Kier Writes

I’ve been thinking a lot about rocks lately, and I’ll tell you why

On every continent where there is sedimentary rock of an appropriate age There is a thin grey line  It is called the K-T Boundary, aka the Cretaceous Paleogene Boundary Below the line There is an incredible diversity of life Giant terrestrial reptiles, swamps, forests, birds, insects, mammals of all shapes and sizes, you name it, it’s probably there.  But above the line?  Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

The line is made of iridium, in an amount that doesn’t occur naturally anywhere on this planet, now or then| We all know the story, it’s one of the first you are told when you enter school “The dinosaurs roamed the earth, until one day a comet came down and made them all disappear”  Except, they didn’t just “dissapear”, though explaining that to a group of kindergarteners is a little more difficult than it sounds  Because how do you tell a five year old that there was once a bizarre, vibrant, beautiful alien world- Except it wasn’t alien, because it was here where we are right now- But then something ended it abruptly, violently, and that something came from outer space

Did you know that when rock was vaporized and melted by the force of the meteor’s impact, it shot into the atmosphere, and the way that it recrystallized meant that for a little while as the world ended, it rained black droplets of glass?

This is why we know it was springtime in the Northern Hemisphere when the event occurred In North Dakota, there is a deposit of lake fish that died in the blast, and they died with these droplets of impact glass in their gills. And in those same last breaths where molten glass that was once rock embedded itself into their bodies, they also breathed in pollen, because flowers were blooming

Flowers blooming at the end of the world, the poetry writes itself Did you also know that the sun went out for at least months? Probably years? And there were birds And there were dinosaurs that were closely related to birds We don’t know if any these animals had the kind of cognition that crows do But even if they had a sliver of the intelligence we see in their descendants, we have to reckon with the fact that something knew that the world was ending as it was happening

It’s tragic, not because we know how the bird or dinosaur or bird-dinosaur hybrid was feeling, we can never know that Its tragic because it was alive And the fish in that lake were alive And the flowers that shed the pollen into the fish’s gills were alive And the algae that the fish ate was alive And at the end of the day their aliveness wasn’t fundamentally different than our own They needed to breathe and eat and rest just like us And they died, just like we will one day

And we hope that it won’t be in a mass extinction event But I’m sure if the fish, the birds, the flowers and the algae knew what we do, they would have hoped for the same thing And really, how much more power do we have than them to stop something so completely cataclysmic? 

I found a photo of the men who discovered the K-T Boundary Father and son, Luis and Walter Alvarez And to my shock The photo was in color Their theory of mass extinction by comet was published in 1980, only four decades ago And wasn’t endorsed by an international scientific organization as the primary theory for the disappearance of dinosaurs until 2010, 15 years ago

Do you know how long that is in the timeline of our planet? That which has seen creatures so much larger than us rule the planet for longer than we can even conceive of time? Not even half a blink of an eye, that is how long we have known concretely how an era of our history spanning 66 million years ended

The earth’s history is teeming with life and therefore also death That which lives must also die, and sometimes we as humans get so caught up in the fear of our own death that we forget we are such a small piece in the tapestry of our world And looking at any tiny part of it up close gives you a little glimpse at how enormous and beautiful and sad the entire story is

I’ve been thinking a lot about rocks because they remind me I am so much more than the sum of my parts, that my very matter is made of the same stardust that made the dinosaurs Nothing is ever created or destroyed according to Newton, and little did he know the connection to the past that his theory gave us Knowing that a little piece of us existed in every age of this world, long before we were even an idea is its own form of immortality And if that which is me but was also a dinosaur can look at the sky as it rains glass and the world crumbles around it, I think I can find the will to know that the world will go on whether humans are here or not