Remember blogs? Back in the 2000s and into the early 2010s, the ‘weblog’ venue for writing and sharing on the internet was quite popular, spawning various networks and grass-roots communities of people with shared interests. It was a whole thing. This was when I was in graduate school and the first few years after my Ph.D. and I found it to be both an enjoyable way to share and learn and also a vehicle for writing about science that wasn’t a technical paper/proposal but also not trying to be journalism or public outreach. I miss that outlet.
So, for 2021 I’m going to attempt to reengage with this style of writing as a way to ‘stretch those muscles’ a bit. I thought about doing this at the original site, but decided to make my life simpler by just using this research group website and identifying as a Clastic Detritus blog post with my ‘classic’ banner image and disclaimer at the top. I’m not going to be overly ambitious about it, I’m aiming for approximately one post per month. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes! (I’m not going to have a comment thread as it would likely attract spam/trolls; you can find me on Twitter or reach out via email.)
A potential theme for some of the posts this year is exploring how geoscientists think about time. Over this recent holiday break, I reread the wonderful 2018 book Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud and also read a fantastic new book by Vincent Ialenti called Deep Time Reckoning. Both books have similar subtitles: “How thinking like a geologist can help save the world” and “How future thinking can help Earth now”. Both of these works articulate one of the most valuable aspects of ‘deep time’ thinking common in geoscience — how studying longer timescales and reconstructing Earth history is critical for understanding our present and for thinking about our future. Not a new idea, to be sure, but these two books have refreshing takes on this notion in my opinion. Thus, I’ll likely write future posts about both of these.
As I’ve progressed in my own teaching, course development/design, and interaction with students, I’ve become increasingly interested in how we, as geoscientists, think about time. It’s not merely an appreciation for the vastness of Earth’s history or gaining knowledge about important processes that occur at very long timescales. Geoscientists also have the ability to consider a huge range of timescales, and can ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’, temporally, with relative ease. We can intuitively identify and focus our thinking on a specific range of timescales for a certain question or problem. Indeed, these and similar are among the skills that Bjornerud has coined as timefulness. Deep time (long timescales and the distant past) is a key part of timefulness, but there’s more to it.
But, how do we generate this intuition? That is, how do students and novice geoscientists develop timefulness? And, how can I improve my teaching (and mentoring) to enhance that development? There’s a rich field of time-perception research as well as work by education researchers focused specifically on temporal reasoning to draw upon. For example, this GSA Special Paper from 2012 has several of insightful articles from geoscience education researchers about teaching and learning related to geologic time. My goal isn’t an exhaustive treatment of everything there is to know — I’m not an education researcher or cognitive psychologist and don’t pretend to be. My aim isn’t to write scholarly pieces suitable for journals — my goal is simply to share some aspects I found interesting in my own exploration and learning.
Again, getting back into this more stream-of-consciousness and ‘low stakes’ style of writing is an experiment. Maybe it gathers some momentum, maybe it fizzles, stay tuned. The first real post (in a few weeks time) will be about one, or maybe both, of the books mentioned above: Timefulness and Deep Time Reckoning.
