation. Because I'm talking to Laura Poppick, she's a science and environmental journalist. She's written an incredible book about geology called Strata. So shout out to all my geology friends. I have a big cohort of geologists that I got close with during grad school. In fact, my little brother spent some time crushing rocks down in the basement of a geology lab. So all you geologists out there, hope you enjoy this one. You guys rock. See what I did there? So Laura is a rising star in science writing. Strata has been long listed for the Penn EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, so that's awesome. We have a very wide ranging conversation. We talk about the book and how poetry can set the scene for science. We talk about major epochs in Earth's history we talk about stratigraphy as meditation. We talk about what dinosaur bones taste like and much, much more. So please enjoy the conversation. Today we are talking with Laura Poppick, science journalist and author of Strata: Stories from Deep Time. This is a beautifully written exploration of Earth's history, and to open up, I wanna read a few lines that come pretty early in the book To know a history is to grow in intimacy with a place, and this has been Geology's gift to me. This is what I want for you in reading this book. I want you to bask in this current moment and that we get to be here at all. So, Laura, what is strata and stratigraphy and what is this book all about?

Laura Poppick 2:08

Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I'm excited to be here. and thanks for reading that passage. That is, that's one kind of close to my heart. so yeah, strata. The material, not the book. So when I say strata, I mean, layers of earth that have been laid down in different environments over time. That might be, environments with any sort of sediment that you might find. So silt or clay or sand, and that would be like a beach environment or a river environment or, even a sand dune and these kind of sediment rich environments, layer up over time in earth's history. and if they are layered up long enough and deep enough, they might turn to rock and then over time those rocks might, make their way back to the surface and reveal stories about the earth from millions or even billions of years ago. So that's what I generally refer. By mean when I use the word shadow. Although strata can also be modern day, uh, layers that you might find in like a lake bed or, the bank of a river. You can still all, all the words Strata mean those layers that you find of sediments that are laid down, in, in one of these environments. Um, yeah. And the, the book itself is about kind of these pivotal moments in earth history that we know about. Thanks to Stratus, thanks to the rock record and thanks to kind of the alphabet that geologists have been able to decode in these layered rocks that they have been able to, increasingly based pretty much over the past century or so, have been able to gather just real increasingly detailed information about what happened before humans existed here.

Tripp Collins 3:58

And I'm gonna ask you some details about the science in the book in a little bit. But I wanted to start, with the origin. So I know you were trained in geology before you became a science writer. So I imagine you maybe developed a notion for this book, early on. or how did the idea for the book evolve for you?

Laura Poppick 4:16

Yeah, that's a good question. So yeah, I got my undergraduate degree in geology, so never got a doctorate or anything like that. it was four years in my undergraduate and then I spent a year after that working as a lab manager and field assistant for an earth history group at Princeton University. And it was through that experience that I was truly immersed in my, more than full-time job out in the field and then came back the field work that we did together in South Australia. Was about three and a half months. And then we came back and I helped process the rocks that we gathered in the lab and was, part of the lab group for that year. And so I got this little window into this world, and I by no means consider myself a geologist at this point. I mean, roughly five years isn't enough to fully become, a geologist in a kind of professional way. But I do feel like it was enough to give me a geologic lens that I will always carry with me for the rest of my life. It's a way to view the earth and it's, this lens that's just kind of enriched my life in ways that it's hard to imagine not having the lens. I think. And that's something that other geologists that I've spoken to kind of agree with, it's like hard to take it off once you've had it on for even a short period of time. but anyway, yeah, so I was working in this lab. and loved the content that we were studying and the work I was doing, but it did feel rather isolating, to be in this lab where we were studying this fascinating time in earth history, but it just didn't quite feel right to be putting all this time and energy and resources into studying this period that most people had no knowledge of. So I felt that maybe my role in this kind of world could be to be more of like a translator to help communicate to the public. And so it was while I was kind of processing those rocks that I decided maybe science writing and journalism could be, more of a career path. I mean, I was still just outta college, so I was really trying to figure out what my path might be. This was early on in my career and so I did after that, find my way into science journalism and actually didn't cover that many. Geology stories, or even, I didn't even have an ambition at the beginning to necessarily even write a book. I just wanted to become a science journalist and to tell as many science stories as I could and to help people understand the planet better, to help people feel comfortable with science and to help people view scientists as humans. I felt like there was so much distrust at that time. This was like 2010 and a little bit after that. And so, you know, as of the case today, back then, so much distrust of science and, you know, conversation around climate change that just wasn't sitting right with me. So my hope as a budding science journalist was to somehow help people feel more comfortable with science. and as a freelancer, which I've been throughout my career, it can be sometimes hard to pitch a story about geology because it's, it can be a harder hook, you know, people. I think have this bias towards it is, and maybe that's is changing now, but I think there's a bias. It's like it's a little bit dry. It's not, it's not the lowest hanging fruit of science stories. So it actually took me being a freelancer for like a full decade, to slowly start to amass the occasional geology story that kind of felt like returning to my roots. And once I wrote a handful of those, I got to a point where I was like, you know, there's something here and I, I would like to turn this into a book long project. And it was one story in particular that I was working on about stratigraphy that it's like, you know, this one story about stratigraphy doesn't do it justice. And that was kind of the moment where I was like, I think I'm ready to dig deeper into this.

Tripp Collins 7:49

Yeah. You knew it was more of a book length project, than a feature article.

Laura Poppick 7:55

Yeah. But I think it took getting like a decade into my career to feel that energy for

Tripp Collins 8:00

and I'm just, just outta curiosity, so you were writing a lot of feature articles and you had this book, maybe in the back of your mind were you, did you put together a proposal and send that out, start looking for agents, or did someone read one of your articles and reach out to you?

Laura Poppick 8:15

Yeah, that's a great question. So I had this idea in the summer of 2019 and kind of slowly started pulling together a, proposal. and slowly started thinking about querying agents. And a couple friends put me in touch with their agents. So I had conversations going with a few folks, but my proposal was built so early on that there wasn't enough there to really, make any sort of commitment one way or the other. So I was just kind of working through that. and then there was one week in April of 2020. Obviously a lot of, people were stuck working from home and maybe agents were really hungry for new clients at that time. So there was one week where I heard from two agents reached out to me, just from stories that I had written, and it wasn't like one new story that gained a lot of interest. They had reached out from about two different stories that I had written, not even that recently. So I had, the good fortune to chat with those two agents and ended up with one who I'm with now, who's really wonderful and she worked with me to, complete the proposal and send it off.

Tripp Collins 9:21

Right on. I wanted to ask you about, this line and some of the promotional material. I know you probably have nothing to do with the promotional material,

Laura Poppick 9:28

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Tripp Collins 9:29

it says the book is in the tradition of John McFee. and since you were at Princeton too, I just wanted to ask you about this. Is this something you identify with?

Laura Poppick 9:38

I mean, it's a great honor to be considered. and the truth of John McFee for sure. I mean, he was definitely an inspiration for me. I read Basin and Range in college and it was a book that definitely inspired me to think about science writing as a career. I did start thinking about that even in college. and it really just, the way that he wrote about geology was just so beautiful and creative and it just opened something up in me, I think. And so I definitely think very highly of him as a writer. and I think it's, to me, I admire him and I love his work on geology. And I think that there, there's room for more geology books. I think when people think of geology books, they often think of him, which is wonderful. Some of those books are 40 years old, and so it's time to, expand the library of these texts on geology. And not to say that there aren't, some great, really talented other writers writing about geology. but yeah, I think part of me hoped to somehow modernize what he was doing in a

Tripp Collins 10:38

Yeah. I wanted to ask about the illustrations. I saw they're by Sarah Gilman. they're awesome. I um, other authors I've talked to an author might, give style preference, but they have no choice, essentially, about their illustrator. so I was just curious what your story was with getting matched up with your illustrator and, I was really impressed by it. I thought it was really cool art

Laura Poppick 10:58

Yeah, yeah. Sarah is incredibly talented. So that was something that I brought to the table that I kind of had this vision since I only had these four kind of main sections, and they were these kind of worlds that I wanted people to feel immersed in. I'm also just kind of a visual person. I also practice art on my own, and I think visually that way, and I think it was a combination of thinking visually and knowing how talented Sarah is. Sarah's a friend of mine. And a colleague, she's a writer, and also an illustrator. She's illustrated a few other books. So she was just top of mind and I asked her if she'd be interested in working with me on this. And we got approval from my publisher, but ultimately it was up to me. so for these types of illustrations, I commissioned Sarah, so that came out of my advanced to commissioned Sarah. and then ultimately, yeah, she kind of agreed to that and she can now separately sell those prints, for her own business, which is great. It kind of works for both of us really well. but it's true. Yeah. I think in other scenarios, authors might not have a say in certain art.

Tripp Collins 12:02

Yeah, you mentioned the four major sections. the other thing you have is, I don't know what to call them, but maybe prose poems at the beginning of each of the four major sections. they're very playful and figurative, and you write things like, uh, to read the planets, earliest, stratas to know time, older than bones, a time before lungs or lips, seeds or whiskers. which is just lovely. But what inspired the inclusion of these and, and do you write poetry?

Laura Poppick 12:26

Yeah, so thanks for bringing these up. I do love them. they were just very fun to write. It was fun to kind of change speed a little bit. I think of them as, my lyric preludes. That's kind of how I've labeled them in my word file as I was writing. I do write kind of playfully, poetry, creative, done all sorts of things on my own time. And so it felt important to be able to bring that part of me that I don't necessarily always have the chance to share in my journalism. It felt like it could be meaningful to bring that side of my writing into the book, in a way that would serve the book. And it felt natural. Like I don't even fully remember when I decided to do it just kind of came out organically that it was like, of course this is how I have to start. Because I think of it almost like, the beginning of a movie. There might just be like a little narration setting the scene, you know?'cause we're in these kind of unimaginable worlds. So I'm just kind of setting the scene and it's poetic, but it's also accurate. And that's what's so fun about it, is that like the details of these times feel like poetry, but none of, none of the pieces, none of those lines are factually incorrect as far as I know. I mean, it's just the truth. And the truth is poetic science can be so poetic. So I was trying to kind of bring that to light.

Tripp Collins 13:37

what about a writing day do you have any special routines? what's a writing day like for you?

Laura Poppick 13:43

So yeah, I'm Definitely a morning person, a morning writer. I know some writers are like night owls, but I'm very much the opposite. So if I'm really trying to immerse myself in it, I'll start the day by waking up, having my cup of tea. I'll take my dog for a little walk, kind of move the the legs, but bye six 30 or 7:00 AM maybe I'll light a candle, have another cup of tea ready, but try to really focus. And if I can really focus like through the midday, through lunchtime, then that's like a solid writing day for me. Not to say that I wouldn't work after that, but I try to do most of my creative work in the morning because I find that everything kind of slips better then. And I've certainly tried to do more creative and generative work in the afternoon and often find that I. Make things worse. And then I go back the next morning like, why did I even spend, you know, the afternoon for me is more about logistics and organizing and planning for the next day maybe, or for an interview I might have to conduct. but yeah, I do it in the morning. I might start, if I know what I need to be working on, but I'm starting fresh on a new section, I might actually start writing by hand and then transfer that to the computer. I find that kind of helps me, that kind of gives me a little more spaciousness in my writing when I'm first starting a draft of something. So that might be part of my morning as well.

Tripp Collins 15:05

What is it about writing by hand, do you think? Does it slow you down or, is it something Yeah. Where did that practice come from?

Laura Poppick 15:11

Yeah, I think there actually have been. Studies on this, but I, I haven't actually read the studies, but I think there is something about writing by hand that the brain likes that's kind of calming. I think for me, I associate, I think it's hard in this day and age where we use a computer for our, our work, for our creative projects. We use it for paying our bills. It's just like being in a room where you do all these things in the same way that I want to empty my physical office space of any distractions, because it'll just kind of clog up my brain. I also kind of wanna empty my, my visual working space too. And so I find that a pad of paper, just a blank piece of paper is just less distracting. And I think it, it kind allows me to kind of get deeper into that, more creative side of things. But once I start needing to get more technical and start editing, I go ahead and throw it on the computer, but then I might, after several drafts. Print it out and go back to hand by hand. And I think just honestly going back and forth is helpful to keep me from getting into any sort of rut too deeply. I think just changing scenery Helps with kind of seeing things fresh.

Tripp Collins 16:21

Thanks that's great. so the subtitle of your book is Stories from Deep Time. for people that study indigenous knowledge, deep time could mean tens of thousands of years. I talked to author Dan Flores who writes about wildlife in North America, and he begins his story with the Chicxulub impact that was 66 million years ago. your book centers around four main stories in Earth's history, and the most recent one was 252 million years ago. So we're talking about, super deep time and it's just, I think it's just so hard for us living these lifetimes on scales of like a hundred years to fathom millions or hundreds of millions or even billions of years. and you have a quote from one of the scientists in the book, that you say that his, view of the world had shifted, and he says it makes you feel small and it should, if it's working. It does. And so I just wanted, if you could talk about that aspect of geology.

Laura Poppick 17:16

Yeah. I know I've had a conversation with someone recently who was like trying to understand what I meant by deep time and I was, like, you know, people think, and not to say they're wrong, but like some people do use deep time to mean like the last ice age 10,000 years ago. And I'm like, that's recent. You know, that's in geological. It really like, and I have at this point, like it truly does. It feels recent. Not that I can actually fathom 10,000 years, but I think my mind's been trained enough for that to feel recent, but whoever I was talking to was like, all right, come on. It's not that recent, you know? But yeah, we're talking, when I think of deep time, I think of like old enough to form a mountain or rock in, which is millions of years. and for hundreds of millions of years, and it's impossible to fully fathom. Sarah Gilman, my illustrator did kinda help me out a little bit by drawing, this kind of time line that I try to use to explain to readers, at the beginning of each section where if you stretch your arms out, and imagine the whole length of your arms is like the time that Earth has existed. So that's 4.5 billion years. So, the beginning Of Earth's existence is like, let's say the tip of your middle finger in your right hand, and then the time that humans kind of arose on earth would be all the way on your left hand, like at the tip of your pinky fingernail. So it's tiny, and so you can begin to kind of picture the length of time that we're playing with here. but it's hard and I think that's okay. I think it's okay not to fully grasp where we are in deep time, but part of what I hope to do with the book and what I find fun about learning about different kind of pivotal moments in deep time is that once you know kind of these major episodes, even if you can't comprehend 500 million years between them, you understand, okay, first oxygen arose in the atmosphere and then. There was this massive, maybe global ice age then that led to the rise of animals and the rise of animals then proceeded the rise of plants. So all of a sudden there are these like major touchstone points that even if you don't understand, the amount of time between them, you at least have a chronology. and you can add to that chronology. Like, you know, the fact that plants didn't, colonize continents until more than 90% into earth's history. So like little kind of stats like that I think helped me kind of like refocus. But,'cause I think even now, it surprises me when I remember that, that I'm like walking down the street and I'm like, oh, this tree is like kind of a brand new invention on this planet, even though we think of this as like this green, blue, green sphere of lushness, but it hasn't been lush for very long. so I think. Having you touched on almost kind of helps bring that into perspective.

Tripp Collins 20:06

Yeah, totally. And, the scale of it. Sometimes we think of the process of, evolution, as a slow timescale movement. But if you're thinking in terms of relative geological scales, evolution is actually quite fast, right? So, humans have been around for, in our current form, maybe a hundred thousand years or something like that. And that's, the blink of an eye in geological time. maybe we'll stay here just for a moment and I'll ask you about the structure is these four main sections, ice, excuse me, air, ice, mud, heat. And on your timeline, that was, 2.4 billion years ago for air. And air refers to, the Great Ox Oxygenation event. so maybe let's talk about that for just a little bit.

Laura Poppick 20:50

Yeah. so yeah, I think that this is surprising to folks who aren't used to thinking about this, that for essentially half of Earth's existence, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. So it's the single most important gas to life today. every single animal except for one that I mentioned in the beginning of the book, needs oxygen to survive. There's a parasite of chinook salmon that somehow don't need oxygen in the same way that everything else does, mostly life needs oxygen. It helps us digest our food. It helps us kind of think our thoughts. It's, essential to our beings, but was not here. There was oxygen, the element. So oxygen is one of the most, abundant kind of common elements on the planet. but it didn't kind of come together into a gaseous form where you have two, atoms of oxygen coming together until halfway through its existence. So, the section air is looking at like, first of all, how do we know that? How do we know that there wasn't oxygen? And now there is, what brought oxygen here when it, arrived and what were the implications, of it arriving? And I find that the implication part super interesting because, oxygen is actually. many ways, very toxic. So it's, it's very reactive with basically many different materials on the planet, whether it's, other gases or minerals or organic materials in life forms. So when we try to eat antioxidants to keep, ourselves healthy, we are protecting ourselves from that reactivity of oxygen. And so there's the thought that when oxygen first started accumulating, it may have actually caused mass extinction, that life could not withstand this toxicity, but eventually life evolved to cope with it. And then life evolved to depend on it. so pretty pivotal moment in Earth history.

Tripp Collins 22:44

Yeah, it's hard to, I mean, for those un introduced to the geology, it's hard to imagine an earth without oxygen, or, like you said, hard to imagine an earth with that's not green. yet all these things, at some point occurred on earth. In fact, there was a earth without oceans at one point. I mean, the earth was too hot in the beginning to even have, liquid water. so I wanna move forward to,'cause since you mentioned the rise of plants, I think the section mud, which begins around 458 million years ago, it's about the rise of plants with roots that stabilize, river banks. And you have a quote, and I think it's related to this, it's life evolves and the environment evolves with it. So what does that mean?

Laura Poppick 23:23

so this is true. There's so many examples of this, throughout earth history, and this is just one. Really beautiful example, I think, and kind of important one, but, one of many. in this section I write about how, before plants evolved to live on lands. So there was algae in the oceans, which has chlorophyll, just like plants, but there were no land plants. And so the continents were mostly there. Like there may have been microbial masks that added some texture. But for the most part, land was barren and kind of smooth rock. And because of that, there was nothing for sediments, like clays and silts to clinging to, and so there was mud on the planet, but these constituents of mud, the silts and the clays had nothing to stick to. So the idea is that they would've largely kind of gotten washed into rivers and into the bottom of the ocean or into lakes. And so we just don't have a lot of mud on land. just as plants begin to colonize continents and they add a little more texture, even before Roots evolved, when there was just really basic, basically like mosses and bryophytes and things like that, um, that added enough texture to help, these silts and clays stick to each other. They have this kind of, like a, clays specifically have an electric attraction to each other. So those pieces of clay would stick to each other. They would stick to the plants, and then it would all snowball, to the point that there was a tenfold increase in mud on land with the beginning of the evolution of land plants. that had huge implications on many different facets of the planet. it's kind of like, oh, mud, okay, funny, like it's cushy but like, what does it really matter for the planet? But it actually has huge implications for a number of things, including. the ways that rivers flow. And so before there was sticky mud on continents, many rivers flowed more like the loose braided kind of collapsing channel type rivers that you might find in Arctic today and other places, where there's not a ton of stabilizing vegetation or there, there's a few different reasons you might have rivers like that. But that the idea is that that may have been like the dominant type of river. And then once there were plants and mud accumulating rivers became kind of sturdier and narrower and more sinuous. And what that means is that, a narrow river is more likely to flood. And then when a river floods and has, a flood plane now rather than the other type of river that when it floods, it would just kind of like the channels would just reroute and collapse. But there would be no like flood plane. You have a narrower river now that's stickier and more cohesive from this, the mud and the plants. You have floodplains. And once you have floodplains, you have the beginnings of soil. Now you have habitat where maybe trees can rise up and you have your first forest and now animals can come outta the ocean. And now animals are living on land and fast forward hundreds of millions of years and you have human civilizations that prefer these floodplains along the river, banks of rivers that are fertile because of the stilts and the clays that accumulate there. So there are huge implications. and that's just one of them. There are a few other that I write about in that section.

Tripp Collins 26:38

I love the way you tell that'cause it's, I mean it's a story and I think that was one thing I learned about how to think about geology, in some sense, like, a philosophy of geology, how it works. And you have a quote from one of the scientists that says, we are asking rocks to tell their story. And they're imperfect archives. And, you go on to say, while the field of, physics or engineering or biomedicine, they provide satisfying answers to concrete questions. Stratigraphy offers drafts of stories. so I, that was a bit of a revelation to me. maybe, just talk about that aspect of stratigraphy a little bit.

Laura Poppick 27:17

It's something that I love about stratigraphy and, that draws me to it. And it's also kind of, it also can make it challenging to try to write a book on these things because there's so many different versions of these stories that different scientists have. And so my job to figure out which versions to tell while also acknowledging that there are other versions. But in general, what I mean by that is that, stratigraphers, people who study strata have these kind of clues that they look for. They're often called proxies. So these are like things that they look for that represent the way that the planet was at the time. So you can't just like, go in and with some sort of tool and be like, how much oxygen was in the atmosphere at this time? And pull out some sort of like thermometer. It tells you that like is not a thing that exists. But you can look for, examples of minerals or just like types of grains that you know, could have existed only if there was no oxygen in the atmosphere and then vice versa. But these proxies are not, always well understood. So scientists think they understand what, the presence of, let's say, like a red, I'll back up. So for example, the color red is associated with there being, oxygen in the atmosphere because red is rust, red is like metal reacting with oxygen. So there was a time, that there were these, types of deposits called banded iron formations these layered really striking rocks that have. These bright red bands followed by kind of these black deposits. And the idea was like, oh, these must represent like this massive influx of oxygen that all of a sudden rusted, these layers of sediment that were falling into the ocean. So there was this whole narrative written, and this is the narrative that I remember learning in geology class in the early two thousands. But over time after science, the geologist setting these rocks kind of looked at them more closely. it became apparent that they actually could have become read long after they formed, which is, as you know, it really complicates, the work of the stratigrapher to, to then have to be like, okay, is what I'm looking at, like an original mark of what existed at that time, or has it been overwritten through time as this rock has. I've been pushed into the mantle, come back up maybe multiple times. So yeah, I quote one of the scientists early on saying, you know, it's true that strata are like pages in a book that you can read the history of Earth, but it's like a book that you've taken and smashed to the bottom of the ocean and formed a mountain range with, so it's not surprising that we can't say everything with certainty. so, it's a fascinating field of science because, it's really about telling a story. It's about gathering evidence. It's about finding what came first and what came next. And sometimes the timing that you have measured based on these grains is actually not correct. So then all of a sudden when you get more precise measurements of age, you're like, oh, actually the other thing came first. And you have to completely rewrite your narrative. and you just have to be okay with that if you're in this line of work.

Tripp Collins 30:30

You touched on this a little bit, but because there's that little bit of room for interpretation and you might have experts, on different sides of an issue, so how did you parse that out? Did you rely on, your expertise to, present one side or another? Or do you tend to present both sides without sort of giving your opinion on the matter or just kind of make, a presentation? how do you approach this? And I'm sure it's different for different cases.

Laura Poppick 30:59

Yeah, I mean, I definitely approach this, as a journalist trying to present both sides of an argument. But because just the nature of the book and of trying to craft these narratives, I think in, in most of these sections, I am. Choosing a side of the narrative to highlight, to have like a main character, so to speak. And that's not to say that it's because it's definitely the right kind of way to look at things. It's because it's a compelling way to think about things. And in each case, these scientists are willing to be wrong. They're open to it. And then I did try to make a point to have a few other voices come in and say, this is why they might be entirely wrong, it's definitely hard for sure to decide who to focus on in a book like this and which research to highlight. it's a matter of familiarizing yourself with the academic literature. But at the end of the day, it is kind of by chance, you know, that I found certain articles that I found compelling. then maybe two scientists who I found that maybe a lot of other scientists had, referenced their work so that I'm aware that they're at least like within the common lexicon of the people in this field of work. But there obviously, there are dozens of other geologists I could have highlighted that, part of me is like, ugh, I wish I could spend the next decade working on this and highlight more work. But it's not the way it works.

Tripp Collins 32:24

I wanted to ask you about a section that was a bit, more personal than the rest. while there, there's a lot of travel and it looks very glamorous from the outside. but then you get this phone call, someone very close to you has died. You can't be there. and I connected with that a lot'cause I was more or less in that exact position. I was on fellowship in Japan when my grandmother died. And as much as I was grateful for. The opportunity I had when something like that happens, it sort of like rearranges your perspective and, I guess more broadly, those of us who have followed our dreams, like out of our hometowns and out of our home countries in some cases and out across the world, there's, a lot of privilege in that. but there's also a lot of sacrifice and I appreciate that you sort of spoke to this. So why was it important to you to include that story?

Laura Poppick 33:10

Yeah. Well thanks for asking and I'm sorry to hear that about your grandma as well. Yeah. it's hard to not be around close to family and moments like that. Yeah. Because there is absolutely a ton of privilege in doing any of this work, and I recognize that. And, so, it's, it is certainly glamorous in certain ways, but it's also. Got its down sides, including not having time with family. And that's something that in my brief time in geology I noticed, to be true of the more senior geologists that I was observing, where even in my twenties I could see like, wow, they're doing this amazing work. They're going to the Arctic, they're gonna Australia. They have to be away from their family for months at a time. And you know, is that really something that I personally would wanna do? I was thinking about that at the time. And also, you know, that's hard. They're sacrificing a lot and it's because they're passionate about the work and they believe in it. And I'm, really grateful to people who are willing to do that'cause we need this research. But, it's not all glamorous. And there, you know, there was one researcher who had a brand new kind of infant at home and he was away for a month, so I'm sure that wasn't easy. so just trying to humanize the science a bit to help folks understand what it's really like to be out in the field for a few months. Because even myself as. 22-year-old when I got that job, I was like, of course I'm gonna go spend three and a half months living in the outback. What could possibly go wrong? You know? That sounds amazing. And I did. I was lucky that it was, an incredible life experience. But my grandma kind of passing away about halfway through that definitely kind of rearranged my experience for the second half.

Tripp Collins 34:47

Yeah, you even mentioned some, of the researchers you worked with, I forget what percentage, but I was blown away that there were some people that spend, I don't know, half their year maybe in the field.

Laura Poppick 34:57

Yeah.

Tripp Collins 34:57

and that's, I don't know how common that is, but, that seemed like, you know, it sounds like fun, but that's a huge sacrifice to be away from home, especially if you have family for a large percentage of your time.

Laura Poppick 35:08

Yeah. And I think it's a particular type of person and I think, I don't know how common, I think half the year is definitely not so common. but yeah, I think it takes a certain type of personality that it works for.

Tripp Collins 35:22

a couple times when you're describing the practice of stratigraphy, you say stuff like, it requires a commitment to paying attention to the events that have unfolded across this planet millions of times over a commitment to patience, to breathing in, breathing out, finding the meeting in the ordinary. Similarly, you say, uh, you can't rush stratigraphy, you gotta cultivate a practice of patience, a capacity to know you're probably wrong, a willingness to keep going anyways, to keep breathing in out and keep noticing. To me, you're describing like a contemplative practice. is this part of how you're you conceive of stratigraphy.

Laura Poppick 35:59

So, yeah, I, it wasn't always how I did, but I think over time and as I actually developed my own meditation practice, that I began to see the overlap there. But it's not something that I came up on my own. There was a researcher that I was out in the field with who said like, it's mindfulness. Like it's, it is that like, you know, it is stopping, observing, being present. and I think hearing him say that and feeling it in my body,'cause there is something so kind of calming about the act of like conducting stratigraphy that I kind of knew it was true, but it was for some reason it felt important for the scientist to validate it for better or worse. and then I did, because that felt so kind of central to me in terms of like why I'm drawn to this field of, of science. I did ask other researchers as I was conducting my reporting for the book if they felt this way. And I don't think anyone ever said, no. I think this is something that people really appreciate. I mean, it's a slow science. You're slowly looking. Seemingly mundane layers, but you're finding kind of incredible kind of wisdom from the earth in those layers.

Tripp Collins 37:12

the book opens with a quote from Rachel Carson, and then you sort of, close it with a call back to, the sea around us. And you point out the tremendous success of that book. It won the national book award. Um, and'cause I often point to like maybe Silent Spring as an example of what a good science book can do to affect change in society. But you also point out that, you know, for as successful as the Sea around us was, it was talking about a warming arctic in 1951. this is one of the most widely read science books of the time. It's 75 years later. We have yet to collectively come to grips with this. so I, I don't know. I just wouldn't wanna put the question to you. What, what is a place of a science book in society and, what are you hoping, comes out of people reading your book? I.

Laura Poppick 38:03

Yeah. And I think with something like the Sea around us, I think it's an incredible service to society to have a book like that. And even if the United States is behind on action, right at this very moment on climate change, doesn't mean that people didn't learn something from that book. I think it's just hard to kind of parse, the difference between learning and acting on what we've learned. but I mean, I think my hope with this, with my book and with any science book is it is a source of. Deep research that, the people have put years into often, and it is the source of information. If people aren't, privileged enough, like I was to go to a college that had geology and I just happen to be a geology major, I mean, most people don't do that. And so this is a way to like get a glimpse into, a world of science that you might not otherwise have access to. And, and, you know, ultimately the hope is to help people understand how the earth works a little bit better. And maybe that shifts how we all think about our role here and how we think about caring for the planet. yeah, I think that's the hope is that with more information, it's not only science, folks, not only give us like potential practical tools for how to treat the planet. But it also gives us just deeper care for the planet, I think. And that's something that I find with earth history and that I kind of relate back to, this idea of, of care in my epilogue where I related to kind of coming across these love letters that my grandparents had written to each other in their twenties, or late teens. and in finding those letters, I felt kind of more connected to them because I felt like I got to know them better. And similarly, if we think of strata like love letters from the Earth's youth that we are kind of unearthing, we just maybe feel more connected to the planet. And maybe that leads us to take more direct action to care for it better. it's not super tangible, but my hope is that it somehow creates tangible change.

Tripp Collins 40:14

Yeah. as Rachel Carson called it an epic poem.

Laura Poppick 40:18

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Tripp Collins 40:20

So I have a few here just for fun. what was your favorite place you traveled? for the book?

Laura Poppick 40:28

I really enjoyed traveling to Dingle Ireland. It was just incredibly beautiful. So I went there for the mud section. there are rocks there from the beginning of plants living on land and from the rise of mud. And, it just felt so fitting. I took a bus from, Dublin to the other side of the country where Dingle is, and just looking out the window, it's just incredibly gorgeous. the lushness of Ireland and how fitting it is for it to also be the place where plants first feel like a place that you can find from the beginning of the plants on land. the kind of metaphor of that felt fitting, but it's also just such an incredible place to travel to. I think my first morning, I think I woke up at like six. In between six and 10 I saw maybe four different rainbows. It's just really special.

Tripp Collins 41:15

That's awesome. If you had a time machine, which period in Earth's history would you most like to visit assuming you had all the life support you needed.

Laura Poppick 41:26

It's funny you would think that I would've kind of made this decision already, but I actually haven't thought about this. man, I would love, yeah, so time machine and then like scuba equipment.'cause I would want to go back to, the time that I write about the end of the second section, which is the very first like life that would've been visible to the naked eye if there were eyes back then, which there were not eyes, but it's called the Ediacaran period. these lifeforms lived at the bottom of the ocean. some of them were probably animals, but some of them were lifeforms that it's unclear if they were plants or animals or some sort of evolutionary dead end. I, had the chance to see some fossils of them in Newfoundland. And I would love to have seen what they actually looked like moving around at the bottom of the ocean, the very first pioneers of life on the planet to be more than one cell and to have body forms. And they live for millions of years, like longer than humans have existed. So we're actually way more anomalous than these creatures were.

Tripp Collins 42:27

Too cool. and last one of these, like kind of quick questions. what do dinosaur bones taste like?

Laura Poppick 42:36

So, yeah, I do write about in the book at the end about testing to see if you have found a fossil, by kind of sucking on it a little bit. And if it feels porous and sticky on your tongue, you've found bone. But if it's just smooth, you've found rock. And yeah, it's, I think I what you would expect to kind of, to kind of chalk me. Um, but I do write in that, in the book, that, you know, when I was at the dinosaur dig that I was writing about, I found, a layer of rock that I just happened to smell. I didn't put that one in my mouth, but I smelled it and it smelled like a river or the bottom of a lake. Like it just had that familiar lake smell. And I said that to the researcher I was with it smells like a lake. And she smelled it and looked at it and she's like, I think you're spot on. I think we just found the bottom of a lake, but it's like millions of years old that somehow it still has that familiar smell.

Tripp Collins 43:26

That's crazy.

Laura Poppick 43:27

Yeah.

Tripp Collins 43:28

I mean, smell is, you know, chemicals, right? So obviously those chemicals, are still there and maybe have just gotten trapped. And when it's become exposed, you can smell it, become smell able again. Do you know anything about that?

Laura Poppick 43:42

I wish I knew more and if it's like literally what I'm smelling or if it's just a, I don't, I don't exactly know, but she made it sound as if like, no, that's a way, it's not the like most precise diagnostic tool, but I think that there is something there and I'm not sure I would like to know more about that.

Tripp Collins 43:57

Cool. what about any, do you have any like book writing advice for any aspiring science writers?

Laura Poppick 44:04

Hmm. I think the biggest piece of advice, which might sound like a throwaway piece of advice, it's just like if you're, if you're wanting to write a book, make sure that you just like, are obsessed with the topic that you are going to be energized through days and years of writing this. And if it's something that you can't imagine not doing, then that is, it's a sign that you've found the right topic to write a book about. I think it's a marathon. It's a long process to write a book and it's a privilege to do it, for sure. I feel super lucky to have done it. And there are times throughout the process that it's an absolute dream and there are times that are more challenging. but I think overall, what makes it different from other types of projects is it can go on for years. you're writing it for years and the editing process takes years. and it takes a lot of energy. So my advice is find something that you just love and, that energy will help you kind of finish.

Tripp Collins 45:04

Yeah, definitely obsession and but also sustained obsession and something that holds your interest. so what is next? I know this book just came out for you, but I'll just curious if, is there anything else, any other projects you're excited that you wanna mention before we, close out?

Laura Poppick 45:21

yeah, I'm kind of just in, I have a few ideas kind of churning right now, and so I haven't, in terms of maybe a future book project. So right now I'm, I have a couple kind of shorter stories that I'm working on, but I do feel that the energy is slowly shifting away from, you know, I'm excited to promote this and to keep talking about strata for as long as people wanna talk about it. But there, I'm kind of like closing a chapter with it and moving on to something else, you know, for the first time in years. So I am excited to see where my energy is pulled and. TBD, where exactly that will land.

Tripp Collins 45:56

you, do you wanna say anything at all about, is it still geology related or, it's okay if you don't wanna, some people are superstitious about mentioning future pro projects.

Laura Poppick 46:05

yeah, I think maybe I'm slightly super, it's like a mix of super stiff and also I haven't fully decided I think, yeah, there are definitely some other geology, ideas that my sleeve. Then there are moments where I think like, well, what would it look like if I didn't do a geology book? And I have maybe a couple ideas in an entirely different realm, but I think the reality is that there's so much in earth history that I, find something that you just can't stop thinking about. I'm still not sick of it, so, so I may as well keep running with that. I think, if I still have the energy, so we'll see, but I could see for sure trying to do another geology project.

Tripp Collins 46:38

And how do people, follow along, find out more best support your work?

Laura Poppick 46:43

Yeah, so I have a Blue Sky account, and you can follow me there. I have a website and I have a substack, so I would, encourage you to follow along on my substack if you're interested. I write once a month or so. I won't flood your inbox. And I include updates there about events and things like that. so those are two good places to find me.

Tripp Collins 47:04

Perfect. And we'll put, I have share notes on my website, so we'll put all the relevant links there. okay. I've been talking with Laura Popik about her new book, strata Stories from Deep Time. There's so much more in the book. If you've ever been curious about the history of the Earth, you should definitely grab this one. thank you Laura. I really appreciate your time.

Laura Poppick 47:24

Thank you so much. This was really fun.