Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis In 2016, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago, detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean waters. For the editors of Timescales, this event captures the disjunctive temporalities of our era’s—the Anthropocene’s—ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating degradation of our planet’s life-supporting environment established slowly over millennia. They contend that, to represent and respond to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) requires reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s. Timescales’ collection of lively and thought-provoking essays puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists. Together forging new intellectual spaces, they explore the relationship between geological deep time and historical particularity, between ecological crises and cultural expression, between environmental policy and social constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries, and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable) hope. Interspersed among these essays are three complementary “etudes,” in which artists describe experimental works that explore the various timescales of ecological crisis. Contributors: Jason Bell, Harvard Law School; Iemanjá Brown, College of Wooster; Beatriz Cortez, California State U, Northridge; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale U; Jane E. Dmochowski, U of Pennsylvania; David A. D. Evans, Yale U; Kate Farquhar; Marcia Ferguson, U of Pennsylvania; Ömür Harmanşah, U of Illinois at Chicago; Troy Herion; Mimi Lien; Mary Mattingly; Paul Mitchell, U of Pennsylvania; Frank Pavia, California Institute of Technology; Dan Rothenberg; Jennifer E. Telesca, Pratt Institute; Charles M. Tung, Seattle U.

Quantifying the timescales of current geological processes is critical for constraining the physical mechanisms operating on the Earth today. Since the Earth’s origin 4.55 billion years ago magmatic processes have continued to shape the Earth, producing the major reservoirs that exist today (core, mantle, crust, oceans and atmosphere) and promoting their continued evolution. But key questions remain. When did the core form and how quickly? How are magmas produced in the mantle, and how rapidly do they travel towards the surface? How long do magmas reside in the crust, differentiating and interacting with the host rocks to yield the diverse set of igneous rocks we see today? How fast are volcanic gases such as carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere? This book addresses these and other questions by reviewing the latest advances in a wide range of Earth Science disciplines: from the measurement of short-lived radionuclides to the study of element diffusion in crystals and numerical modelling of magma behaviour. It will be invaluable reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as igneous petrologists, mineralogists and geochemists involved in the study of igneous rocks and processes.

Leading experts from a diverse range of disciplines encourage the reader, from whatever perspective to think about change and environmental issues in a new light through different time-scales.

With a Foreword by Steven WeinbergIn this richly illustrated book, Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft and Theoretical Physicist Stefan Vandoren describe the enormous diversity of natural phenomena that take place at different time scales.In the tradition of the bestseller Powers of Ten, the authors zoom in and out in time, each step with a factor of ten. Starting from one second, time scales are enlarged until processes are reached that take much longer than the age of the universe. After the largest possible eternities, the reader is treated to the shortest and fastest phenomena known. Then the authors increase with powers of ten, until again the second is reached at the end of the book.At each time scale, interesting natural phenomena occur, spread over all scientific disciplines: orbital and rotation periods of planets and stars, decay times of elementary particles and atoms, biological rhythms and evolution processes, but also the different geological time scales. remove