Second sight

There is a story told in every piece of stone more magnificent than any creation myth, a story that shocked and astonished the Christian geologists of the late 1700s when they started to decipher the long history of life on Earth. Through learning to read traces of the cataclysmic and remorseless geological changes that formed the planet, they uncovered a story that enabled them to compute the ages of the Earth, the solar system, our galaxy and the universe.

This stone is hard chalcedony, fine-grained silicon dioxide deposited

from solution. The silicon is bonded in all directions with oxygen, making it extremely durable for the same reason diamond is. So it, too, holds some of the history of the globe, and it may last another million years or more. When I carved this face, I felt that I was carving my own consciousness onto it.

If the Earth suffers some searing catastrophe, this chalcedony head will survive, whereas marble would fall into dust. In case technology doesn’t sort the problems facing humanity, and we don’t all make it through to an acceptable

future, happy and well, as scientists tell us is extremely possible, I hope my stone carvings will lie waiting to be read in some futurescape of strangeness, and be a memorial to us.

The Earth is and has been so powerful, so wild, so beautiful – the source and the surrounding of all that we are and are capable of. But our deep respect for her is dribbling away, and we are destroying her. This is my protest: I want to shout down the years and tell the future of that bit of its past that was us. Emily Young

A message to the future

Time in the Stone, a collection of photographs of Emily Young’s sculpture, is published this month by Tacit Hill Editions, £35, ISBN 9780955476600

54 | NewScientist | 2 June 2007 www.newscientist.com

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