Crafting deep time: Tempotechnical practices in experimental geology,1788–1888–1988

Abstract

This article explores how scientists in experimental geology craft deep time. Scientists experimented with geological time from 1788 to present-day high-pressure geology, and employed strategies to understand and communicate their research. In their labs, the formation of rocks or the uplift and erosion of mountains, events that take eons in nature, occur in a matter of hours or minutes—such unsettling yet spectacular experiences offered new possibilities to manage the unimaginable temporalities of the earth. In this article, I introduce “tempotechnical practices” as a tool for considering how geological timescales became manageable in laboratory settings. I argue that a broad and comparative perspective on geological time adds to the literature on scientific temporalities by showing how experimental geologists reformulate the mind-boggling temporal scales of deep time and control past, present, and future. This challenges the common assumption that thinking about deep time “warps our sense of indebtedness to earth forces and creatures past, present, and future” . Instead, the experimental crafting of deep time in experimental geology evokes visions of power and control, for better or for worse.

He will perform, in our opinion, an important work, who shall carefully compare the products extracted from the depths of the earth with those of the laboratory; for then will be brought vividly before our eyes the striking resemblance which subsists between the productions of Nature and those of Art. Although the Creator, inexhaustible in resource, has at command divers means of effecting His will, it nevertheless pleases Him to maintain a constancy in the midst of the variety of His works; and it is already a great step towards a knowledge of things to have discovered even one means of producing them; for Nature is only Art on a large scale.

Wilhelm Leibnitz, Protogaea [1719] ¹

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, scientists and engineers know how to talk about geologic time. Or rather, they have learned how to recognize, calculate, and model processes on geologic timescales. An extreme example is the safety case for the nuclear waste disposal system in Finland, the first of its kind, with its statements about the evolution of the safety system over several thousands to a million years (Posiva, 2021). Although experimental data, modeling, and literature make such claims possible, these scientists also face Augustine's dilemma when asked for the nature of time; he seemed to grasp time only when not thinking of it, but it dissolved into mystery when he did (Carter, 2011). According to Neil Chapman, one of the leading experts of nuclear waste disposal of the late twentieth-century, “none of us have a good grasp of time, beyond a few decades. Geologists and astronomers are aware, at least at the intellectual level, of huge timescales. However, few other people have any real conception of what a hundred thousand or a million years involves” (Chapman and McCombie, 2003: 36). Nuclear waste disposal is concerned with the planning of human infrastructures surpassing everything which has ever existed on earth (probably with the exception of the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record with estimated lifetimes of several hundred million years: Macauley, 2012). Yet, even Chapman expressed Augustine's experience that our ability to oversee time is very limited and that larger timescales remain abstract.

Regarding Augustine's dilemma, techniques such as computing and modeling complement the commonsense grasp and provide intellectual conceptions of geologic time. Scientists like Chapman stand in the tradition of an over 200-year-old fascination with deep time and the similar voicelessness confronted with the depth of time (McPhee, 1981). Whereas geology was part of natural history as a genuinely historical discipline until the eighteenth century (Rappaport, 1997), geology and history became disentangled over the course of the nineteenth century (Bergwik and Ekström, 2022: 1) alongside the bursting of the limits of time (Rudwick, 2005). As a consequence, twenty-first-century “Anthropocene geologists” (Westermann and Höhler, 2020: 580) aim at rethinking the relation between human and natural history (Chakrabarty, 2018; Chakrabarty, 2009; Bonneuil, 2015; Lifetimes Research Collective, 2022; Bergwik and Ekström, 2022). Also, social scientists have addressed the obstacle to imagine big time scales creating neologisms such as “timefullness,” “longtermism,” or “nonsynchronicity” (Bjornerud, 2018; Irvine, 2020; Ialenti, 2021; Roosth, 2022). On a smaller scale, historians of science have explained how geologists made sense of the vastness of the past and how they found many of their answers in the field (Chakrabarti, 2020; Rudwick, 1985; Rudwick, 2005; Oldroyd, 1990). In fact, deep time in geology made its most dramatic appearances in landscape theaters such as Siccar Point or the Alps, and these spectacular vistas found expression in many illustrations, specimen collections, and books around the world (Heringman, 2023; Schnyder, 2020; Rudwick, 1992). Apart from the historical quest for scientific explanations of landscape formation and the age of the earth, historians have focused on the Freudian insult of deep time, which confronted biblical time in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Freud cataloged humanity's humiliations in 1917: Copernicus exiled humans from the universe's center, Darwin tethered them to apes, and Freud revealed that they were puppets of an uncontrollable unconscious (Freud, 1917). To complete the quadruple insult to human vanity, geology buried Eden under eons of rock (Gould, 1987; Rudwick, 2014).

In addition to field work, geologists also conducted experiments in laboratories, but the scientific tools to experimentalize geologic time have remained mostly unnoticed in historiography (Newcomb, 2009). Most scholars talk about empirical stratigraphy and theoretical reasoning when they discuss geological research on deep time (Dresow, 2023: 253). Yet, at least from the late eighteenth century on, the cultural and scientific fascination with the depths of earthly time and the horrifying “marginalization of the human by geologic deep time” in history (Schultz, 2020: 5) were subjected to the experimental grip of geologists; scientific practices reproduced geological phenomena and crafted geologic timescales in human time. The experimentalization of geologic time was indeed a form of crafting for three reasons; first, deep time experiments from 1788 to 1988 consisted of dirty, muddy, dusty handwork; second, the tinkerer's experience was one of crafting, not of penetrating nature's secrets—this article focuses on their material engagement with deep time, which differs practically and epistemically from theoretical and digital models due to its earthiness and fuzziness (Morgan and Morrison, 2010); and third, the experimental phenomena exhibited a complex relationship between the workbench and the world out there as they were hard to match and synchronize with geologic time, and therefore continued to be artificial “reproductions”.

Each of the three examples over a period of 200 years show material experimental systems in which scientists attempted the manipulation of geological time. Looking at the workshop level of deep time discussions adds to scholarship which elucidated the historically and geographically specific scientific and cultural debates around geology (Chakrabarti, 2020; Bobbette, 2023). The inaccessibility of deep time rendered its conception necessarily metaphysical, and experimental approaches were not immune from it. This article argues that the controllability and engineerability of unimaginable timescales are part and parcel of thinking about deep time, that deep time was not only found in the field but also crafted in the laboratory, and it introduces three “tempotechnical” practices of experimental geology from 1788 to 1988; the production of artificial rocks in a furnace (1788), the creation of mountains on a workbench (1888), and the experimentalization of nature itself in natural analogs (1988). The immediacy of dusty handwork is one of the reasons why the probably most obvious, but predominantly computer-based experimentalization of deep time, that is plate tectonics modelling after the 1960s, is not among the three examples (Vérard, 2018). The term :‘tempotechnical” is inspired by Sara B. Pritchard's “envirotechnical system” which “encapsulates and specifically foregrounds [the] dynamic imbrication of natural and technological systems” (Pritchard, 2012: 223). Similarly, “tempotechnical” (or tempotechnical practices) refers to a technology which uses manipulated time as a decisive element of its practice. While Andrea Westermann has examined “plastic as a technofossil of unknown futures or still-to-be-completed pasts” (Westermann, 2020: 137), tempotechnical practices provide the ability to craft still-to-be-completed pasts and also unknown futures in contemporary and very real environments.

Sociologist Michael Flaherty, studying the manageability of time experience according to individual or social requirements, used the concept “time work” (Flaherty, 2003; Flaherty, 2011; Flaherty et al., 2020); time work makes it possible to intervene in temporal experiences, it offers the possibility to manipulate, control, and customize time, and it is most often “interstitial and compensatory.” As will be argued in the following paper, crafting geological time by scaling-up (extrapolating from fractions of larger time periods) and scaling-down (accelerating processes) is time work in the sense that it redefines processes happening in laboratory time and that it synchronizes the artificial geological temporalities with experienced time or more extreme, even subjugated the former to the latter. Recent studies on “laboratory times” described different temporal roles of laboratories; as a “backdrop to work on time (experiences of it, measurements of it), as an environment prompting work practices with their own fascinating temporalities, […] as a place from which particular practices (and understandings) of time arise” (Hussey and Douglas-Jones, 2024: 5), and also as a generator of laboratory temporalities where “working practices of science meet with the social lives of scientists, technicians, students and laboratory animals” (Hussey and Douglas Jones, 2024: 8). We seem to possess the techniques of easily sliding up and down temporal scales (Westermann, 2020) and juggle with temporal narratives (Manning, 2003; Thalos, 2013; Hussey, 2023). For instance, scientists scale up their results to billions of years and even lift up their scientific gaze to other cosmic bodies. Thermal models, for instance, allow to describe the cooling of the lunar magma ocean over hundred of millions of years and also to calculate the depth of lunar strata (Schmidt and Kraettli, 2022).

What needs greater attention in the history of science is the role of laboratories in the work on time—in the sense of controlling it, managing it, engineering it, crafting it—rather than experimenting with the experience and measurement of time. Laboratories are also sites where inaccessible time can become manageable, where scientists for instance experiment with geological timescales within human time. Using tempotechnical practices as analytical tools, therefore, does more than rethink time in scientific practice (Walford, 2013) because it brings visions of temporal control to the fore, and it emphasizes the handicraft dimension of scientific work on time. Tempotechnical practices craft time, they are practices which first of all change the temporality of certain processes, that is either through acceleration, retardation, or real-time observation. To be clear, all scientific experimentation includes some control of the temporal dimension (Rheinberger, 2006: 222–229; Knorr Cetina, 1998). Tempotechnical practices can be based on scientific experimentation or experiential knowledge, but they provide means to synchronize human time with other timescales with distinct aims, for instance geoengineering; examples range from nuclear waste disposal infrastructures (engineered to remain in place for thousands of years) to accelerated genetic mutation (elicited to research biological evolution), artificial weathering in construction work (conducted to make materials more durable) to evolutionary medicine (conceived to adapt to evolutionary physiological functions). Such practices synchronize multiple temporalities, but they do this in a distinct and controlled way. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has worked on time in biology, and regarding evolutionary time he came to the conclusion that “whereas we have a primary biological experience of the persistence of time and irreversible change, our primary experience of history [evolutionary time] is necessarily cultural” (Rheinberger, 1990: 391; quotation found in Burian, 2013: 22). With regard to Richard Lenski's research group conducting a long-term evolution experiment on Escherichia coli (producing tens of thousands of bacteria generations within a few decades), we now experience and observe even the materialization of evolutionary “history” (Lenski, 2011).

The coincidence of multiple temporalities has been described as an act of synchronization by Helge Jordheim; more than a mere contemporality, different times are worked on “to adjust, adapt, and control, in other words, to synchronize them” (Jordheim, 2014: 506; see also Esposito, 2025). The “dialectics of nonsynchronicities,” according to Jordheim, are phenomenological and epistemological and ontological as in the case of Chapman; geologic time cannot be experienced or “grasped” like human time, but it can be described and crafted. These dialectics are also existential and political and social—nuclear waste is dangerous, and its disposal is a political problem of geographical and temporal dimensions. Unlike the mainly conceptual examples which Jordheim provides, tempotechnical practices of synchronization actually craft geologic time within human time. The respective experimental systems figured as interscalar vehicles allowing to collapse scientific “intimacy and cosmic significance” (Hecht, 2018: 125), but they do more than that: they present acts of “creative commensuration” sliding up and down temporal scales (Westermann, 2020: 125), and they experimentally craft geologic time and for real engineering purposes. This challenges the assumption that thinking about deep time “warps our sense of indebtedness to earth forces and creatures past, present, and future” (Ginn et al., 2018: 214). Instead, the workability of deep time in experimental geology evoked narratives of power and control. Geologists, so argues this article, crafted geological time in the laboratory, in simulations and models, and thereby confronted the lost accessibility of time.

1788: Deep time in a furnace

In 1788, James Hutton published lectures which he had given to the Royal Society of Edinburgh a few years earlier (Hutton, 1788). Hutton (1726–1797) was a Scottish geologist, physician, and naturalist, often regarded as the father of modern geology (Dean, 1992). In these lectures he addressed the immense amounts of time needed for the earth to have taken its current shape. Reflecting on possible means to express these time scales, Hutton formulated the basic principles of uniformitarianism: the present offered “data from which to reason with regard to what has been” and to “which is to happen hereafter” (Hutton, 1788: 217). Uniformitarianism allowed to extrapolate from observable phenomena and explains earth's geological features by slow, continuous processes over immense periods of time. Therefore, “natural appearances” represented “means for concluding a certain portion of time to have necessarily elapsed, in the production of those events of which we see the effects” (Hutton, 1788: 217). The big question then was: “But how shall we describe a process which nobody has seen performed, and of which no written history gives any account?” (Hutton, 1788: 219) Hutton objected the possibility to recreate natural pressure and heat, the main forces in Earth history, and he looked at contemporary experiments with great skepticism. Instead, he emphasized the power of imagination and induction to grasp the immenseness of natural time (McIntyre, 1997). Hutton suggested to go out into the muddy environment, conduct field research and examine solid bodies (to understand their natural history) and then to describe contemporary natural operations; long periods of external agents such as frosts, rains, and floods corroded the surface over long time periods, whereas the combination of heat and pressure let material fuse and create new rocks. Because the secret operations of the earth could not be witnessed nor the amount of time needed for erosion and other forces to create the surface of the earth conceived, the only way to compute time was scientific reasoning. In Hutton's view, the immensity of time needed made the investigation of the exact heat and pressure a dead issue (Hall, 1805: 171). Instead, it was possible to understand general laws of “science and chemistry” and to use “just reasoning from natural appearances […] as evidence,” if “more immediate proof cannot be obtained” (Hutton, 1788: 224). As an enlightened person, he rejected “wonder and doubt” regarding the great events in nature, because his vision of long-term processes contradicted the notion of a “violent exertion of power” brought up by contemporary catastrophists (Hutton 1788: 293–294).

Confronted with the now proverbial “abyss of time,” another Scottish geologist turned out to be more prone to the language of wonder and the sublime. John Playfair (1748–1819) advocated Hutton's theories of geology, for example in his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Playfair, 1802). Playfair famously described their visit to Siccar Point: “We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean. […] The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time” (Playfair, 1805: 72). David Farrier called this “affective register of deep time […] one of terror and wonder, fashioned to fit a vision of the sublime that transcended and yet somehow affirmed humanity” (Farrier, 2016). These “terrifying new temporal vistas” were “daunting,” chilling, “uncanny with a haunting presence in our daily lives” (Fisher, 2023). This Huttonian vision of earthly processes exhibited some main characteristics of contemporary romantic philosophy in science; an inclination toward mysticism, an emphasis on artistic sensibility and productivity, and a tendency to privilege the intellectual and intuitive dimension (Holmes, 2009).

James Hall, the direct successor of Hutton and colleague of Playfair, acknowledged the depth of time but was undecided regarding uniformitarianism or catastrophism over the course of time (Hall, 1805: 101–102). Hall (1761–1832) was a close associate of James Hutton, playing a key role in advancing Hutton's theories of geology. He conducted experiments to artificially create rocks or to simulate geological processes, such as the formation of folded mountains, by applying pressure to layered materials, providing practical evidence to support Hutton's ideas about Earth's dynamic processes and the concept of deep time (Wyllie, 1998). Unlike Hutton, Hall developed an elaborate experimental array using special tubes, barrels, and furnaces to observe the pressure and heat needed to dissolve and fuse materials like basalt. It is no coincidence that the volcano in Figure 1(A) and (B) is juxtaposed with the artificial heat and pressure apparatus; volcanoes gave natural scientists a direct view into the Earth's laboratory. They were measured and observed during dangerous expeditions, and accordingly laboratories turned into dirty, hot, humid, foul-smelling and generally unpleasant places (Newcomb, 2009: 85). Departing from geology as an analytical form of “stratigraphical puzzle-solving” (Pickstone, 2001: 123) trying to demonstrate the few and most important principle in geological processes, Hall and others laid the experimental foundation of geological synthesis in geochemistry or models in geophysics (Pickstone, 2001: 141–154). Already earlier scientists had tried to find answers for the unresolved matter of petrogenesis in the early eighteenth century and brought this issue to the laboratory, but Hall's experiments differed to those because of their temporal scale. Although time was not yet an experimental parameter, it came in as a condition of natural petrogenesis. In the laboratory, not time, but force, pressure and heat of the furnaces made the artificial comparable to the natural. An outcome of these experiments was Hall's conviction that erosion and fusion was also possible in shorter time periods as proven by their artificial reproduction in the laboratory. Experimentation, therefore, rendered the numbing geological sublime of Hutton's deep time manageable, the furnace represented a tempotechnical device for experiencing and conceiving (but not yet “grasping”) large timescales. Deep time could now be dissolved into separate, cyclical, and scientifically describable processes which allowed to understand and model events on larger temporal and spatial scales. Hall's argumentative sequence started with a cautious description of instruments and experiments and then led over to an explanation of existing volcanoes and moreover the history of the earth itself. In the end, Mount Aetna, Hall concluded, exhibited the same principles as his experimental furnace; tables of pressure and heat from the work bench, cleaned from the ashes and soot of the experiments, corresponded with the depths of volcanoes, the pressure on ocean floors, and the inner earth. Laboratory time work, it seemed, provided the means for craftmanship in both time and space.

Figure 1.

(A) and (B) The furnace to mount Aetna (Hall, 1805).

But the comparison remained incomplete; laboratory time remained absent and inaccessible to experimental activity; as a factor in the creation of rocks, as a factor in the formation of mountains, and as an element or experimentation itself. Many other contemporary reports on geomorphological experiments refrained from time as a parameter, even though the mind-numbing Huttonian view of cyclical time came into view. If time showed up, then as an answer to the problem of scaling up the limited forces available in scientific laboratories. By giving birth to rocks, Hall took the romantic register of geology—affective states of enchantment, violence, haunting, and a related emotional economy of powerlessness (White, 2009; Bergwik, 2020)—and, permanently confirming his general agreement with Hutton's lessons, customized it according to his needs as an experimentalist. Also, during other experiments, where Hall pressed pieces of cloth in order to recreate horizontal thrust and the formation of mountains, he trusted that the produced forms “bear a tolerable resemblance to those of nature” (Hall, 1815: 10). The validation of the experimental relation between the laboratory and nature happened on this level; a comparison of natural and artificial rocks revealed the validity of the experiments, but it was far from what later would be called a “scale model” (Ranalli, 2001: 67). In Hall's opinion, the relation between the scientific laboratory and nature required no further investigation. To require a scientist to collapse science and nature was “no less absurd than it would be to prevent [a scientist] from reasoning about the construction of a telescope, till he could explain the nature of the sun, or account for the generation of light” (Hall, 1805: 157).

These experiments represented the first tempotechnical practices to bind the bursting temporal dimension of the earth back to human time. Deep time was a scandal to human imagination, and the laboratory brought it back under control. Handling geologic timescales in the laboratory made up for the limitations of human experience because it filled gaps and created imaginations of feasibility. As the measurable parameter of time did not play a role in Hall's experiments, the analogy of furnace and nature made huge timescales thinkable and manageable. The material practice of producing artificial rocks exhibited an early stage of both an attempt to control and contain geological time which at the same time remained elusive and unintelligible (Hussey and Douglas-Jones, 2024).

1888: Deep time on a workbench

In 1888, Alphonse-François Renard, a Belgian geologist and curator of the Royal Museum in Brussels, delivered a lecture to the Royal Institution in London (Renard, 1889). He addressed the artificial reproduction of volcanic rocks and largely the work of experimental geology in France. This presentation was timely since British geologists were only discovering the use of chemistry for geological experimentation (Hamilton, 1986). Renard paid tribute to Hutton and Hall giving a lesson in uniformitarianism with its “fundamental principle—namely, that the essence of the forces which have acted upon the earth has never changed” (Renard, 1889, 271). Following this principle, geologists could now explain two main groups of mineral masses; sedimentary rocks and rocks of volcanic character. The former group was observable in real-time, for instance in riverbeds with sedimentary deposits, and they provided an unproblematic analogy. Rocks of volcanic character, however, originated in depths and time scales inaccessible to direct observation and represented a problem to the inductive method of geology; only experiments promised to shed light on processes beyond human time. These endeavors were reasonable, because “[i]n logical order,” so Renard claimed, “the synthetic methods follow the progress of observation and of analysis” (Renard, 1889: 274). ² Synthetic methods attempted to reconstruct “the identical conditions which have surrounded the formation of the natural products” and hereby circumvented the limitations of the inductive method. Historically, the experimental (synthetic) method in geology had only gained momentum as a self-conscious academic discipline in the decades after Hall. Influential scientists such as Gustav Bischof (1792–1870), a German chemist and geologist who made significant contributions to the study of chemical processes in geology, spoke of “our earth” as “a big chemical laboratory” (Bischof, 1863: v). The definitive account of experimental geology however came from Gabriel Auguste Daubrée (1814–1896), a French geologist, who used a full introduction of his Études synthétiques de géologie expérimentale to defend the experimental approach against the traditional field-based approach in geology (Daubrée, 1879: 1–10).

Renard's lecture stood under the famous motto from Protogaea by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “Neque enim aliud est natura quam ars quaedam magna.” Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German polymath who made significant contributions to mathematics, philosophy, and logic, and who explored the origins and formation of the Earth in Protogaea, a text based on observations of fossils, rock formations and natural processes. Giving the lecture in French, he translated the Latin original as “car la nature n’est qu’un art en plus grand”—respectively in English: “For nature is nothing other than a great art” (Renard, 1888: 705, 713). ³ However, when Renard's lecture was published in the journal Nature in 1889, the translation by Frederick William Rudler, curator at the Museum of Practical Geology in London and president of the Geologist’ Association, used slightly different words: “for Nature is only Art on a large scale” (Renard, 1889: 277). Whereas Leibniz described only similarities between human workshops and nature, Rudler's adaption included human and natural creations under the same scale. The difference revealed concurrent and different understandings of epistemic time work, of “agentic practices designed to control or manipulate aspects of temporality” (Flaherty, 2002: 387).

Leibniz and also Renard would not have claimed that nature was only art on a larger scale but that nature and art exhibited a “striking resemblance.” Neither Leibnitz nor Renard were atheists, although both had found their distinct way of combining scientific thinking and religion. Leibniz did not think that scientific explanations could substitute religion. To him, the production of stones in the laboratory explained one of many ways which God could do to create things. For this reason, knowing one method was already a great insight. Because Leibniz believed in the consistency of earthly matters, it was at least conceivable that the laboratory-based method corresponded with natural laws. Nevertheless, Leibniz would not have put human methods on the same level with God's methods. Talking about the artificial creation of rocks, Renard paid tribute to Leibniz and indirectly to Nicolas Steno at the end of his lecture. Renard, Leibniz, and Steno were convinced that human experiments and arts corresponded with natural processes, that “underground laboratories” exhibited the same forces like scientific laboratories (Leibniz 2008: xxix). Still, experiments on the human level were not simply the same as natural events. As a Jesuit and a priest, Renard argued against occult forces and for imitable processes of nature, but he believed in science as possibly allowing “to catch a glimpse of the operation of causes the knowledge of which is the final aim of physical and natural science” (Renard, 1889: 277). The final aim remained in God's hands, only perceivable like beams of sunlight through clouds in front of the sun. Unlike earlier experimentalists like Hall, however, Renard paid attention to some temporal aspects, for instance he described that lava kept its viscosity “for a long time” under a mantle of scoria (Renard, 1889: 272), or that certain crystals form only at certain times in the life-cycle of a volcano (Renard, 1889: 273), and sometimes microlites have no time to form at all (Renard, 1889: 274). Nevertheless, the infinite time of the earth remained dead to the human gaze respectively restricted to a higher power.

In Rudler's translation, however, the cautious reasoning of Leibniz had disappeared. An encompassing scale brought processes from small ovens to gigantic volcanoes together. In this reading, the synthetic method allowed to understand the natural scale of time and space in the limited space of the laboratory during human time. Scaling time and space was a distinct form of time work, a set of “agentic practices designed to control or manipulate aspects of temporality” (Flaherty, 2002: 387). Indeed, scaling had become a useful technique in nineteenth-century geology. Pressure and heat represented solvable problems: either scientists imitated the forces of nature using special instruments, or the combination of time and force offered an explanation. A textbook for students reassured its readers: “Again, where the FORCE seems unequal to the result the student should never lose sight of the element TIME, an element to which we can set no bounds in the past, any more than we know of its limit in the future” (Page, 1859: 338).

In the nineteenth century, geological and biological processes became explainable by processes of incredible duration, scholars from John Hutton to Charles Darwin built systems around the assumed evolution in natural history. This stood in contrast to the nineteenth-century fascination with acceleration and increasingly shorter timescales in science and generally in society. Particularly the shortening time periods needed for travelling, production, or communication in the nineteenth century inspired new disciplines researching the optimization of acceleration in society (economic theory, engineering, work research, and sociology) or mapping the temporal possibilities and limits of the human body (physiology, psychology, and neurology) (Borscheid, 2005; Harvey, 1990; Rosa, 2005; Lorenz and Bevernage, 2013). Also, technological attempts to register and control time—from the standardization of international time to the development of time registering devices such as photography and cinematography—added to the permanent engagement with short time periods in the modern world where acceleration became the “basic principle of modern society” (Koselleck, 2000; Rosa, 2013; Jung 2016). Despite or because of all this, deep time kept its uncanny nature. The vertigo of deep time was linked to the allegedly scandalous dethroning of Christian temporality, but probably even more with still weird methods to make claims about the past; whereas history had familiar “modern examples of revolution or mass hysteria to examine for comparison with records of the past,” geologists (and biologists) needed to argue in historical vacuum and fill in what Earth history had left empty (Frodeman, 1995: 965). Indeed, emptiness was the necessary condition for geological fieldwork as geophysical structures and outcrops became visible only because softer material had dissolved or eroded (and vanished). Against this backdrop, experimental geology possessed tempotechnical devices and practices to fill the void.

In the same year as Renard's lecture in London, something miraculous happened at the old Grange House in Linlithgowshire, UK; eons were compressed in a few minutes. While nature took millions upon millions of years, the Scottish geologist Henry M. Cadell (1860–1934) needed less than an hour. Within a few minutes, mountain ridges rose, deep valleys wrenched open, layers of earth shattered, and cracks opened up. Within the time it takes to drink a cup of tea or go to the bathroom, Cadell had experimentally created a landscape made of clay and shaped by quasi-geological processes. These experiments were series of geological experiments which complemented his work for the Geological Survey of Scotland (Oldroyd, 1990: 288, 371). In this context, Cadell spent countless days in the highlands with one particular purpose: to understand the geology of Sutherland (Cadell, 1896). Cadell had been a student of James Hall, and in addition to geological field trips, he used physical models to simulate geological processes, such as the formation of mountains and faults, by applying pressure to layers of materials like sand and clay. Figure 2 shows Cadell, possibly with boots still dusty from his field trips, presenting both orogeny in action and his tempotechnical devices; a workbench, a press, clay, a shovel and a broom, a watering, and most importantly human force. These clay experiments demonstrated how tectonic forces shaped the Earth's crust, providing empirical support for Hutton's theories of geological change and the concept of uniformitarianism.

Figure 2.

The field to the work bench: Cadell as temporal Prometheus, British Geological Survey.

Cadell's tempotechnical enactments were not only spectacular illustrations of the processes in the depths of time, but also reminders of the Faustian power of geologists re-enacting the third day of creation of the Old Testament. Looking at one of his products, Cadell explained: “Eureka! said I to myself, not loud but deep. Here was a mountain in embryo newly upheaved, before denudation had ever scratched its brow, full of neat little thrust-planes, a perfect model of some of the heaped-up quartzite bens of Sutherland, such as Arkle or Creag Dionard” (Cadell, 1896: 71). How different were the famous words of James Hutton 100 years earlier. Cadell addressed the “lore of the long-forgotten past” with a certain dramatic gravity, too, but unlike Hutton's giddiness, Cadell expressed an “appeal to the imagination” and the “desire to know more about their history and structure” (Cadell, 1896: 11). Whereas Hutton and Hall looked back in time and imagined their surroundings in the past, Cadell gave the modern homo faber a voice and acted as a temporal Prometheus miniaturizing geological time and testing the experimental extension of human power over deep time. “Hey Presto!,” he exclaimed when “[a] new formation was deposited with a rapidity quite unknown in the cycles of geologic time” (Cadell, 1896: 72). The recreation of geological sites was so realistic, that Cadell was able to name all the thrusts and foldings and even recognized an artificial formation travelling “for several miles in the Palaeozoic days of its youthful frolics” (Cadell, 1896: 73). Experimental geology offered a tempotechnical grip on deep time par excellence, a geo-Prometheanist project avant la lettre (Dryzek, 1997), and took the shape of a pseudomythological tale about human potency (Tamborini, 2020; Piccardi and Masse, 2007).

1988: Deep time in natural analogs

In 1988, an international group of geologists convened in Berlin to discuss so-called natural analog studies in Poços de Caldas, Brazil. Natural analog studies, the study of natural analogs or natural geological systems, were “used to study specific long-term evolutionary processes of importance” (Smellie et al., 1997: 5). The Berlin meeting was the Twelfth International Symposium on the Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management and brought together a selection of representatives from national waste disposal programs (Natural Analogue Working Group NAWG) initiated by the Commission of the European Communities in 1985. ⁴ Several international natural analog study projects mirrored the increasing interest in this kind of research which had mainly to do with the “gradually maturing [of performance assessment methodology] to the point where it needs the kind of support which analogues can offer” (Côme and Chapman, 1987: ix). Another important factor, of course, was the pressing issue of regulatory bodies which required timely solutions for nuclear waste. After nuclear waste had been transported from nuclear plants to little-known or even unknown sites in other countries in the first decades, a practice which Gabrielle Hecht called “residual governance” (Hecht, 2023), new regulations required that responsible institutions find their own solutions for radioactive waste and to predict the future behavior of their respective solutions (from sea dumping to geological disposal). According to Naomi Oreskes, prediction was not of primary interest to geologist in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, modeling became an “attempt to predict the future behavior of geological systems” because of a “demand for prediction of the long-term behavior of proposed nuclear waste disposal sites” (Oreskes, 2007: 115). ⁵

Indeed, natural analog studies had been already conceptualized as early as in the 1960s. Like one or two centuries earlier, geologists outlined natural experiments exceeding all other scientific disciplines except astronomy in temporal and spatial scale. In the 1960s, however, geology and so-called “natural experiments” definitively “set the limits to the scope of the laboratory sciences, and it will continue to do so,” according to Vincent Ellis McKelvey (McKelvey, 1963: 69). None of the early natural experiments attracted more attention than the so-called Oklo phenomenon, the find of a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon in 1971. Addressing anxieties related to reactor safety, terrorism and sabotage, and waste disposal, physicist Alvin Weinberg declared in 1977: “Thus, nature has performed the experiment, and the findings, on the whole, are reassuring. […] Nature had achieved this 1.8 × 10⁹ years earlier” (Weinberg, 1977: 206). Nature, therefore, had already demonstrated that the problem of radioactive waste disposal was solvable, therefore becoming the largest tempotechnical device possible. The fact that the deep time of nature itself served the tempotechnical manipulation of geological time went far beyond deep time expertise in geoengineering (Meiske, 2021) or the predominantly abstract modeling of plate tectonics (Vérard, 2018; an exception is Katz et al., 2005). Working on Onkalo, the world's first long-term disposal facility, Weinberg's notion was representative for many actors involved in nuclear waste disposal. Even though not all of them joined in his jubilant praise for the achievements of nature, the very fact that the nuclear age continued to produce immeasurable amounts of waste presented a real problem, because the waste was already there. Dealing with geological time had become an ontological issue, it redefined the way human and nonhuman living beings found themselves on a planet overstuffed with potentially hazardous material (Jarman, 2022).

The Oklo mine was destroyed by mining and only core samples collected by scientists maintained the site as a potential natural analog for future research (Hecht, 2018: 126). Yet, national bodies had started to invest into the problem of radioactive waste disposal. So-called “natural analog studies” emerged in the 1980s in the context of civilian nuclear power use: new regulations required the waste situation to be clarified before new nuclear power plant licenses were awarded. The risk of “mobilisation of radionuclides” into the biosphere represented the main problem with the storage of radioactive waste (Chapman et al., 1984: III). For this purpose, a crucial aspect in predicting future processes was the “reliable extrapolation of experimental data with short time periods,” especially as radioactive waste involves geological time periods. The great advantage of natural analogs lay in “the opportunity they provide to examine processes occurring over geological timescales, hence allowing more confident extrapolation of short timescales experimental data.” Natural analog studies, in other words, scaled earthly processes down to the work of scientists in the respective land- and labscapes. As a practice of synchronizing human, natural, even planetary dimensions (Westermann and Höhler, 2020; Rudwick, 2005; Thomas, 2014), scalability was sometimes taken for granted (Stiner et al., 2011: 272), but it remained “both an analytic category and a political claim,” and therefore always “political and ethical work accomplished by scalar choices and claims” (Hecht, 2018: 111).

Scaling went hand in hand with the idea of control over time, nature, and people. Yet, scientists themselves were skeptical about the apparent scalability of natural systems. Neil Chapman considered it questionable that “laboratory-based data can be successfully extrapolated over time scales approaching hundreds of thousands of years, especially when bearing in mind the complexity of the reactions and alteration processes which will accompany, for example the burial of high-level radioactive waste and the subsequent dispersal of radionuclides into a groundwater environment” (Chapman et al., 1984: 1). Instead, the most trustworthy data would be buried under mud and stones: “The strength of analogue studies lies in the opportunity they provide to observe natural geochemical processes which resemble the processes considered important in the containment of radioactive waste over a timescale and at a level of complexity generally impossible to simulate under laboratory conditions” (Chapman et al., 1984: 1). The NAWG started in 1985 with a statement about the nature of natural analog studies. In order to be able to predict the long-term behavior or repository systems, “[s]afety assessments of repository performance will be made using predictive models based upon our understanding of how such processes act over long times in the various geological settings proposed for disposal” (Statement by NAWG, see Côme and Chapman, 1986: 1). ⁶ The natural analog method required scientists to understand the geological settings in order to identify the problems and to recognize the experimental system. Natural analogs provided the opportunity to “observe” longer time and size scales than possible in laboratories and allowed to validate models which then influenced the theoretical planning of repositories. Natural analogs (1) replicated processes considered in a model and made temporal and spatial extrapolations possible; (2) they helped identifying specific parameter values; (3) they signposted directions of long-term processes; (4) and they integrated many processes and exhibit complexities which might evade the experiment (Statement by NAWG, Côme and Chapman, 1986: 4). To be clear, the temporal dimension remained an issue as the statement notes: “The timescale of the process must be measurable, since this factor is of the greatest significance (the raison d’etre) for a natural analogue” (Statement by NAWG, Côme and Chapman, 1986: 5).

As a consequence, the NAWG brought modelers together with geologists and other Earth scientists; good field-based knowledge of the sites made models possible in the first place. So-called “modelers” (responsible for disposal safety assessments) met “experimentalists” and learnt about their current capabilities (Côme and Chapman, 1987: xiii). The group in Poços de Caldas was representative for many other natural analog studies of the time in their attempt to isolate a problem—colloid transport investigations or more colloquial groundwater movement—and to understand the setup of the natural experimental system (Figure 3). Transport modeling usually depended on a mathematical description of a scenario. “Most rock-water systems,” however, “def[ied] rigorous definition by a model” because they were extremely complex (Alexander and McKinley, 1991: 118). Computer models “operationalize[d] temporal experiments” to understand geological processes (Rosol, 2022: 67), but they could not replace natural analogs. For this reason, empirical data collection by means of boreholes (Figure 3), precise knowledge of the geological subsurface, and a measurement of water flows were necessary. Working on natural analog studies required a certain level of physical fitness, good footwear, and the use of large machines in addition to geological understanding; as entire landscapes had been turned into tempotechnical devices, their use was dependent on the scientists’ physical encounter with the sites in the field.

Figure 3.

Natural analog studies to the laboratory to nature: insights into the unforeseen complexities of experimental systems (NAWG, 1991: 16).

To outsiders, natural analog study reports read like science fiction. To geologists, however, they simply represented the normalization of thinking long-termism respectively the rendering accessible of formerly inaccessible timescales. (Chapman et al., 1991) To them, atomic time and geological time collapsed; enormous half-life periods of isotopes mattered only when the radioactive decay in human time surpassed a certain level. Thinking as a member of the NAWG required to adopt a vision of an extended present: nature had stored radioactive material for incredible periods in the past, and it would keep repositories in place for another immeasurable amount of time irrespective of the single isotope. Also, the NAWG perspective turned the world into a deep time laboratory surpassing even geo-Promethian nineteenth-century fantasies of the world as an experimental workbench. Natural analog studies crafted an extended geological present in which natural sites offered just the most recent tempotechnical practice of nuclear waste disposal.

Conclusion: Crafting deep time

Decimal potencies of time scales for measurable very short events are much larger than the potencies for measurable large events (photon movements in zeptoseconds (10⁻²¹ of a second) versus the computable age of the universe in petaseconds (10¹⁵ seconds)). Also, very short events are observable and registered in “real time,” even if a lot of technoscientific translation is required to put human and atomic time on the same scale. Longer time periods beyond the human lifespan, on the contrary, are only accessible by means of scaling and extrapolating. This is one of the reasons why geological time, more than atomic time, remains inaccessible and poetic for many until today. This inaccessibility of deep time, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, keeps us trapped in an “ontic certainty” about our stable status in the world (Chakrabarty, 2018: 31). Yet, “the myth of the uniform time of progress seems to be losing its grip” (Jordheim, 2014: 500). Our temporal regime is challenged as soon as the assumed boundaries between the natural and the cultural, the ahistorical and the historical begin to crumble. A way to get a better grip or to “grasp” deep time is to examine disruptive moments where geological and human time collapse. Chakrabarty's primary example is climate change, but there are many other challenges which irritate geological certainties; volcanoes in Java, for instance, which made people reflect on their involvement in geological processes (Bobbette, 2023); or Mexican earthquakes which make people sick (Summers, 2022). Alongside these examples, recent scholarship has shown that “the shock of the Anthropocene” is rather a rhetorical and political shock than a real phenomenon of the twenty-first century (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016).

Dipesh Chakrabarty described responses to the shock of the Anthropocene ranging “from denial, disconnect, and indifference to a spirit of engagement and activism” (Chakrabarty, 2009: 197), but these responses become uncertain in times of crisis. Chakrabarty brought the discussions about the Anthropocene to a clear conclusion: “In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force” (Chakrabarty, 2009: 206). When social scientists or humanities scholars deal with deep or geological time in the twenty-first century, they often depict a similar voicelessness in view of the incomprehensible temporality (Ginn et al., 2018: 217). As a result, historians have either focused on the Freudian insult of deep time or they have called for bringing together human and natural history after over 200 years of separation. These reactions express the experience that “[the Anthropocene's] temporality, which asks us to accept the ethical proximity between the most fleeting act in our present and planet-shaping effects that will play out over millennia, is deeply menacing” (Farrier, 2019: 2). Yet, writings about the Anthropocene have been criticized for their inherent determinism and temporal closedness (Nordblad, 2021). Instead of accepting the ongoing climate change as a predetermined fact (Stager, 2011), Julia Nordblad insists on the openness of climate change and the many scenarios available to decision-makers in the early twenty-first century. Deep time, however, did not simply dethrone the human, but it allowed for the tempotechnical conquest of the fourth dimension; all the examples discussed in this article exhibited the temporal ambiguity of geological time as it represented a threat but also a possibility to take back control over time and history, to regain control over time which had become precarious faced with the inaccessibility of geological time. As this article shows, humans have played “geological force” already centuries earlier, even if on a much smaller scale.

Foremost geologists had played this game, working on the riddles of earthly strata and the age of the earth and hereby replacing biblical time and decentering the human. Helge Jordheim, critical of the scandalous geological dethroning of the human, argued that the bursting of time was followed by a “reordering of the field of knowledge, by which man and earth […] were pulled apart by separate epistemologies and methodologies—what we recognize today as geology and history” (Jordheim, 2022: 22–23). These two epistemologies link Neil Chapman's intellectual (geological) and personal (historical) take on geological time to the early days of reflections on deep time. Examining experimental time work of geologists, it becomes clear that their laboratory time work reworked geological time as an epistemic thing and thereby made inaccessible time manageable. Something important happened between 1788 and 1888 and 1988: Geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scaled-down deep time processes in their furnaces and on their workbenches and then scaled-up their experimental findings, whereas geologists in the twentieth century scaled-up their experiments to deep time natural analogs and then scaled-down their findings to fit the immediate needs of the nuclear industry. Hall conducted first experiments to confirm Hutton's uniformitarianism, Renard called experimental synthesis the most advanced stage of geology, and the NAWG group extended the experimental grip beyond the lab to include nature itself. All these experiments crafted geological time in their respective laboratories, and they aimed at “grasping” deep time with tempotechnical devices and practices. Scientists like Hall recognized natural laws and produced artificial similes; geo-Prometheanists like Renard and Cadell synchronized natural and experimental laws, and they discerned even the possibility to recreate geological time scales; and geopresentists like the members of the NAWG collapsed atomic and geological time and created the temporality of an “extended present” (Nowotny, 1994: 8).

Because of tempotechnical normalization, geological time became a charismatic megatime in the late twentieth century, offering temporal engineering solutions for waste, but at the same time contributing to “the unilateral excesses of contemporary capitalist presentism” (Ginn et al., 2018: 216) and chronowashing (Bastian, 2024) the problems of nuclear disposal facilities. Particularly research on nuclear disposal facilities expanded the present in the sense that solutions to problems in the far future are crafted in the present as if the far future belonged to the controllable space of human time, as if the still-to-be-completed futures can be completed already in the present. With François Hartog, this seems to follow a presentist regime of historicity (Hartog, 2015), whereas the two other regimes of Hartog's triad (facing past or future) characterize the other examples of this article; with his uniformitarianist epistemology, Hall was facing the past; Renard and Cadell with their fin-de-siècle belief in technoscience, for that matter, were facing the future. Still, Hartog's regime of historicity in nuclear science is only a vision of tempotechnical potency which crumbles as soon as real events such as Fukushima disrupt the crafting of deep time. All the experimental accounts of geological time are deeply problematic as “geologic desiring-machines” which “make the earth scream [in] a misogynists tale of conquering the geological impotence that the earth has bestowed on mankind” (Yusoff, 2017: 107), but without neglecting the limiting anthropocentric gaze on the earth, the rhetoric of experimenting with deep time nevertheless offers something; it shows that “deep time is not purely an abstraction to be calculated, but a phenomenal experience to be encountered in the field” (Irvine, 2014: 170) and also produced in the geo-Prometheanist lab; it provides geopresentist narratives of (literally) slow hope (Mauch, 2019); and it provides a vision of the human as one of many “active Earth commoners who hold in their reflexive minds, in their creative hands, and in their socio-environmental struggles and initiatives some of the ‘solutions’ for lives of dignity in the Anthropocene” (Bonneuil, 2015). Coming back to Chapman from the beginning, none of us might have a good grasp of deep time, but some of us know tempotechnical practices which craft deep time in the laboratory, and this offers at least a technoscientific answer to Augustine's dilemma.