We Live and Die Inside Deep Time

The Science

The central object is a fossiliferous slab of Jurassic mudstone from eastern Australia featuring the stem and leaves of an araucarian conifer and small teleost fish fossils that are ~151 million years old (Late Jurassic). The fish, living in a lake, died due to an ash-fall from a volcanic eruption in the region, and were buried along with plant fragments from a surrounding Jurassic forest. Post-lithification, meteoric waters have introduced iron rich compounds to give the rock a characteristic banding of red-brown colours. Black manganese oxide also precipitated onto some lamination surfaces and around some fish bones. This exposed surface was revealed when broken open by a curious life-form and palaeontologist in the late Holocene aka the Anthropocene. The background features a north-looking view of the night sky from Melbourne, Australia. The blue haze is the Milky Way and the bright objects are nearby stars or nebula including the Pleiades. The light from the Pleiades is less than 500 years old but other pinpoints emanate from stars, galaxies and other sources ranging from thousands to billions of light years away. The rock was photographed by the artist using a digital camera. The star field is a digital creation using Stellarium software. The two images were combined and manipulated using Affinity software.

The Theme

The overall image encapsulates existence throughout time, from the beginning to the here and now. We exist within this deep time. The rock was broken open sometime in the last 100 years. It reveals the existence of life ~151 million years ago. The folded layers beneath represent tectonics over time and numerous fossiliferous deposits stretching back into 4+ billion years of Earth’s existence, like pages in a book. The starfield is what I saw when I was born and looked northwards a mere lifetime ago. This view takes in a small slice of all of existence, representing all other life that may have emerged throughout deep time elsewhere in a universe over 13.6 billion years old. The image also includes the Pleiades, a star cluster that has always fascinated curious life-forms on Earth and probably elsewhere as well.