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What did the Western United States resemble one thousand, one million, or even one billion years ago? How does this incredibly distant past remain visible and influential in the region today? These profound questions inspired a comprehensive project dedicated to exploring deep time. Deep time refers to the immense scale of Earth's geologic history, a timeline stretching back over 4.5 billion years. This concept remains difficult for the human mind to fully comprehend because the temporal scales involved are so vast that they defy our everyday experiences. To grasp deep time requires a fundamental shift in perspective, moving beyond the linear progression of human history to recognize the slow, relentless forces that have shaped our planet.
High Country News dedicated its entire January print magazine to exploring this vast history. The project comprises multiple stories that connect specific places and events in the contemporary West to their deep-time origins. From swampy ancient forests that eventually became coal deposits to the relatively recent carving of the Grand Canyon, the West's landscapes serve as a testament to powerful forces operating over eons. The magazine sought to visualize and explain this slow, relentless shaping of the continent, utilizing both rigorous scientific narrative and artistic representation to make the abstract concept of deep time tangible for readers.
To visually represent this deep history, the magazine commissioned an original illustration. Artist Alex Boersma created a stylized geologic timeline of Earth, focusing specifically on the lands, plants, and animals of the American West. A geologic timeline organizes Earth's 4.5-billion-year history into major time periods, functioning much like chapters in a very long book. These periods are defined by significant changes in the planet's geology, climate, and life forms, providing a framework for understanding the sequence of events that have defined our planet's evolution.
Boersma's illustration captures key moments from this regional history with striking detail. It highlights, for instance, the lush, swampy forests that thrived across parts of the West more than 300 million years ago. The plants in these ancient ecosystems were eventually buried and compressed, forming many of the coal seams found in the region today. In contrast, the timeline also shows the formation of the Grand Canyon, a process that began a mere five to six million years ago. While that seems like an incredibly long time to us, in the context of geologic time, it is a very recent event, occurring only in the final seconds of Earth's clock. The annotated version of this illustration links visual elements directly to stories from the Deep Time project. These annotations provide entry points into the broader narrative of the West's formation, allowing readers to navigate the complex timeline with clarity and connect visual data to specific historical events.
The project's stories investigate how ancient events directly shape modern Western environments and issues. One story explores the connection between fossilized cycads—ancient palm-like plants—found in South Dakota's Black Hills and the ongoing legal and cultural struggles over land in the region. These fossils are remnants of a tropical forest that existed there roughly 120 million years ago, when the continent's climate and geography were radically different, challenging the modern perception of the region as an arid high desert. The presence of these tropical relics serves as a physical reminder of the dynamic nature of Earth's surface.