"Winter is settling over the rolling hills of North Idaho, where I live. Snow ices the limbs of the bare aspens outside my window, while perfect flakes fall from the flat gray sky. This weather is my reality today, but it is also ephemeral; the blanket of snow will probably melt in a week or two. Three days ago, we were still awaiting the season's first snowfall."
"To help readers understand how incredibly recently humans appeared, John McPhee, in his 1981 book Basin and Range, suggests spreading your arms out wide and imagining that the distance from fingertip to fingertip represents 4.5 billion years - the age of Earth. In comparison, he writes, the 300,000 years since Homo sapiens evolved is so brief that "in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.""
Snow settles over North Idaho's rolling hills and melts on short timescales, contrasting with geologic processes that span millions to billions of years. Trees, windows, and loess deposits represent different brief intervals within much larger Earth history. Using a fingertip-to-fingertip analogy for 4.5 billion years, human existence occupies an almost negligible portion of planetary time. Western landscapes preserve ancient rocks such as the 3.45-billion-year-old Sacawee gneiss and record histories visible in places like the Grand Canyon. Biological survivors such as pronghorn trace Pleistocene legacies. Scientific understanding of plate tectonics informs the long-term shaping of the region.
Read at High Country News
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