Earth Science History

On a snowy morning in January 1910, the Alaska Steamship Company's Farallon struck Black Reef in Cook Inlet. The vessel carried no wireless radio to broadcast an SOS. Thirty-eight men scrambled into lifeboats, to be cast up on the rugged shore where they huddled under make-shift tents constructed from the Farallon's sails. Exposed to a bitter northern winter with meager equipment and clothing, a disturbing awareness sank in-rescuers may arrive too late.

Healing Clays: History, Science and Uses of the Earth's Best Kept Secret takes the reader on a documented journey through the history, uses and scientific studies on this most fascinating subject of healing clay. Contemporary society is embarking on yet another learning curve when it comes to natural elements and their benefits for general health and well-being. Using clay as an instrument for improving the health seems like an unbelievable concept to most in modern societies, but history teaches us clay was once an integral part of many culture's health practices. From Cleopatra’s beauty...

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next 100 years, human life on swathes of the Earth's surface will end in a haze of heat, drought, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of 20th-century progress and a profound threat to life in the 21st century. And yet dust is something we hardly ever consider--it is so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought. Jay Owen's Dust sparks curiosity and corrects that oversight.

The ocean has shaped and sustained life on Earth from the beginning of time. Its vast waters are alive with meaning, and connect every living thing on Earth. Deep Water is a hymn to the beauty, mystery and wonder of the ocean. Weaving together science, history and personal experience, it offers vital new ways of understanding not just humanity's relationship with the planet, but our past - and perhaps most importantly, our future.

Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily. Bringing to bear a lifetime's digging, Francis Pryor delves into England's hidden urban and rural landscapes, from Whitby Abbey to the navvy camp at Risehill in Cumbria, from Tintagel to Tottenham's Broadwater Farm.

World-renowned volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer has worked at the crater's edge in the wildest places on Earth. He's faced down AK47s, learned from tribal elders, and watched red hot rocks shoot into the sky. More people have been into space than have set eyes on the fiery depths of Mount Erebus in Antarctica, where he has measured the Earth's powerful forces. In Mountains of Fire, he paints volcanoes as otherworldly, magical places where our history is laid bare, and shows us just how entangled volcanic activity is with our climate, economy, politics, culture and beliefs.

But the quest to unravel life's genesis is not just a story of big ideas. It is also a compelling human story, rich in personalities, conflicts, and surprising twists and turns. Along the way the journey takes in some of the greatest discoveries in modern biology, from evolution and cells to DNA and life's family tree. It is also a search whose end may finally be in sight. In The Genesis Quest, Michael Marshall shows how the quest to understand life's beginning is also a journey to discover the true nature of life, and by extension our place in the universe.

The discovery of the Americas around AD 1500 was an extraordinary watershed in human experience. It gave rise to the modern period of human ecology, a phenomenon global in scope that set in motion profound changes in almost every society on Earth. This new period, which saw the depletion of the lands of the New World, proved tragic for some, triumphant for others, and powerfully affecting for all.

The year is 1735. Twelve unruly men board ships bound for South America. Their mission? To discover the true shape of the Earth. They will be exposed to a wilderness of dangers none can imagine. The survivors won't return for 10 years. An almost forgotten moment in history, a story for our times, this is the true story of the mission to discover the shape of the Earth.

In 1910, Captain Robert Scott prepared his crew for a trip that no one had ever completed: a journey to the South Pole. He vowed to get there any way he could, even if it meant looking death in the eye. Then, not long before he set out, another intrepid explorer, Roald Amundsen, set his sights on the same goal. Suddenly two teams were vying to be the first to make history - what was to be an expedition had become a perilous race. In 2018, Captain Louis Rudd readied himself for a similarly grueling task: the first solo crossing of treacherous Antarctica.

Die grüne Wiege der Menschheit: Die faszinierende Geschichte der Menschen und des Dschungels. Das Schicksal der Menschheit ist schon immer mit dem der Tropenwälder verbunden. Der Anthropologe und Archäologe Patrick Roberts nimmt uns mit auf eine spannende Reise durch die Jahrmillionen. Er schildert, wie die Wälder entstanden und das Aussehen unseres Planeten entscheidend prägten. Erst durch sie fanden Amphibien den Weg an Land, entwickelten sich neue Pflanzen- und Tierarten - und schließlich der Mensch.

Elixir spans five thousand years, from the beginnings of civilization to the parched American Sun Belt of today. It is a story of human endeavor: our present-day interaction with this most essential resource has deep roots in the remote past, and every human culture has been shaped by its relationship to water.

The past fifteen thousand years--the entire span of human civilization--have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age, when sea levels were more than 700 feet below modern levels. Over the next eleven millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and starts. These rapid changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because they were able to adjust readily to new coastlines.

When Will Hunt was 16 years old, he discovered an abandoned tunnel that ran beneath his house in Providence, Rhode Island. His first tunnel trips inspired a lifelong fascination with exploring underground worlds, from the derelict subway stations and sewers of New York City to sacred caves, catacombs, tombs, bunkers and ancient underground cities in more than 20 countries around the world.

A leading ecologist argues that if humankind is to survive on a fragile planet, we must understand and obey its iron laws. Over the past century, our species has made unprecedented technological innovations with which we have sought to control nature. From river levees to enormous one-crop fields, we continue to try to reshape nature for our purposes - so much so it seems we may be in danger of destroying it.

A place of exceptional diversity, rapid change and high energy, for the past 100 million years Europe has literally been at the crossroads of the world. By virtue of its geology and geography, evolution in Europe proceeds faster than elsewhere. The continent has absorbed wave after wave of immigrant species over the millennia, taking them in, transforming them and sometimes hybridising them. Flannery's exploration of the nature of Europe reveals a compelling intellectual drama, with a cast of heroic researchers whose discoveries have changed our understanding of life itself.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

Raging wildfires have devastated vast areas of California and Australia in recent years, and predictions are that we will see more of the same in coming years as a result of climate change. But this is nothing new. Andrew C. Scott tells the whole story of fire's impact on our planet's atmosphere, climate, vegetation, ecology, and the evolution of plant and animal life. It has caused mass extinctions, and it has propelled the spread of flowering plants. The exciting evidence we can now draw on has been preserved in fossilized charcoal, found in rocks hundreds of millions of years old....

Inspired by Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History, the acclaimed book that grew out of an August 2018 issue of the New York Times Magazine solely dedicated to it, Saving Earth tells the human story of the climate-change conversation from the recent past into the present day. It wrestles with the long shadow of our failures, what might be ahead for today’s generation, and crucial questions of how we understand the world we live in—and how we can work together to change the outlook for the better.

In 1865 a broken Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy’s storm-warning system and ‘forecasts’ would return, the model for what we use today. In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God’s great wrath, 19th-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma.