Working Group: The Archives of Deep-Time Sciences

Geology, astronomy, paleontology, archaeology, and meteorology are examples of deep-time sciences: they study phenomena – continental drift, climate change, the origin of species – that unfold on a time scale that beggars the human imagination. In order to detect these glacial processes and rare phenomena (glacial and rare at least as measured by human lifetimes) remarkable efforts of sustained observation and careful comparisons are required. Only exceptionally in human history have institutions been created and supported to carry out these generation-spanning projects. The deep-time sciences are by their very nature archival: the mismatch between human and phenomenal time-scales forces inquirers to collect, record, and preserve specimens and observations. Records kept and saved over thousands of years are essential if these Herculean labors are to bear fruit: today’s astronomers are still living off the archives of their Babylonian and Han dynasty predecessors – and storing up observations for their successors millennia hence.

The deep-time sciences demand a double feat of imagination on the part of their practitioners: to compass the gargantuan time scales in which life evolves or stars form; and to project their own discipline far enough back into the past and forward into the future so that the patterns that emerge only after eons can be recorded and detected. All scholars and scientists presuppose to some extent the continuity of their endeavors, but deep-time scientists take this commitment to their ancestors and descendants to almost fantastical extremes. They are the guardians of the far past in the service of the far future.