Strata
Stories from Deep Time
29 August 2025
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
A lyrical journey through four moments in Earth’s 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 canyon walls and cliffsides all around us. These layers of rock help geologists piece together how our planet became the place we know and gather context for modern change.
In Strata, Laura Poppick travels across the globe to show us how to decipher these primeval plotlines. Digging into four moments of transformation that shaped Earth and made our lives possible—from the first accumulations of oxygen in the atmosphere to the deep freeze of “Snowball Earth”, the rise of mud on land and the dinosaurs’ reign on a hothouse planet—we see how the arc of geologic time bends toward stability. Beautifully grounding and laced with awe, Strata unveils the wisdom and hope for our times these rocks can hold.
Reviews
"Lushly descriptive... In Poppick’s hands, something as simple as a rime of muck around the edge of a driveway is an invitation to wonder about relationships and changes that can only be understood through layers of stone stacked like storybook pages... Poppick’s lavish writing presents a gem on nearly every page... And through her fondness for strata and the stories that can be found therein, readers will be left with something better than a geological crash course. They will turn the final page with a new way of looking at the interplay between the world we know and its backstory." — Science Magazine
"In Strata, journalist Laura Poppick offers a paean to this subtle science of reading the rocks, and the lessons it can teach us about how the planet responds and recovers from periods of upheaval." — James Dinneen, New Scientist
