Geosonnet 55

A plotter’s pause to synchronize his watch

Is often preparation for a heist:

A bank vault? Tardy mail train full of scotch?

A drug syndicate’s freighter full of ice?

Geologists scheme on a grander scale

Where ice envelops Earth, a mile thick.

Should cryospheric pilfering prevail

The melting must be synchronous, and quick.

Boron reveals (in sonnet twenty five)

Cap carbonates have one last common flaw

A rapid deposition crooks derive

A catastrophic warming's last hurrah

   The zircons say less than a million years.

   CO₂ melts the ice, then disappears.

Geology 47 251

Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Geosonnet 54

A horoscope yon wand’ring planets make

Predictions of our facies, lives, and death.

Is graveyard orbital influence fake?

A sediment’ry burial shibboleth?

Milanković, that fortune-telling Serb

Used planet motions to predict the ice

Can continental weathering perturb

A fossilizing chemical device?

The Ordovician pyritized remains

Of soft parts every point one million years

Suggest orbit obliquity explains

Whether flesh is preserved or disappears..

   A fool’s gold coin beneath a dead worm’s tongue

   Exquisite fossil afterlife’s begun.

Geology 47 103

Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 

60 61 62 63 64  65 66