Strata: Stories from Deep Time

by Laura Poppick

A revelatory journey through four moments in Earth’s deep past, and their lessons for our future.

The epic stories of our planet’s 4.54-billion-year history are written in strata—ages-old remnants of ancient seafloors, desert dunes, and riverbeds striping landscapes around the world. In this brilliantly original debut work, science writer Laura Poppick decodes strata to lead us on a journey through four global transformations that made our lives on Earth possible: the first accumulations of oxygen in the atmosphere; the deep freezes of "Snowball Earth"; the rise of mud on land and accompanying proliferation of plants; and the dinosaurs’ reign on a hothouse planet

Poppick introduces us to the researchers who have devoted their careers to understanding the events of deep time, including the world’s leading stegosaur scientist. She travels to sites as various as a Minnesotan iron mine that runs half a mile deep and a corner of the Australian Outback where glacial deposits date from the coldest times on Earth. Ultimately, she demonstrates that the planet’s oceans, continents, atmosphere, life, and ice have always conspired to bring stability to Earth, even if we are only just beginning to understand how these different facets interact.

A work in the tradition of John McPhee, Strata allows us to observe how the planet has responded to past periods of environmental upheaval, and shows how Earth’s ancient narratives could hold lessons for our present and future.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Nature, Geology, Environment, Natural History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2025

About the author

Laura Poppick is a science and environmental journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Wired, Audubon, National Geographic, Science, and elsewhere. She has been listed as a finalist for the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award and the Maine Literary Awards Short Works Competition in Nonfiction, among others. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This is what I want for you in reading this book. I want you to bask in this current moment, in the awe that we get to be here at all."

I love the dual nature of the phrase “deep time.” As Laura Poppick’s beautiful science and nature book, Strata, shows, it refers not only to the physical depth of the minerals, fossils, relics, and other materials that allow scientists to study Earth’s history, but also to the profundity of a study that connects our lives to the many millions of years that came before us.

Strata combines all of the best elements of nature writing. The overarching natural and geological themes remind me of those from one of my favorite nature books, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. Furthermore, I love the way that Poppick brings in the social and human sides of science.

I enjoyed “meeting” the author and the other scientists she worked with, in particular reading about her own awe at and gratitude for the Earth (as evidenced by the quote above from her introduction). And I appreciated the look at things such as efforts toward making geoscience more inclusive for indigenous people and incorporating their traditional beliefs.

A few other notes:

It’s always a good sign when a nonfiction book offers such interesting facts that it makes you pause to tell someone something that you just learned. Like that flowers are millions of years older than grasses — fascinating!

Between reading Chet Raymo’s Honey from Stone recently and the news in this book that Dingle’s earth contains traces of some of the world’s oldest land plants, I think I need to make another trip out to the peninsula soon and go exploring.

The section on knowing so much about the scientific elements of dinosaurs (their anatomy, etc.) but still so little about the “social” side of them (how they acted and how they relate to each other) and how scientists are theorizing on these things, was so interesting.

Thank you so much to the author, W.W. Norton and Company, and Netgalley for providing an advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I’m going to leave you with a passage that really spoke to me, because I think if you are the perfect audience for this wonderful book, it will be all the convincing you need to read it:

"If that asteroid had landed just a few minutes later in water just a few hundred meters deeper, everything could have been different. Less rock may have vaporized, less solar radiation may have been blocked. Sauropods and stegosaurs and tyrannosaurs and all the rest of them may have clawed their way through and come out on the other side, never opening up the space for those small, hairy beings to rise to dominance.

We grew from that devastation, that piece of space debris thrown randomly down to Earth. That wreckage brought with it the possibility of bouquets and dance parties and fresh-baked pastries; orchestras and paintings with pigments in heartbreaking hues. It brought the possibility of narratives, of stories passed down through mouths and later through hands and ink and paper and now silicon. Of people who could weave stories from stone.

This hits me not only when I'm sitting with strata but when I'm out in the world in a wholly human experience. I'm at a concert at a small stadium, my shoulder brushes the arm of the man sitting next to me. He slurps soda from a plastic straw and bobs his head as he mouths the words to nobody. Everyone is sweaty and we all know the song. When the stage lights flicker from fuchsia to yellow to alien green in tempo with the bass, we scream and cheer because we get to be here. The lights flash again and for a moment, in the darkness, I'm not here but floating through the depths of an Ediacaran sea. I'm swimming through the brine of those sightless, earless, boneless beings.

I'm remembering the ice ages that they sprang from and the mudlessness of land in those days. I'm remembering the lunglessness and soundlessness and now I'm remembering to breathe and turn back to the music. .

But I can't take my mind off it. How, after all those epochs, after everything Earth had been through, the thing that made this moment possible may have just been that random piece of space junk."

[♡•Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was impressive! Will post a full review soon!

[Miranda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps unfairly, I went into this book hoping to find another “The Underworld.” A book that dives deep on a niche topic, but brings you along for the ride, making you a convert by the sheer force of the author’s enthusiasm. Strata: Stories from Deep Time is a serviceable introduction to the study of stratigraphy, and has some interesting information, but if you’re not already interested in the field, I’m not sure this book is going to draw you in.

On the other hand, if you are interested in the natural world, and how it’s evolved and changed, and all the pieces and things that had to come about just so, so that humans could be here to crate the tango, and lasagna, this book has a lot to offer you. Or if you’re simply curious about how we know what we know about geologic history-this book will answer your questions.

I received an ARC in exchange for this honest review.

[Ben Goldfarb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had the privilege to blurb an advance copy of this lovely book; here’s what I wrote:

“Rock has never felt more alive, nor deep time more current, than in Laura Poppick’s absorbing, illuminating Strata. In the intrepid tradition of John McPhee and Elizabeth Kolbert, Poppick spelunks into our planet’s history to unearth the ancient dramas that sculpted our landscapes and ourselves. This book is an indispensable guide to the dynamic stories our planet writes in stone.”

[Pamela]

The book is a bit more information dense than I was hoping for. It is readable, but you probably need a strong desire in reading about geology, deep time and stratigraphy.

The book is organized into four parts, Air, Ice, Mud and Heat.

I got through much of the section on Air, that contains a discussion on the GOE short for Great Oxygenation Event, or Great Oxidation Event. Scientists are having difficulty in determining when exactly this took place, and how. The rocks have to tell the story since this was such a very long time ago. The evidence is still there, but fragmentary, difficult to decipher. Opinions differ on what the rock is revealing. The details of this are interesting to some extent.

I image the rest of the book will be at the same detailed level and my interest just isn’t sustaining that deep dive at the moment. Perhaps I will attempt the book at another time, but for now I am leaving it here, partially read.

[Sarah Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Review: Strata: Stories from Deep Time by Laura Poppick

Laura Poppick’s Strata: Stories from Deep Time is a masterful synthesis of geological storytelling and scientific inquiry, offering a profound meditation on Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history through the lens of its layered landscapes. As a woman and scholar in environmental studies, I was struck by Poppick’s ability to weave personal narrative with rigorous research, creating a work that feels both intimate and expansive. Her exploration of four pivotal planetary transformations—from the oxygenation of the atmosphere to the reign of dinosaurs—resonated deeply, not just as scientific milestones but as metaphors for resilience and interconnectedness.

What moved me most was Poppick’s humanization of deep time. By spotlighting the researchers—like the world’s leading stegosaur scientist—who dedicate their lives to deciphering Earth’s strata, she transforms abstract epochs into relatable quests for knowledge. Her visits to sites like the Minnesotan iron mine and Australian Outback glacial deposits evoked a visceral sense of wonder, grounding cosmic-scale events in tangible landscapes. As a reader, I found myself pausing to reflect on how these ancient narratives mirror contemporary environmental crises, particularly Poppick’s emphasis on Earth’s inherent stability amid upheaval. Her prose, lyrical yet precise, mirrors the strata she describes: layered with meaning, each sentence revealing new depths.

However, the book’s strength—its focus on geological processes—sometimes sidelines the socio-political dimensions of environmental storytelling. While Poppick deftly explains how Earth’s systems interact, I longed for more explicit connections to Indigenous knowledge or feminist ecocriticism, frameworks that could enrich her analysis of human-planet relationships. Additionally, the four-case-study structure, though effective, leaves gaps; a chapter on mass extinctions or anthropogenic impacts might have bridged past and present more urgently.

Strengths:

-Narrative Brilliance: Poppick’s McPhee-esque style makes complex science accessible without sacrificing depth.
-Emotional Resonance: Her portraits of scientists and landscapes invite readers to feel deep time.
-Interdisciplinary Potential: A model for bridging geology, journalism, and environmental humanities.

Critiques:

Missing Frameworks: Greater engagement with Indigenous or feminist perspectives could amplify its relevance.
Temporal Gaps: A fifth case study on human-driven change would strengthen its contemporary stakes.

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.5/5) – A revelatory debut that redefines our relationship to planetary history, though its silences on human narratives within geology hold it back from perfection.

Thank you to W. W. Norton and Edelweiss for providing a free advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Final Thought: Poppick’s work is a strata itself—layers of wonder, wisdom, and warning. It leaves readers not just informed but altered, with a newfound reverence for the ground beneath our feet and the futures it might hold.

[Peter Tillman]

The publisher has provided this nice except, on the discovery of Snowball Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowbal...
Book excerpt: https://lithub.com/how-an-ancient-ice...
The first good evidence was found by a British geologist in Svalbard in 1938. WW2 intervened; he didn't publish his work until 1964. He had a hard time getting his ideas accepted.

A subject that's always interested me, since student days. I'm always a bit skeptical of science books written by journalists. From the evidence of this excerpt, I'll take a look at the book, when our libraries get a copy.

[Lungstrum Smalls · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the writing never quite rose to the level of Carson or McPhee for me, I enjoyed this well researched and heartfelt book about Earth’s deep history.

[Maris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book. What a wonderful summary of Earth’s history with snapshots of research and researchers, tied together with lovely prose.
“You breathe in and you breathe out. You remember how unlikely your life is, and yet here we are. In this moment, now.”

[Jonathan Crain · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Strata: Stories from Deep Time," Laura Poppick offers more than a guided tour through the 4.54-billion-year history of Earth. She constructs a layered narrative that is part memoir, part environmental history, and part popular science, grounded in firsthand observation and fieldwork. What emerges is a book that challenges readers to think in geologic terms without ever losing sight of the urgency of the present.

Poppick's approach is distinctive—a blend of personal vulnerability and scientific precision. The narrative begins not with a grand discovery or sweeping thesis, but with a memory—stumbling into a college geology class, more out of inertia than ambition. From that starting point, the book steadily unfolds into a reflection on what it means to see the world as a living archive—one shaped as much by ice and sediment as by microbes and mass extinctions. That Poppick can trace a line from the quiet clarity of Bighorn Canyon to the implications of planetary-scale climate change is no small achievement.

The scientific content is handled with rigor and clarity. Readers are introduced to phenomena such as the Great Oxidation Event, the Snowball Earth hypothesis, and the Mesozoic hothouse not as static textbook entries but as ongoing conversations among working scientists. Importantly, Poppick doesn't pretend these debates are settled. She embraces uncertainty, highlighting, for instance, how evidence for early oxygen is contested or how models of ancient glaciation remain incomplete. This openness to provisional knowledge is not only intellectually honest but thematically resonant: Earth's story, like ours, is a draft in progress.

Poppick's prose strikes an effective balance between accessibility and precision. She knows how to translate complexity into clarity, often through grounded metaphors—sediments as barcodes, mud as both a product and a driver of ecological transformation. At times, the language drifts toward the poetic, but it does so in service of explanation, giving shape to processes that are vast and abstract by nature.

A notable strength of "Strata" lies in its emotional range. It evokes awe at the magnitude of deep time and grief at the accelerating loss of ecological stability—a coherence of emotional registers that serves the book's central argument. There is humility in acknowledging that humans are "agents of this geologic moment," but also recognition that we are part of the same system that once saw cyanobacteria reshape the atmosphere or glaciers recast the biosphere. The recurring motif of interconnection between past and present, life and landscape, grounds the book's most urgent argument: that understanding Earth's history is essential to any meaningful environmental action today.

To her credit, Poppick does not position the geologic past as a simple mirror for our current predicament. She makes it clear that while the past offers insight, it does not provide reassurance. Indeed, some of the most sobering lessons come from the recognition that the current pace of change far exceeds even Earth's most catastrophic episodes. If there is a call to action here, it is a measured one: learn deeply, act deliberately, and abandon the illusion that complexity excuses inaction.

Though occasionally constrained by the frameworks of Western science, "Strata" makes thoughtful room for Indigenous perspectives and acknowledges the colonial legacies of geological exploration. The author's reckoning with these issues—especially her reflections on resource extraction and privilege—adds depth and honesty to the book's ethical landscape.

"Strata" ultimately succeeds not because it tells us something entirely new, but because it teaches us to pay closer attention—to rocks, to rates of change, to the stories we inherit and the ones we leave behind. It is a book that meets this moment not with panic, but with perspective. Readers who care about climate, deep history, and the ethics of being a species with geologic impact will find much to consider here and, perhaps, something to carry forward.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laura Poppick’s Strata traces key moments in Earth’s history across four sections—Air, Ice, Mud, and Heat—covering events like the Great Oxidation, “Snowball Earth,” the emergence of land ecosystems, and the dinosaur era.

Strata distinguishes itself through Poppick’s adept integration of geological science into narrative form. She skillfully combines scientific explanation with articulate storytelling, joining researchers in mines, outcrops, and polar environments. This approach offers a comprehensive and nuanced depiction of Earth’s ancient history. Poppick’s writing is clear and thorough, making complex science understandable without oversimplifying its evolving nature.

Strata also carries a quiet urgency. By examining how Earth has recovered from past upheavals, Poppick frames geology as a lens for understanding today’s climate challenges. Instead of simple solutions, she highlights that Earth endures, but our place on it remains vulnerable.

The book can be dense at times, particularly when discussing early atmospheric changes. However, Poppick’s vivid writing and detailed content make it worthwhile. Strata blends science writing with thoughtful reflection, inspiring awe for Earth's history and responsibility for its future.

Final Rating: 4.5 out of 5 — This well-crafted debut effectively brings the distant past to life and will be of particular interest to those who appreciate science, nature, and environmental literature.

[Book Club of One · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with much writing on geologic time, Laura Poppick takes the long view, exploring four key developmental moments from Earth's present formation for Strata: Stories from Deep Time. It is a book about the chain of events that make the present possible, and a reminder that even if we do not survive, we shall leave a trace, a band of strata all our own.

Poppick divides the work into four parts: Air, Ice, Mud and Heat. Each of these, seemingly simple, elements helped derive land and atmosphere that has made life possible. Poppick provides both the history of the scientific understanding of how these elements shaped the world, in her own words or those of experts and pairs these narratives with her own first hand experiences as a student or more recent travels to interview and see the works of contemporary researchers.

Strata offers us four main stories of how we understand the development of the Earth System. And why understanding these developments are so key for planning for upcoming environmental upheavals.

Recommended to readers or researchers of Geology, history of the sciences or deep time.

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[Jaksen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, well-documented and researched. But you really need a little background in science - geology mostly - to understand a lot of this. The writer does explain the material, but then it delves DEEP into that material to give a comprehensive, clear description of what's going on.

The story of our earth, written in the rock layers that have accumulated over millions - and billions - of time. What's in that rock, how it formed, what we can learn from it - and how probably, most importantly, it informs the future of the Earth as well.

I know the current space program wants to focus on 'Space' as in 'Out There Space.' Beyond the Earth. But one must remember that the Earth is also in space and it's the only place where we humans can live. So I really don't see the divide between focusing on 'out there,' when the Earth is part of the 'there' which is most important to us.

Five stars

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where do I even begin to discuss this book? I was very impressed. It was a wonderfully crafted blend of science/geology, poetry, and lyrical prose. The author wrote in a way that the science was not overly complicated. Add in the beauty of the poetry and lyrical prose, and it made me enjoy it even more. I even found myself thinking about the wonderful joy of mud which is something I had never thought to consider before.

I can only hope that Poppick writes more books in the future, because I will gladly read more of her material.

[Wendelle]

a fascinating and wonderful escape journey into our planet's deep time, this book discusses the current state-of-the-art knowledge and competing theories about specific incidents in our planet's history that currently preoccupy leading geology departments: the Earth's Great Oxidation Event, global glaciation events (Snowball Earth's Sturtian and Marinoan periods as well as the Gaskier glaciation periods), the Ediacaran explosion of life forms strange and wonderful, and the role of ancient vegetation in creating mud out of silt and clay through chemical weathering.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm tempted to give it a four start rating but the attempts a lyricism fell so flat that, despite the good presentation of a lot of important and not fully resolved science (a difficult task) I couldn't quite pull the trigger on that.
Also, some of the personal details about the scientists was so pointless that it also dragged down my rating. This is a professional journalist so I hold her to higher 'literary' standards.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grateful to have gotten to read this one before it came out and contribute a small bit to these stories. It does amazing justice to the science, but also to other equally valid perspectives of the world: indigenous, artistic, poetic. Laura captured perfectly the feeling of being human: singular and speck-like at the same time. Loved loved loved!

[GH · Rating 5 out of 5]

I looooove stratigraphy so I had very high expectations haha and I did like it but hoped it would be a little longer or more detailed (if even possible). it reminded me of why I love geology and how I miss going on geology field trips!

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reads like a love letter to geology, and like any love letter, it gets a little awkward to read it sometimes. The flowery language and sheer love seeps through, although I think it's necessary to make the material less dry (ha, dry!).

Overall an excellent book which easily contextualizes and presents some newer discoveries I was not aware of.

Very much recommended.

Note: I got a copy of this from a goodreads giveaway, so thank you!

[Joel R Jasperson · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful read

Really brought the history and study of the earth alive. Laura brings the past and present earth together and introduces us to the people engaged in this science

[Catisha Scavairello · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to all responsible parties for the Goodreads giveaway. here's my honest opinion:

I entered this giveaway to learn something new, and I did. however, I thought the book was dry.