Deep Time

Life Reflections on a 300 million year-old forest

On a recent trip to Prince Edward Island, I walked among trees older than the dinosaurs. It changed how I think about time.

I took my family on a Prehistoric Walk led by a local geologist who clearly loved what she did. We joined about 20 other adults and children on a red-cliff lined beach.

An ancient forest buried in mud 300 million years ago. The beach was littered with petrified trees turned to stone millennia ago.

“This is the largest fossil in Canada,” our guide said as she pointed out a linear rock stretching along the beach that was once an ancient tree.

I reached down and touched it, thinking this tree grew in an ancient forest millions of years before the dinosaurs.

We’re naturally curious to understand what the past was like. I stood on that beach looking at the other round clumps of rock that were once trees and tried to imagine I was standing in an ancient forest that looked unlike anything that exists on earth today.

Humans live on average 80-plus years. We tend to view the world through that very limited lens. We think in terms of days, months, and years. We have no concept of deep time.

On the PBS podcast Eons the host said when we think of something that happened a million or two million or 20 million years ago, it’s hard to conceptualize what it actually means.

It’s about seeing ourselves within deep time – a fleeting life against the backdrop of hundreds of millions of years.

Through our 80-year life span lens, the rhythms of our lives - our goals, our plans and worries - fill our world. Standing on that beach, for just a moment, they felt both urgent and insignificant at once.