Living Things: A Review of Turning to Stone

 When I began this blog many years ago, my father questioned its title:  Fossils and Other Living Things.

"I don't get it.  Fossils aren't alive," he objected.

I replied that I found that fossils have stories to tell and experiences to share if we are open to communicating with them.  They aren't silent.  I don't think I went much further because his puzzled expression was not encouraging.  At least he'd expressed some interest, even if it was mostly couched in doubt.

I could have gone on and on.  I might have described the multi-hued Miocene shark tooth that lets us know that it came into contact with particular kinds of minerals in its journey to becoming a fossil (e.g., my post titled Colors - Fossils and a Graphic Story About Darwin).  I could have suggested that I love that all fossils carry a living backstory if we choose to explore its taxonomy or its evolutionary history or the people involved in describing that story.  It's an infatuation to which many of the posts in this blog attest, beginning as early as my sixth one titled What's In A Name? Part Un).  Perhaps he would have enjoyed learning that fossils can lie about their history (e.g., the Elvis taxa which I discussed in the post titled Witticisms in the Face of Mass Extinction).  In the end, I don't know that any of this would have made much of an impression.  One needs, I think, to appreciate this understanding of fossils by coming to it with a willingness to challenge the literal, supported by an openness to the poetry and complexity of natural things.

So it is no wonder that I found structural geologist Marcia Bjornerud's new book Turning to Stone:  Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (2024) compelling.  (I do not provide page numbers with the text quoted below given that I read an ebook version.)

It's a marvelous memoir in which she recounts her many different roles:  student, scientist, woman in a male dominated field, academic, wife, mother, and widow.  In the process, she highlights the evolution and growth of the geological sciences over the past several decades, and the maturation of our understanding of the geological processes that make, and have made, the planet.

She tells her story in ten chapters, each highlighting a rock that had significant importance at a different stage of her life:  from the 500 million-year-old sandstone deposited on an ancient oceanside beach that generated the sandy soil marking her childhood in Wisconsin; to the mysterious 700 million-year-old diamictite, a clastic sedimentary rock, she studied in Svalbard as a graduate student; to the 450 million-year-old sedimentary (and, in her telling, boring) dolomite, deposited on an ancient continental shelf, that undergirds the landscape around the Ohio campus where she earned tenure; to the 1.7 billion-year-old granite produced in the cauldron of an ancient continental volcanic arc and now quarried near the Wisconsin university where she thought she'd found a measure of harmony in her life only to experience a period of turmoil.

Given her field of study within the science (structural geology), the stories these rocks have to tell invariably involve some aspect of the upheaval of seismic and volcanic action, the building up and tearing down of mountains, and the movement of tectonic plates and continents.  (On second thought, those are elements in some part of the history of every rock on Earth.)  There's quite a lot of violence in this account, but, as she counsels, much good comes of it.

There are several recurrent themes in this tale, none more important than Bjornerud's relationship with, and attitude toward, rocks.  In the prologue titled Ice, set in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, she leaves no doubt about a specific perspective that animates the book.  Early in her academic training, she is a graduate student in Norway exploring evidence of tectonic action.  The landscape speaks to her in a way that harkens back to her childhood in Wisconsin when she felt at one with a responsive natural world.

In the sciences, one of the deadliest sins is animism - describing inert entities likes glaciers and mountains as if they were living beings.  And yet, in Svalbard it was undeniable that the austere landscape was alive, its rocks and water, ice and air in constant conversation.  The terrain was animate, sentient, and creative.  It would just take me thirty years to say that out loud.

She states that out loud often in the course of this memoir.  "This book is an invitation into my geocentric worldview in which rocks are raconteurs, companions, mentors, oracles, and sources of existential reassurance."  In her telling, rocks communicate, remember, reveal, wait, are cryptic, are incommunicative or inarticulate, sometimes mumble, . . . .

Embedded in the book are engrossing lessons in geology.  What comes through most clearly to me is how unique Earth is of all the planets.  Bjornerud's treatment of the tectonic forces at work on the planet Earth stands out.  She notes that, of all the planets, ours is the only one that has moving plates.  This continuous movement of plates, in particular the subduction of one plate under another, provides a constant source of communication between the interior of the planet and the exterior, a communication that is critical not only to the structure of the planet as we know it, but to the presence of life here.  The rocks that undergird her story are intimately involved in this repeated construction and destruction of stone.  "The Earth makes no distinction between creation and destruction."

Other themes run throughout the memoir, particularly, that, in the pursuit of short-sighted monetary gain, we have subjected the natural world to wanton destruction and exploited native peoples in that pursuit.  We erroneously believe we are in charge, that we have control.  The rocks know better.  Further, she inveighs against the notion that the Earth we know today was preordained, fated to be what it is.  Reflecting on the history of life from the microbial to the multicellular complex, she notes,

None of these things - though now literally set in stone - were then preordained; given the happenstances of planetary and biological evolution, Earth's story could have unfolded quite differently.

Here, as elsewhere in the book, she does not shy away from drawing life lessons from the rocks, to wit, "My path into geology felt anything but predestined."  Perhaps most prominently in this vein is the notion that the Earth's sustaining processes of creating and destroying, with the dangers and rewards of the cataclysms involved, are mirrored to some extent in the arc of change in her life where roles and relationships change, sometimes abruptly. 

Perhaps change is the key to this book.  The Earth is vibrant, living, and changing.  Rocks undergo change, sometimes slowly, sometimes violently.  Our understanding of the rocks has changed and deepened over her lifetime.  At one point, while in an academic building's basement, she contemplates an array of neglected crates containing rocks collected years ago.  The rocks have not changed in those relatively few years, whatever their histories before being collected.  She muses,

The rocks have remained as they always were, while our interpretations of them have vacillated and evolved.  The same is true for the events of our lives; the past is immutable, but its meaning changes with time.

This memoir merits and rewards our attention.