Traces of Time -
  The Beauty of Change in Nature
   Pat Murphy, Paul Doherty, Ph.D.,
   William Neill, Diane Ackerman
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
  2000 Chronicle Books, SF, CA USA
   ISBN: 0811828573


Nature tells stories that unfold over time and the evidence is all around us in the shape of a rugged coastline, in the blooming of fireweed in a blown-down forest, in the banded strata of an ice cave wall.

Traces of Time is an inspired collaboration between Photographer William Neill and the Staff of San Francisco's acclaimed hands-on science museum, The Exploratorium. It beautifully illustrates the effects of time on our natural surroundings.

The Exploratorium was the one place in the Bay Area where I could take my chickadees for an entire day & know we would all be learning things that were both strange & curious about everyday objects & events. It was ever a hands-on museum where you never heard a discouraging word & were invited to play. I am sure the Exploratorium has grown up since I was there in the late 1970s as I understand it now houses over 650 exhibits which people can investigate with impunity.

Exploratorium Senior Writer Pat Murphy & Senior Staff Scientist Paul Doherty give us scientific observations & interpretations in such a way we can understand the passages of time when we see rocks slither across deserts or in the Sun's shadows rock upon rock. They explain events that last only a moment as too those that take eons to develop - from the gouging out of the Grand Canyon to the growth rings of trees.

Poet, essayist & naturalist, Diane Ackerman, muses upon the season in which she wrote her Foreword - late summer in upstate New York where flowers are in bloom along road sides. She pens a brief chronicle of the seasons that offer traces of time for anyone asking - the sunlight prowling around her home to the western windows. Nature's calendar depends on location - a crust of ice on a lake means one thing in the Klondike & quite another in New England.

With our local star, The Sun, & our own Moon we have cycles of time readily observable when the sky is clear as too the wonderous waltz of the constellations & a year by year calendar inscribed in the rings of a Douglas Fir Post from Broken Flute Cave in Arizona. The opening & closing of flowers & the ebb & flow of tides all tell time for us. Have you ever seen a rock move? Stare at Moving Rocks in the Mojave Desert & you will!

Now take a wander through William Neill's spectacular photographs of shadows on snow, photographic exposures of the same river rapids - short & long - showing what a difference a fraction of a second can make. One picture can tell a zillions seconds - winter in a snow blanketted forest or the torrent of a waterfall in Spring & Autumn. You can see the traces of events that occurred in the last year, the last century, the last ten thousand years & the last million years or so. A close-up of a tree cut down a decade ago looks like a sundial, an intricate abacus of feast, famine & fire.

Even lichen & moss can tell you about time as can the many colorful layers of ice & the size & shape of glaciers.

Then for the really, really big tellers of time you need to find mountains & seaside cliffs. These will tell you of the passages of eons beyond ordinary counting as they are worn by weather & tides & the movements of tectonic plates that are the crusts of the Earth upon which we step day after day & generation after generation.

William Neill writes: The Earth has many lessons to teach us. These lessons are written on the ground at your feet, on the mountains across the river from my house, in the rocks of a river bed, in the trees on a mountainside. Once you learn to read them, you'll see them all around you.

Pat Murphy writes: If you would like to know more about the Exploratorium, our exhibits and our programs, check out our site on the World Wide Web at: www.exploratorium.edu

TRACES OF TIME. The photos from the book will be on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco through January, 2001. After that, Traces of Time will be a traveling exhibition, touring museums around the country.

Paul Doherty holds a Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He formerly taught geology at university level & has been Senior Staff Scientist at the Exploratorium Center for Teaching and Learning since 1986.

Another Exploratorium Book: By Nature's Design

More from Pat Murphy: The Falling Woman, There and Back Again & Wild Angel

More from Diane Ackerman: Deep Play, The Moon by Whale Light & A Natural History of the Senses

More from William Neill: Landscapes of the Spirit; By Nature's Design & The Color of Nature.
(11/12/00)

Rebecca