Anthropocene
Plastics, concrete aggregate, and radionuclide fallout — the thinnest layer in the column and the loudest. A bottle cap from a 1987 landfill sits here, already half-fossilized in polymer.
Holocene
The warm, stable epoch that let agriculture happen. Peat, pollen grains, and charcoal from the first controlled fires bind this band into a soft, fibrous ochre.
Pleistocene
Glacial and interglacial cycles compress this into dense, striated till. Mammoth ivory fragments and windblown loess mark the cold pulses.
Cretaceous
Ends abruptly, world-wide, in a millimeter of iridium-rich clay — the Chicxulub line. Ammonite whorls and chalk microfossils crowd the band above it, then silence.
Jurassic
Fern fronds pressed flat in fine-grained shale, laid down in shallow inland seas while sauropods walked the deltas above.
Permian
Zircon crystals here date the Great Dying to within 60,000 years — a hairline in this band, the worst extinction Earth has recorded.
Cambrian
The explosion. Trilobite exoskeletons stack in the hundreds here — the first hard bodies the planet ever preserved.
Hadean
Below all fossils: zircon grains, the oldest solid material we've dated, crystallized from a crust barely cooled enough to be called rock. Below this, there is no record left to core.