Philip Marsden

Whoever imagined that geology was a lifeless subject?

The shifting rocks of Earth’s crust are part of the planet’s ecology just as much as plants and animals, says Marcia Bjornerud – applying to geology the principle of universal connectivity

Rock formations in Coyote Buttes North, Vermillion Cliffs, Arizona. [Getty Images] 
issue 17 August 2024

Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards dispelling it.

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