Marcia Bjornerud

Dec 17, 2024 | aeon.co | Marcia Bjornerud

As geological sites go, this one is easy to miss. It’s just a low rise of exposed rock along a back road in northern Wisconsin, outside a town whose one claim to fame is a tavern that the gangster John Dillinger used as a hideout in the 1930s. Even though I’ve been to this outcrop many times before, I drive right past it on this autumn day and need to look for a place where it’s possible for three university vans to turn around.

Sep 4, 2024 | nautil.us | Marcia Bjornerud

Imagine living in an old house for years and finally getting access to a locked basement—only to discover a magical workshop where everything in the world is made. That’s a bit what it was like recently for geologists to finally get a good glimpse of the mantle, that vast middle layer of Earth that begins some 20 miles beneath the surface of the continents. Last month, an international research team published their analysis of the longest core sample of the mantle to date in Science.

Aug 13, 2024 | orionmagazine.org | Ellen Wayland-Smith |Marcia Bjornerud

Marcia Bjornerud’s wise and sweeping book, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Sublte Wisdom of Rocks, shows us how learning to situate our human selves within the expanded time scales of deep geology is paramont to forging a more ethical, sustainable way of living in partnership with the earth. Together we sat down to discuss the role of metaphor in science, sacred time, and some really, really old rocks.

Jul 17, 2024 | nautil.us | Marcia Bjornerud

The question of whether humanity is alone in the cosmos creates strange bedfellows. It attracts astronomers and abduction conspiracy theorists, pseudoarchaeology enthusiasts and physicists. And loads of science-fiction writers, of course, who have conjured extraterrestrials from Klaatu to Doctor Who. Douglas Adams imagined a galaxy so full of life that its interstellar travelers needed a Hitchhiker’s Guide.

May 29, 2024 | bigthink.com | Marcia Bjornerud

Well into the space age, our thinking about the heavens is still entangled with ideas from ancient Greece. Like the classical Greek cosmologists, we tend to envision the heavenly realm as a place of order and harmony, with planets and moons in elegant, unchanging orbits. As Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton later showed, this is true in approximation. But in detail, the motions of the planets are messy and erratic.