This project, led by Dr Chris Manias at King’s College London, is seeking to build collaborations and a grant application to investigate how understandings of deep time can help us engage with the manifold crises of our current moment, and build new modes of thinking for possible futures.

​

**************

​

We are currently facing overlapping crises: climate change and biodiversity loss; hardening international borders and global conflict; rising political radicalism; upsurges in health issues, including in mental health and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic; continued legacies of colonialism and extractivism; fossil-fuel dependency; and scepticism towards expertise. In recent years, the term ‘polycrisis’ has emerged to imagine this global condition, seeing all these (and other) issues as connected in complex and unexpected manners, for which old frameworks of understanding and ways of acting are no longer adequate (Morrin and Kern 1996; Tooze 2022). To engage with the manifold challenges we face, we do not just need technical solutions, but new modes of thinking and expression.

 

This project contends that one way of building communities and new understandings to address the polycrisis is through bringing in deep time: the geological timescales of Earth history, which stretch backward and forward millions of years. Knowledge of deep time provides possibilities for new modes of thinking, but also poses challenges, being implicated in many of the issues confronting us. This project uses the cultural position of the deep-time sciences as the basis for new collaborations and transformative research linking the humanities and the sciences.

 

Recent research (including my own) has shown how the sciences of deep time have beenimplicated in many of the problems we now face. On a basic level, our fossil-fuel and extractive economies grew from their development, with the mining of coal depending on geology (Zizzamia 2019). Geological surveying has also historically been a tool of territorial and colonialcontrol, and palaeontological ideas defined race and inequality (Chakrabarti 2021; Yusoff 2024).Many museum fossil collections have colonial roots, and ‘parachute science,’ where Western scientists take material from developing countries, still continues (Raja et al. 2022). To understand how we got to where we are, we need to engage with histories of geology and palaeontology.

 

But there are equally strong arguments that the deep-time sciences allow us to engage with the polycrisis. Deep time provides the only illustrations we have of earths with different climates and levels of biodiversity. Thinking about the earth’s long history – involving timescales and processes which confound human imagination – can be terrifying, but can also promote future-orientated and long-term perspectives (Bjornerud 2018; Hanusch 2023). Many scholars are also attempting to link deep time with non-Western understandings, thinking about how they might work collaboratively (Bashford et al. 2023). In the face of situations where we need to think on different scales – of time, space and process – and hold multiple possible pasts and futures in mind, thinking with deep time potentially allows ways of doing so.

 

This project brings these issues together, engaging with the question: how can we simultaneously come to terms with the troubling histories of the deep-time sciences, while developing their potential to engage with the crises that we now face?​​​​