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Studying Stones Can Rock Your World


To think like a geologist is to contemplate timescales that stagger the imagination—and lay bare the planetary forces behind our earthly existence.

When we encounter her in the opening chapter, she is a seven-year-old on her way to school, and the glimpses we get of her classmates as they board the bus are almost novelistic: three Mennonite sisters in tidy braids and gingham dresses, emanating an aura of community that Bjornerud envies; a rosy-cheeked farm kid whose ambient smell of bacon likewise evokes a twinge of jealousy (“ours is not a hot-breakfast family”); a shuffling little boy whose chronic absences foretell the illness that will kill him in his twenties. Brimstone, that most morally fraught of rocks, is essentially made from thin air: it emerges as a superheated vapor from magmatic vents in the Earth and then, as it starts to cool down, bypasses the liquid stage entirely and turns straight to stone. The rocks around us, Bjornerud says, tell us that change happens occasionally by violence but mostly by patience; that survival entails the power to endure and the wisdom to recognize that the world can alter in a single day; that being thrown into even the harshest and most unfamiliar of environments can lead to beautiful transfigurations.

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