I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating. a bit of a PR problem. I think it's implicated in many people's minds only with resource extraction

or dinosaurs. But these days, the modern geosciences are really a way of seeing the world

in four dimensions, including, of course, time. It's more than anything, I think,

a cognitively challenging discipline. It requires vast powers of imagination to understand that

there have been many different versions of the world and that we can actually gain access to

those things. So that's what I'm trying to convey in the book,

much more than just rock and mineral identification,

but some real sense of the way that we can conjure

these older versions of Earth in surprising detail.

That's Marsha Bjorn and Rood.

She's a professor of geology at Lawrence University in Wisconsin,

and she's written a book titled Turning to Stone,

discovering the subtle wisdom of rocks.

It's a lyrical exploration of how she fell in love with rocks

and what they can tell us about our planet, ourselves, even the universe.

If only we can decipher what they have to say.

This is going to be really interesting for me

because we talk about communication all the time on the show.

But I think this will be the first time we're talking about

communicating with rocks, with the earth itself. And we're serious about that. It's not a joke

and it's not woo-woo land. It really interests me because driving through a cut in the earth at the

top of a mountain where I can see how the earth has been developing for a long, long time.

...