Showing how a lede can feel both snappy and learned, here’s Peter Brannen opening his searching and entertaining Scientific American article, “Can a time capsule outlast geology? A ridiculous but instructive thought experiment involving deep time, plate tectonics, erosion and the slow death of the sun”:

Stuff is old where I live, in greater Boston. Clapboard houses that list with age bear plaques touting the former residence of the town cordwainer or victualler. The gravestones, worn rough by New England winters, also stand crooked, bearing similarly outmoded biblical names—a Lemuel here, an Ephraim there. Old, too, are the local churches where many of these souls were commended to the great hereafter.

As for the building material that makes up these churches, well, that’s a little bit older still. Roxbury puddingstone, the mottled rock quarried nearby and used for much of the old church masonry in Boston, formed 600 million years ago in violent submarine landslides off the coast of a barren volcanic microcontinent that had been rifted off Africa. This upheaval happened so long ago in the course of the perpetual wandering of continents that the whole thing took place somewhere near the South Pole. The sediments hardened to rock, then hitched a ride across a bygone ocean as part of a traveling tectonic plate before being sutured onto the rest of equatorial North America some 140 million years before the first dinosaur evolved.

This rock now pokes out from underneath fallen leaves and the edges of Dunkin’ parking lots in the Boston area. Very little else here has survived the intervening half-billion-year eon, save a superficial veneer of glacial till from the extremely recent last ice age—one that is surely doomed in the next few dozen millennia or so. Had somebody hoped to leave a time capsule for today’s Bostonians 250 million years ago in the Triassic period, or even four million years ago in the Pliocene epoch, they would have been completely, utterly screwed. The same is true for anyone aspiring today to send such an envoy into the geological deep future. Ephraim and Lemuel’s mortal remains, much less the local Dunkin’, will not survive into geological time. “Can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste?” Charles Darwin wrote in his 1839 book The Voyage of the Beagle, referring to the defacing forces of erosion.