The Dialect of Rocks: A Guest Post by Marcia Bjornerud

Author, professor and geologist Marcia Bjornerud dives into the wonders and mysteries of rocks — like understanding their languages, histories and personalities — in her latest book. Read on for Marcia’s exclusive essay on writing Turning to Stone.

Understanding the language of animals is a universal human dream that reflects a deep yearning to reconnect with our roots in nature.  Ancient myths imagine halcyon days when humans and animals could converse, and modern AI algorithms attempt to decode bat calls and whale songs.  So far, however, our efforts to translate these messages have had limited success.

Yet there is an ageless non-human language we understand quite well: the dialect of rocks. 

Contrary to their reputation for taciturnity, rocks have much to say.  They have vivid memories of earlier versions of the Earth: erstwhile supercontinents, long-eroded mountain belts, vanished ecosystems, extended periods of prosperity and episodic cataclysm.  We in the Anthropocene should pay attention;  the accounts rocks share about events of the past are the best guide we have for the future.

Once one becomes attuned to their utterances, it is obvious that rocks are speaking to us all the time.  As a geologist who has spent much of my adult life in conversation with rocks, I can’t even walk down a city street without hearing the building stones tell their stories. 

Turning to Stone is an invitation to my ‘geocentric’ world view in which rocks are raconteurs, companions, mentors, oracles, and sources of existential reassurance.  Each chapter in this book features a rock type that was a protagonist at a certain time in my life, from a rural girlhood in northern Wisconsin, through an unlikely vocation as a geologist studying mountain building processes in remote parts of the world. 

To me, rocks have distinct personalities. Each type has its own idiom. Some are extroverts, easily read and eager to share, while others are reticent and cryptic.  Some are like celebrities, famous and beautiful but of little functional importance to the world, while many that seem plain and dull are essential to the long-term stability of the planet. 

Through my small human journey as an Earth scientist, I hope to convey the grander dramas embodied in Earth’s pantheon of rocks – and to show how rocks, whether one ever thinks about them or not, ultimately define reality for everyone who lives on this rocky planet.

While not everyone can or should become a geologist, geologic habits of mind – an instinct for Earth’s rhythms, a feeling for our place in its story – are essential to the physical and psychic well-being of humankind.  Around the time of the industrial revolution, Western society stopped seeing the Earth as imbued with wisdom — offering, in Shakespeare’s words, “books in running brooks, sermons in stone” — and demoted it to dumb matter that we could outwit and exploit.  This view of Earth as inert and unresponsive has led not only to environmental catastrophe but also existential crisis: we Earthlings don’t remember who we really are.

Turning to stone and listening to rocks may help us find our way home.