Reading the Rocks The Autobiography of the Earth

Name: Reading the Rocks The Autobiography of the Earth
Price: 4.31 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780465006847

ISBN-10: 0465006841

ISBN-13: 9780465006847

Edition: 2007

Authors: Marcia. Bjornerud

List price: $18.99

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Description:

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…

Book details

List price: $18.99
Copyright year: 2007
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 10/31/2006
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 256
Size: 5.12" wide x 7.91" long x 0.63" tall
Weight: 0.594
Language: English



Acknowledgments


Currently Accepted Geologic Timescale


Prologue: Stone Crazy


No place with no past


The accidental diarist



The Tao of Earth


The Department of Redundancy Department: Inertia and spare parts


Equals and opposites


Going home to Mother Earth


Everything old is new again


The Earth fugue



Reading Rocks: A Primer


Meeting rocks on common ground


A rock by any other name


Grammar and syntax of the three rock languages


Mind the gap: What rocks don't tell us


Putting everything in order


Getting a date


Peering into the primordial mists



The Great and the Small


Geo-metry: Sizing up the Earth


A sense of scale


The importance of being erroneous


Making retroactive measurements


Tiny bubbles


Stretchy coastlines and imperial microbes


Lawmakers or outlaws?


Measure for measure



Mixing and Sorting


Stars of rock and heavy metal


Density is destiny


Whither the water


Mixed drinks and metaphors


The mantle of power


Waste management


Mal de mer


Only connect



Innovation and Conservation


You say you want a revolution


The paradox of oxygen


Coming out of the cold


Swimming with the (not-yet-evolved) sharks


An arthropod-eat-arthropod world


The many legs of the arms race


Communes and junkyards


Something old, something new, everything borrowed



Strength and Weakness


Earth before geology


Naming names and making maps


A mechanical Earth


The incredible shrinking Earth


Earth unbound


Epilogue: The Once and Future Earth


Glossary


Notes


Index