Notes from Deep Time cover art

Notes from Deep Time

A Journey Through Our Past and Future Worlds

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Notes from Deep Time

By: Helen Gordon
Narrated by: Sarah Cullum
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About this listen

From the secret fossils of London to the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from state-of-the-art Californian laboratories to one of the world's most dangerous volcanic complexes hidden beneath the green hills of western Naples, set out on an adventure to those parts of the world where the Earth's life-story is written into the landscape.

Helen Gordon turns a novelist's eye on the extraordinary scientists who are piecing together this planetary drama. She gets to grips with the theory that explains how it all works - plate tectonics, a breakthrough as significant in its way as evolution or quantum mechanics, but much younger than either, and still with many secrets to reveal. And she looks to the future of our world, with or without us.

©2021 Helen Gordon (P)2021 W F Howes Biological Sciences Earth Sciences Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Physics Science Paleontology Highlander

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The content delves interestingly into the history of geology and our understanding of deep time. The reading is marred by too many grating mispronunciations of both technical and everyday words, which must also be attributed to poor editorial oversight. To do justice to this work, it should be re-recorded.

Interesting material, poor reading

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This is an interesting look at deep time that I wish I had read rather than listened to. The narrator uses the exact same droning deadly serious tone no matter what's happening in the book. It wasn't too bad at first but became very annoying, especially as it completely bulldozed anything funny.

Interesting book, annoying narration

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Really enjoyed this.if you have a interest in geology it’s worth a listen and go out and see what you can find .

A fantastic journey

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Excellent and fascinating! A very enjoyable book that I enjoyed from beginning to end and a very clear and pleasant narration. I loved the quirky diversions into the lives of some of the people who unraveled the mysteries of geology and deep time.

Fascinating Tales of Deep Time

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Much of the history of man has been written down on cave walls, clay, tablets and eventually paper but if you want to know about deep time, that history is written in glaciers (snowfalls with a record of the climate falls as snow and then compacts in layers and keeps a record in the glaciers - though man causing climate change is something that could soon melt and become lost forever) as well as in rocks, fossils, and the Earth’s geology. Along with carbon dating we can also date and know about the evolution of plants, animals and fish through DNA.

I once saw a presenter describe deep time by holding out his arm to the side, and explain with a single swipe of a nail file, you would remove the entire history of mankind. The rest of the arm would signify the time that came before man walked on this planet. It’s a very long, deep history and this book explains it and how we made these discoveries. When I was young, the rock sections of museums were something I missed as they were just dull and boring but now when I often visit Bristol Museum, I have become fascinated by the section that deals in that deep time from the Precambrian area through the Silurian, Devonian, (named after Devon) and onwards through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods through to the Holocene that we now inhabit.

There have been five great extensions including the last one, 63 million years ago when a meteorite landed somewhere in the Mexican plateau and wiped out all the dinosaurs with the exception of the non-Avian dinosaurs that we call birds that are all that remain of the dinosaurs. Eventually all that will remain of man existence in the fossil records, as mentioned by Elizabeth Colbert in her book ‘the six extinction’, all that will be remains of us in deep time is a period as thick as a Rizla paper. Our time on this planet has been very short. Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years. There is a greater lapse in time between the stegosaurus walking on this planet and becoming extinct than to the time of the Tyrannosaurus rex then there has been between the time the Tyrannosaurus Rex lived and went extinct and man. Dinosaurs ruled this world for about 165 million years and Homo sapiens have only been around for 200 - 300,000 years.

It’s a fascinating history and it got some really lovely passages of writing. I loved the following passage:

“I thought about what Steffensen had said when I asked him about climate-change denial. ‘I’m constantly mesmerised by the fact that people are genetically put together in such a way that they will choose to disregard proof in order to have a simpler view of the world,’ he said. ‘For some, this world view includes a belief that religion and climate change are incompatible. I’m a good Christian in many ways, but in my mind there is space for science and Christianity and they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Science was never meant to prove or disprove the existence of God. You can look at the sky, and knowing there’s galaxies and dark matter and shit up there doesn’t take away the sense of beauty and wonder.’

As well as the following:
Our apparently stable world is in constant motion. ‘If you wait long enough, everything flows,’ says University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), geodynamics expert Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni. ‘Over very, very long time-scales even the rocks flow, just like they were water in a boiling pot.’

Understanding deep time

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Difficult to follow with many mispronounced words and pacing poor with gaps in incorrect places and missing from correct places. Performer obviously with little or no knowledge of Geology (subject of book).

Could be much better, probably a good book to read.

Disappointing performance many mispronouncments!

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I would not have cared if the book had been read in American English or British English, but the mis-pronunciations made me think the narrator couldn’t speak either

Good book mangled

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An easy listening, super accessible way to learn more about deep time. Great narration too if a bit slow. I listened at 1.5x speed.

Easy listening for mind boggling ideas

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This is by far the worst recorded audiobook I have ever heard. Such a disservice to the interesting source material!
E.g. a poem by Alfred “Teninson”, the oldest “vertebras” lived…
Worst yet, “terroir” pronounced “terrier”.
If I were the author, I would insist this be re-recorded

So many errors!

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