Discipline
Geology
Lessons across the journey that lean on geology, in the order they appear in the story.
- 4.2 Earth's violent birthDraft
The Moon-forming impact and the magma ocean.
- 4.3 Core, mantle, crustDraft
Differentiation: how the Earth sorted itself into layers.
- 4.4 Plate tectonics and the HimalayaDraft
The engine of a living planet, told through the Indian plate and the rise of the Himalaya.
- 4.6 Deep timeDraft
Radiometric dating: how we know the age of a rock.
- 5.6 The Cambrian explosionDraft
Why animal bodies appear suddenly in the rocks, and whether they really appeared suddenly.
- 5.7 Mass extinctionsDraft
Five times the biosphere nearly ended, and what actually did the killing.
- 5.8 Mammals in the shadowsDraft
A hundred and fifty million years of not being important, and what happened when the competition vanished.
- 7.4 The Indus Valley civilisationDraft
The largest of the ancient civilisations by area, with no palaces, no royal tombs, and a script nobody can read.
- 8.3 Fossil Fuels and IndustryDraft
Digging up three hundred million years of sunlight, and what it did to everyone who did not.
- 8.4 The Great AccelerationDraft
Twenty-four graphs that all bend at the same moment, and what that moment cost.
- 8.5 The AnthropoceneDraft
A proposed geological epoch that was formally rejected in 2024, and why that rejection changes nothing about the evidence.
- 9.6 The deep futureDraft
Earth has about a billion years of biosphere left, not five, and that is only the first paragraph.