Twenty-five sonnets over 4 billion years

For the last 6 months, I’ve been summarizing research articles from the high profile academic journal Geology in sonnet form; trying to distill the artistic meaning of the research, be it the methodology or the interpretations.  The first 25 of these sonnets are compiled below.

They are listed in stratigraphic order of the time period studied; that is, the sonnet about the study of the most recent rocks on top, with research on older rocks below.  The one sonnet describing a study of Martian rocks is listed last, as those rocks are probably older than any of the terrestrial studies described here.

These fall into five broad categories: The Way of the World (Lab studies, simulations, and Quaternary rocks), Climate and Carbon (Tertiary); Death on a Blue Dot (Cretaceous through Cambrian extinctions) Ice ( Ediacaran and Cryogenean), and The World Forms (the first 3.8 billion years).

  Numbers refer to the described paper, in terms of volume-page in the journal Geology. They are also linked, as are some technical terms.

The way of the world

42-867

The linear progressions we assume

sphericalize our precious holy cows

the certainty simplicities presume

breed dreamt-up facts we dutifully espouse.

Repeated careful data overthrow

and phosphorus impurities reveal

Olivine is white-hot Devil's snow

A closet skeleton time can't anneal.

This phoenix from volcano is reborn

Forgotten stories texture can unearth

abandon simple models, do not mourn

Complexity's explanatory worth.

   The simple models woo, but cannot stay.

   Eventually the facts get in the way.

40-447
The vast caldera of the Yellowstone

Erupts siliceous ash from time to time.

It’s far from the Cascade subduction zone

Therefore, a mantle plume’s the suspect prime.

But magma conducts electricity

Conductors in the mantle lie out west

The tomographic maps are quite pretty

But show no melt where theory would suggest

A plume, with mantle source below the crust

Should yield a seismic and conductive trace.

Because we can’t detect deep melt we must

Explain resistance far below this place.

   A pulsed hotspot, or plate-related stall?

   Or maybe plumes do not exist at all.

 42-771
The ants which scuttle by between our toes

Dissolve the min’rals of the Earth we tread

The calcic feldspar, slipped under their nose

Ten trillion insects weather, pit, and shred.

The Himalayan mountains cool the Earth

Though mangroves and the grasses do their part,

But ants may do what was the work of turf

By min’ralizing CO₂, they start

Evaporating seas in Neogene

Drying the Earth to suit their sandy hives

Anthropocene becomes the Formicene

The terraformic swarm constructs, connives.

  No human teamwork makes emissions slow

  Yet toiling ants sequester far below.

42-759
The Vikings lived in Greenland 'till in cooled.

Ten thousand years before, as glac'ers thawed,

Melt water in the North Atlantic pooled,

The Younger Dryas cold snap shocked and awed.

In Norway, glaciers reappeared on high,

Above the fjords where stoic Norse rule lapsed.

Then Carolina icebergs floated by,

As Greenland outlet glaciers collapsed.

Why would cold make this icecap melt, not grow?

Emotionless wind froze the Baffin Bay.

Warm currents thawed the ice tongues from below;

Without a shelf, the glac'er sped away.

  Today such currents threaten the Antarctic

  An outburst would be deluge, not cathartic.

42-643
The rhyolite of Huckleberry Ridge

Discharged a hundred cubic miles yield

The timing of this eruption did bridge

Reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field.

We measure timing of this ancient blast

With argon from potassium decay

This cataclysm from the recent past

might warn us should another come today.

The crystals froze, then thawed, then froze again.

The magma chamber did not slowly stew

chronology of xenocrysts explain

What to expect, should this begin anew.

  The warning won’t be twenty thousand years

  to outburst, from when magma first appears.

Climate and Carbon

41-947

The sunset lion, as Britannia aged

Survived, with every man, the frigid waste.

Industrial hostility upstaged

The sanctity of souls, their wreck encased

In icy seas and grinding floes made cold

By deep Antarctic circumpolar flow.

Dark isolation froze this land, how old

Are continental glaciers, ceaseless snow?

Six desp'rate heroes sailed the Scotia Sea

Dead arc, live backarc ridge beneath their keel

Tectonic forces pulled their goal to lea,

Deflected currents, begat their ordeal.

  Endurance sank, endurance overcame

  Asylum, dawn, and cause were all the same.

41-963
A pox on all those proxies non-unique

Which make interpretation hard to do.

Magnesium to calcium we seek

Sea temp'rature, and not pCO₂.

So lithium, uranium are used

to disambiguate the Mg curve

O. umbonatus data's not recused.

Antarctic ice growth isotopes observe,

But whence the melting in the Miocene?

Here isotopes of carbon join our tale,

And sedimentary burndown in marine

Organic carbon makes the icecap fail.

  Antarctic ice was thawed by CO₂

  Let's try repeating this effect anew.

40-523
For fifty million years, ‘tis understood

A vanished forest froze in permafrost.

The isotopes of carbon in the wood

Tell secrets of the climate we have lost.

Then brackish duckpond, now a frozen sea,

Ex-crocodiles where Franklin did maroon.

Those Rains of Castamere, we can’t agree:

Cold drizzle or a tropical monsoon?

Extinct sequoia yearns for rain no more

Yet in its fossil rings it has preserved

A dryad’s weather journal, yielding lore

of summer rain and winter drought observed

  The Arctic Ocean’s lost half of its ice

  What happens when it’s gone? We need advice.

Death on a blue dot

41-983

Just Sixty-six million short years ago

(Though Deccan volcanism coincides)

The Yucatan was smote a cosmic blow

And the Gulf shelf collapsed in those fell tides

Late Cretaceous sediments were scoured,

Deposited as “boundary cocktail.”

Unsorted forams, lime mudstone, powered

By Chicxulub-induced collapse of shale

The wildcatters call the seismic line

“Middle Cretaceous Unconformity”

Not middle, end; deluvian, malign,

Complete destructive uniformity

  The Mesozoic ended with this splat

  So Gerta Keller, please hang up your hat

42-895
From flood basalt hot sulfur will exhale,

Across the dying planet, smog bank draped

The genie left the bottle, empty grail,

No evidence what long ago escaped.

The lava flows forget what they degassed

A fleeting daydream, lost with time’s progress

But though a hundred million years have passed

The clinopyroxene preserves the S.

Partitioning experiments defined!

A synchrotron or ion probe can see

The sulfur clouds to which we once were blind

Are quantified now, analytically.

   Sulfurous magma wrecked the biosphere

   While clean eruptions let life persevere.

41-955
The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province

Erupted tholiitic and potassic.

C O two upset atmospheric balance.

Eco-collapse ended the Triassic.

Green sulfur bacteria’s isotopes

Show photic zone euxinia prevailed.

Stomatal size decreased (show microscopes)

And carbon biomass was soon curtailed.

Compound-specific isotopes will tell

Which phytoplankton thrived in these tough times,

While wax from leaves and calcite from a shell

Record recovery in clastic slimes.

  The Triassic ended as it began

  Can those extinctions be surpassed by man?

42-779
The strontium which weathers from the land

Is held by teeth and shells beneath the waves

Their creatures live, then die, interred in sand

with isotopes in stratigraphic graves.

The greatest dying Earth has ever seen

Initiated the Triassic time

Before the ants evolved, rock weathering

Was temperature dependent, leaching lime.

Warm mud in post-apocalyptic waste

Bereft of vegetation, washed away.

And Gaia, both hungover and disgraced,

Left complex biomes for another day.

  She sobered up in five or six epochs

  But those hard times forever changed the rocks.

42-879

The Permian extinction was severe,

though only callous geos call it "great."

Sulfur and carbon choked the atmosphere

Siberian eruption exhalate.

A lava-coal explosion, it’s surmised

Spread fly ash all around the sickly Earth,

But if this ash is made by wildfire,

The evidence for coal fly ash is dearth.

A sulfate drought could set the world aflame,

The brimstone vapors choking off the rain.

The lava’s murder weapon’s not the same,

But "Lip" can improvise to kill again.

   If carbon, sulfur cycles stop their flow

   The ecosystem has nowhere to go.

42-835

On Mars and Venus air is CO two,

While on the Earth it is but a trace gas.

Our rocks and water scrub the gas into

The stable carbonates, which won’t degas.

In torrid climates, weathering is fast.

Cold rivers transport unreacted grains

Fluvial temperature in eons past

Can be deduced with XRF and brains.

The elements in sediments explain

An early Permian heats up and thaws.

Jokulhlaups warm up more than the jungle rain

Digesting rocks chewed up by glacial jaws.

   This weathering drew down the CO two

   But not enough for ice to grow anew.

42-711
The oxidation of the atmosphere,

And buffered ocean water do record

Life’s radiation into a frontier.

When proxies tell this tale, they are adored.

While sulfur oxidation can detect

Stagnation deep in Neptune’s dusky realm,

A noisy delta S makes us suspect

Metabolism signals overwhelm.

Portentous albatross foresaw the brine,

Which makes the sea the beverage of the dead,

Has sulfate contents greybeards can divine

With isotopes of calcium instead.

  The ocean’s respiration, waves to slab,

  Can be deciphered in a far off lab.

42-583

Australia is a dry and stable land.

No mountain range, no active slipping fault,

And yet this plain had lava seas erupt.

We call them Kalkarindji flood basalt.

It’s hard to know just when these rocks were formed.

The weathering and rock type complicates

Radiometric dates of dykes that swarmed

When seas contained the first protochordates.

For ten long years they searched the outback rocks

For grains unhurt since fossils first were formed.

In hopes the nucleii-related clocks

Survived half billion years, still undeformed.

  510 MA, a date of some distinction.

  Flood basalts can lead to mass extinction.

Ice

40-307

The Ediacaran saw creatures grow

Diversify as animals evolved.

But Cambrian descendants do not show

A lineage, preserved or else dissolved.

A missing fossil yearns to be dug up.

The Flinders Ranges burn to tell their tale

Trace fossils, both a spicule and a cup

Mean evolutionary theories can prevail.

Coronacollina was once a sponge

With opaline supports to hold it flat

Choia’s ancestor, before the plunge

Into the Cambrian destroyed the mat

  On which it lived, before it then evolved.

  Another fossil puzzle has been solved

42-815
The ozone and peroxide in the air,

enriched in isotope O seventeen,

Pass on the spike reaction products bear;

This stratospheric label’s not marine.

If limestone sulphate bears this airy mark

deceitful proxy! geosaboteur!

Thus reconstructed oceans fade to dark,

Eliminating tales that never were.

A lithologic memory withdrawn,

Built on assumptions hereby disallowed

The dreams of times hypothesized are gone

Mere fanciful illusions, disavowed.

  A lab revealed the havoc smog did wreak

  Perhaps they need a microbeam technique.

42-1103
The Earth once had a frozen shell of ice

encasing oceans, land, from pole to pole.

The mystery: what process could suffice

To kiss Snow White, rouse cryogenic soul.

One theory says volcanic CO₂

Would slowly warm the Earth until the thaw

As ice breaks up, the air and water brew:

Carbonic acid forms: paleo-spa.

The isotopes of boron measure bases.

Post-glacial carbonates record the change

As acid forms, the calcium replaces

Hydronium, a weathering exchange.

   Across the world, the acid came and went;

   A single ocean-atmosphere event.

42-659

New biostratigraphic data may

Help Cryogenian stratigraphy

The timing’s known from rhenium decay

The vase shaped fossils match from every sea.

Were they amoebas wearing armor plate?

Or protist tanks, cilia on the brink?

Eukaryotic arms race tempted fate

Destabilizing carbon source and sink.

Darwinian selection did not give

Thoughtful reflection, cool restraint, or mirth.

Organics buried, still they strove to live,

Turned pale blue dot into a snowball Earth.

  Three quarters of a billion years ago

  The first nuclear winter: “Let it go…”

The world forms

42-503

Enough with carbon, climate variation

Let’s look at rocks from a far older time,

Which lacked much copper mineralization,

And when anorthosites were at their prime.

Earth’s middle age- boring for a reason?

Tectonics were remarkably unchanged.

Ice and iron were both out of season.

A billion years of uniform exchange

Of isotopes, strontium, and S

The active margins ringed the continent.

Slow, steady mantle cooling caused the process

Strong lithosphere held melts incipient

  It ended with Rodinia dispersion

  Which led to Earth’s exciting, current version.

42-619
Nobody studies fucking iodine.

The halogen too rare for us to care,

But iodate to carbonate’s inclined

So we might have a useful proxy there.

This IO₃ requires oxygen,

And thus does not exist in reduced seas.

Its presence in old carbonates means then

Ozone and oxygen were in the breeze.

Archean carbonates do not have I,

But it appears when O first graced the air.

And thus another tool is forged, whereby

Our planet’s past can be unearthed to share.

  This gas we breathe controls the biosphere.

  We’d like to know what made it first appear.

42-923
Our early atmosphere was quite anoxic

‘till early algae terraformed the Earth.

One grand event, replacing gasses toxic?

Or did O oscillate since life’s first birth?

Did evolution make fate manifest?

Inexorable progress of the gene?

Or was the early oxygen repressed?

Methanogenic dominance was seen.

These visions of our past yearn to be fact.

Hypotheses distinct yet plausible.

The dawn of life’s mysterious, abstract,

Lest ancient rocks reveal what’s causable.

   Archean soil lets us know the way.

   Oxygen came, but then it went away.

42-747
The cratered lunar face preserves the song

Of bolide roller derbies eons past

But while the cold dead moon remembers long

The rains of Earth reshape the surface fast.

Did impacts peak four billion years ago?

Or taper off through geologic time?

Archean rocks are analysed to know

micaceous balls were hot glass in their prime.

This impact melt was blasted into space

By comets larger than the dino's doom.

Thus diminution models must replace

The cut-off LHB has us presume.

   Can cratering effect how cratons grow?

   Tectonic orogens changed status quo.

42-359
The Schrödinger bacteria’s Barsoom,

Where robots scan the wadi of the Styx.

There died, or never lived a microbe bloom

When déjà vu and Dejah Thoris mix,

Her hungry eyes fixed on Hadean seas,

Lowell’s canal dream just an aquifer.

The playa droid with X-ray vision sees;

Areocalcrete Earthings soon infer.

With carbonate and opal intergrown,

Australia’s prayer of cheap uranium,

As vengeful Ares, orbited by drone

Blends nukes and life within his cranium

  Thus Opportunity grinds sands of time

  Which mortals fancy Ceres made of lime.