Periods of rapid change are among the most interesting things in the geologic record, but that rapidity also makes them hard to study. While 10,000 years sounds like an eternity to us, it’s just a blip in the humbling expanse of Earth’s history. The stories that rocks can tell usually cover too much time to reveal all the details of a blip that short, which challenges geologists’ detective skills. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM to its friends) occurred about 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs and 56 million years before the present.