Geodiversity Takes Centre Stage Paul Hubley, P.Geo. All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players, They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages… Excerpt from William Shakespeare As You Like It (spoken by Jacques) An explosion of Homeric (epic) proportions, an estimated 13.8 billion years ago, gave rise to everything physical and chemical around us today. The blast was so great that some even postulate that the early moments of our universe even had several additional dimensions compared to those we know now. And it is all still expanding. Physics tells us that explosions result in a release of energy–a reordering of matter. Chemistry tells us that they are the dismantling of something old and creation of something new. Clinical psychologists refer to explosions as a trauma after which a new awareness can be developed over time. Explosions have shaped our consciousness, informed our rituals, politics and religion, and are often expressed in parables or in oral tradition, theatre, poetry and popular culture. One thing is certain–as the curtain lowers in the aftermath of an explosion, things are not the same as they were.  When we examine our world on the backdrop of explosive events, we judge some events to be acceptable or even good, whereas some we reject as bad. Some explosions play a small part in our history while others occupy centre stage. Natural or manmade, terrible or wonderful, detonation or no detonation, explosions have always been a fascination to many, including geoscientists. Whether it be meteorite strikes resulting in extinction events, or tritium detection from atomic bombs being tracked in groundwater for age-dating, some geoscientists dedicate their careers to understanding explosive events.  In an excerpt of As You Like It, Shakespeare introduced seven Acts for seven ages, beginning with the iconic line “All the World’s a Stage.”  Classical Latin explōdō means “to hiss a bad actor off the stage,” or “to drive an actor off the stage by making noise,” from ex- (“out“) + plaudō (“to clap; to applaud“), hence meaning “to drive out” or “to reject.” The modern meaning developed later. In Shakespeare’s time, just as with the ancient Greeks, men were the only ones allowed to be theatre actors–fortunately in theatre we’ve generally developed a more sensible sense of diversity since that time, and benefited greatly from it.  Shakespeare described seven ages of a man’s life, from young to old. Our play also has seven Acts for seven ages on the World stage, but in reverse order, from oldest to youngest, with some key explosive events as the backdrop. It is presented in two parts, converging in Ontario. In Part I we encounter physical-chemical-biological explosions in the abiotic and biotic world. In Part II we implode (focus inward), in hopes of blending our natural world with our community, actions and interactions with others–an implosion of nature and culture, to see what post-play chatter we can initiate.  Now we welcome our principal company of actors: geodiversity, having this basic definition: Geodiversity is the variety of earth materials, forms and processes that constitute and shape the Earth, either the whole or a specific part of it. Relevant materials include minerals, rocks, sediments, fossils, soils and water. Forms may comprise folds, faults, landforms and other expressions of morphology or relations between units of earth material. Any natural process that continues to act upon, maintain or modify either material or form (for example tectonics, sediment transport, pedogenesis) represents another aspect of geodiversity. However geodiversity is not normally defined to include the likes of landscaping, concrete or other significant human influence.  At this point in our story our world is formed and the stage is set. The stage is suspended in the vastness of space. It’s a place of spectacular beauty, with a slow rotation of players. The audience is in a hushed silence, waiting for the first Act in our diversity play, ready if needed to boo bad actors off the stage…  PART I Act I – All the World’s a Stage It took over 9 billion years after the initial explosion, so about 4.6 billion years ago, to get sufficient cosmic dust and rocks to agree with each other enough to form the accretion of a new celestial body, a world we here call Earth (which is one name of many). Here we find the basic building blocks for everything we know and everything we have ever known.   As the world cooled sufficiently, and for billions of years, all the world’s been a stage for a slow but steady rise in geodiversity, with a few exiting the stage, and many others entering. Throughout this time there were numerous explosions, the biggest is believed to be when a Mars-sized planetoid we named Theia crashed into Earth, ejecting the material for the moon. A meteorite is generally considered to be responsible for the Sudbury Nickel Rim–this would have been an explosive event of epic proportions. No doubt there were new minerals formed as a result of these events. But generally speaking, over this vast timescale of billions of years, geodiversity was not particularly explosive. In a series of studies, Hazen et al (2008), Hazen et al (2017) and Hazen and Morrison (2022) describe geodiversity as a function of mineral diversity. The research identifies that the world stage has hosted between 5,000 and 6,000 minerals, much of it believed to be biologically-mediated (formed as a result of biological processes), even in the early days of world history. The research describes a slow increase over deep time, culminating in the Great Oxidation Event, resulting in a groundswell of new minerals due to the availability of oxygen in the atmosphere to react with other elements (relatively speaking, oxygen is highly reactive and found all sorts of ways to combine with rocks and minerals). But despite this reactivity, throughout this deep time period of billions of years there’s nothing even close to being considered an