“Turning to Stone” paints stones as storytellers and mentors

Bjornerud is exhausted and dazed. She is struggling with the collapse of her department, the sleep deprivation of early motherhood and a strained marriage to a terminally ill husband decades older than she is. She feels compassion for the forgotten granites. They have endured for over a billion years, even as geologists’ interpretations have changed. Life is the same, she realizes. “The past is unchanging, but its meaning changes over time.”

This story and reflection is one of many in Bjornerud’s latest book, Petrification – part memoir, part geology explanation, part meditation on science and society. Bjornerud, now a tenured structural geologist at the same university (which eventually expanded its geology department), weaves together seemingly unrelated themes to tell the stories of stones that helped her “understand what it means to be an Earthling.”

Björnerud’s life forms the framework of each chapter; the stones provide the backdrop. The book is largely chronological, from Björnerud’s childhood to the present. Each chapter covers a type of stone that has some significance in her life. Sandstone, for example, shaped her childhood in ways she did not understand until she was a fully trained geologist.

In the part of Wisconsin where Bjornerud grew up, the rock had once formed the basis of the Big Woods of Small house in the big forest Fame. The forests were cut down and cleared for agriculture, leaving sandy soil that was not really intended for anything more than pine trees. More and more fertilizer needed for “a reasonable crop” seeped through the porous sandstone into the aquifers, contaminating the groundwater that provided drinking water for most households in her community, she writes.

Björnerud’s eloquent storytelling, complete with gripping geological controversies, entices readers to turn the page—and learn complex scientific concepts along the way. Take, for example, the reams of granite Björnerud unearthed in the secret room. How did these stones form? In the early 20th century, some articulate geologists suspected that sedimentary rocks were transformed into granite by a mysterious chemical process. But experiments conducted in the 1920s by geologist Norman Bowen showed that the Earth’s mantle contained all the necessary ingredients to produce a variety of stones. He found that, depending on how much the molten mantle cooled, stones ranging from basalt to granite could form.

Throughout the story, Bjornerud sprinkles in anecdotes about the people around her. She describes their marriages in varying degrees of detail and drops snippets about her children and her adopted Ojibwe sister. But readers who want to know more about these people’s lives may end up wanting more. They are not the main characters. Bjornerud and the earth are.

When Bjornerud came of age in the 1980s, geology was “redefining itself as a more rigorous, quantitative science.” Numerical modeling and laboratory experiments were gaining popularity over “old-fashioned” geology, which relied primarily on field observations. Bjornerud was small, young, and a woman – she did not fit the image of a geologist. She realized that she could not speak of “field experiences as transcendent spiritual revelations” if she wanted to be taken seriously.

But now Bjornerud can describe with awe her connection to the rocks she has studied. “I’m glad I’ve spent so much time with rocks that I understand their language,” she writes. Diamictites from the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen told her about ancient ice layers. Pseudotachylytes from the South Island of New Zealand indicated past earthquakes.

The view that the Earth is apathetic has paved the way for environmental disasters and cultural anomie, writes Bjornerud. “We don’t remember who we really are.” In this book, readers will see the world through her eyes and perhaps accept her invitation into a geocentric worldview “where stones are narrators, companions, mentors, oracles and sources of existential reassurance.”

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