Ending the Proterozoic: A Poetic Reimagining

The Ediacaran-Cambrian Transition (approx. 550-539 mya) was one of the planet’s most revolutionary events, marking the emergence of diverse and abundant animals. Changing environmental conditions – such as oxygen availability, carbon cycling and nutrient levels – are likely to have been both constricting and galvanising, resulting in the rapid radiation of diverse body plans alongside a permanently altered ocean-atmosphere system. For my PhD research, as part of the UK’s first Doctoral Training Programme in Extinction Studies, I took a biocultural approach, seeking to acknowledge both the catastrophic and creative aspects of ecological regime shifts, whilst offering an artistic response to the complex processes that occur at key chronostratigraphic boundaries, from mass extinctions and evolutionary radiations to global oxidation events. Combining palaeontological study and creative practice, I established a novel methodology conducting ‘lyric fieldwork’ at Global Stratotypes and Section Points, writing a radically ‘indisciplined’ thesis and accompanying long poem spanning deep time, from the Precambrian through to the Phanerozoic. In this presentation – a performative reading – I will share an excerpt of my poem, focusing on the closing moments of the Proterozoic Eon and the start of the Phanerozoic Era, where the Ediacaran Period moves into the Cambrian Period, and where major geochemical perturbations correspond with an ‘explosion’ of biological innovations, from biomineralisation and the evolution of hard body parts to the rise of predator-prey dynamics and increased locomotive strategies.