Caroline Winterer

Deep time is the idea that emerges in the 19th century that the Earth is not, in fact, 6,000 years old, as a literal reading of Genesis and the rest of the Bible will tell you, but in fact, millions, if not billions of years old.

And that idea emerges quite rapidly in our very modern history.

That's right.

Yeah, they had definitely found fossils of scary creatures before.

And the word fossil simply means coming out of the ground.

It doesn't mean particularly ancient.

So you could imagine that, for example, the dinosaurs had been around, swimming around the waters of Noah's Ark, for example.

So you didn't need deep time for dinosaurs.

You need intellectual revolution to begin to imagine an enormous expanse of time in which

The history of the earth plays out instead of a tiny expanse of time in which the history of the earth plays out.

Well, as you mentioned, the Industrial Revolution, and in fact, that momentous revolution is accompanied by the Deep Time Revolution.

They are completely related to one another.

One would not have happened without the other.

So as Americans and Europeans in Europe begin digging for, for example, fossil fuels in the ancient coal forests that lie under North America, they begin to ask themselves,

huh, I wonder what rocks lie underneath this.

I wonder what rocks lie above that.

And that's an economic question, right?

How deeply do I have to dig into the earth in order to get to the fossil forest layered where the coal is, for example.

But they begin to see, wow, this is, you know, it

probably took a really long time for these various deposits of earth to lie on top of these ancient coal forests.