Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth - Hardcover

Bjornerud, Marcia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081334249X ISBN 13: 9780813342498

Publisher: Basic Books, 2005

Synopsis

To many of us, the Earth's crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. For more than four billion years, in beach sand, granite, and garnet schists, the planet has kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past.Fulbright Scholar Marcia Bjornerud takes the reader along on an eye-opening tour of Deep Time, explaining in elegant prose what we see and feel beneath our feet. Both scientist and storyteller, Bjornerud uses anecdotes and metaphors to remind us that our home is a living thing with lessons to teach.She shows how our planet has long maintained a delicate balance, and how the global give-and-take has sustained life on Earth through numerous upheavals. But with the rapidly escalating effects of human beings on their home planet, that cosmic balance is being threatened—and the consequences may be catastrophic.Containing a glossary and detailed timescale, as well as vivid descriptions and historic accounts, Reading the Rocks is literally a history of the world, for all friends of the Earth.

About this title

About the Author

Marcia Bjornerud is a Professor and Chair of Geology at Lawrence University. She is a Fellow of the Geographical Society of America, and was a 2000-2001 Fulbright Scholar. She lives in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Reviews

In this engrossing volume of pop-geology, geologist Bjornerud chronicles the watersheds in Earth's history from the primordial supernova that seeded the nascent solar nebula to the man-made cataclysms of global warming and habitat destruction, visiting along the way such "near-death experiences" as the Moon's apparent birth from a collision between Earth and a wandering planet, the "Snowball Earth" period when the oceans froze over, and the asphyxiating "Permian-Triassic oxygen crisis," when 90% of the world's species died out in less than a million years. Adopting something of a Gaian perspective of Earth as a self-regulating superorganism, the author attributes the planet's stability in the face of upheaval to dynamic mechanisms that cycle elements back and forth among the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere and Earth's crust and interior. Bjornerud conveys these lessons through a stimulating introduction to the geological principles by which Earth's past is teased out of obscure but telling details of rocks and fossils. Her thematically structured chapters, reminiscent of Stephen Jay Gould's essays, are written in an expansive, erudite style ranging from science to philosophy, history and the occasional admonition against humanity's reckless remaking of the environment "like spoiled children." (May)
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College professor Bjornerud presents an evocative history of the earth, one that will instill an appreciation for the dynamism and comparative uniqueness of our planet. Geology's specialties of crystallography, geochronology, and other techniques can find the clues that rocks embody in their passage through fire and ice. Often employing anthropic metaphors about a rock's "memory" of its pat, Bjornerud dispenses with lecturing and departs on an elliptical (through still precise) presentation. The reader isn't directed to the attributes of a rock but, rather, to the geological cycles by which, and the environments in which, it was created. Interconnecting in Bjornerud's account, cycles such as tectonics and weathering have had their "settings" altered over time, affecting in turn the rocks whose content of minerals, radioactivity, and fossils are the basis for the cathartic demarcations of the geologic time scale. An exemplary introduction, Bjornerud's work displays a fluidity, clarity, and awe that will inspire further reading. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081334249X
• ISBN 13: 9780813342498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256