Deep time told through the layers themselves. Poppick is a science journalist and she goes to the outcrops with the geologists reading them — banded iron formations recording the moment oxygen first flooded the ocean, the black shales of a mass extinction, ice cores, the boundary clay from the asteroid. Each chapter takes one interval and one rock and works out how anybody could possibly know what happened four hundred million years ago from a striped cliff. The mass extinctions get the most room, and the parallel to what’s in the water now is left for you to make.
Strata