Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

by Marcia Bjornerud

Overview

From the author of Turning to Stone, a mediation on the stories that rock can tell us about the deep history of our planet

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465006847
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/31/2006
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	73,152
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.75(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

A lively introduction to current concepts in geology, pitched to the undergraduate reader but well suited to generalists as well. Readers who learned their geology two or three decades back have a little catching up to do: The chronologies have changed, certain theories have changed and indeed the planet itself has changed, for, as Lawrence University geology professor and debut author Bjornerud notes, "the magnitude of human actions on the Earth now matches those of natural agents." (And more: she notes that humans add 16 times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than do volcanoes, the next-biggest contributor to the old greenhouse effect.) Bjornerud obliges in this well-paced survey of such things as the rock cycle, thermohaline ocean circulation, and convergent evolution. Those daunted by the formidable language of geology, the stuff in which John McPhee revels, will be pleased by Bjornerud's plain-English approach, by which, for instance, she likens the Earth to a great recycling system: "There is no natural equivalent of a landfill. Nothing is unusable waste, and nothing will last forever, at least not in any particular form." Bjornerud covers a lot of ground, so to speak, with the result that some big-picture processes earn rather hasty treatment; pyroclastomaniacs are likely to clamor for more on volcanism, for instance, while fans of continental drift may want a little more plate tectonic action for their buck. Still, such are the shortfalls of surveys, and all the fascinating asides will spur motivated readers to dig deeper on their own. Who knew, for instance, that the oceans may once have been frozen during the period called Snowball Earth, that a little zircon chip fromAustralia is "the very oldest discovered object native to the Earth," that the seas of the moon are actually big holes punched into the lunar surface by massive meteorites, and that a rock has only to be ten inches wide to qualify as a boulder? These are the kinds of things of which naturalists' dreams are made, and Bjornerud introduces them memorably.

Kirkus Reviews