“I think it was just being in it,” she says. “Being able to pick up the rocks, take a close look at them, and start to translate that into a story about time.”

Val’s words remind me of a favorite passage from Annals of the Former World by John McPhee:

Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.

This is Val’s job – cracking into the dense volumes of earth’s history, one rock at a time, and translating their complex interiors into a narrative. Using the tools of geochemistry and isotope analysis, Val and her colleagues aim to fill in some missing chapters in the epic saga of our dynamic planet.