Christopher Nicholas

“Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink. There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Limestone is usually formed of the compressed bodies of marine organisms – crinoids and coccolithophores, ammonites, belemnites and foraminifera-- that died in waters of ancient seas and then settled in their trillions on those seabeds. These creatures once built their skeletons and shells out of calcium carbonate, metabolizing the mineral content of the water in which they lived to create intricate architectures. In this way limestone can be seen as merely one phase in a dynamic earth cycle, whereby mineral becomes animal becomes rock; rock that will in time – in deep time – eventually supply the calcium carbonate out of which new organisms will build their bodies, thereby re-nourishing the same cycle into being again.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be adult.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“This is the most direct route from the mouth into the mantle, where the stomach and other organs lie, but as you might imagine, swallowing through your brain can be risky.”
― Danna Staaf, Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods