Earth Science History

You may be wearing a Tungsten ring right now, but did you know the promise of Tungsten is almost limitless? The story of Tungsten tells a tale of a metal still successfully used to counterfeit gold, but which is also itself truly valuable: once understood only as an annoyance to tin miners, Tungsten today has proven itself as essential to every industry and art, and will even one day carry humanity beyond the stars. Easy to understand and entertaining, readers will also learn why it takes the light of a dying star to form Tungsten and why we still rely on Tungsten to light our homes and ...

The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own. It’s a time of ice ages, global migrations, and mass extinctions - of woolly rhinos, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and not least early species of Homo. It’s the world that created ours. But outside that environmental story there exists a parallel narrative that describes how our ideas about the Pleistocene have emerged.

Why are conditions like autism, asthma, obesity, and allergies exploding at unprecedented rates? Why are we living longer, getting smarter, having far fewer kids? If Darwin were alive today, how would he explain this new world?

From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before. Life teems through Henry Gee’s lyrical prose - colossal supercontinents drift, collide and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today.

There are over 100 million Pentecostals in Africa. In Latin America, Pentecostalism now vies with Catholicism for the soul of the continent, and some of the largest pentecostal congregations in the world are in South Korea. In To the Ends of the Earth, Allan Heaton Anderson explores the historical and theological factors behind the phenomenal growth of global Pentecostalism.

From the solar system to spinning tops, hurricanes to hula hoops, power plants to pendulums, one mysterious force shapes almost every aspect of our lives: spin. Despite its ubiquity, rotational force continues to baffle and surprise, and few people realize how it makes our planet habitable or how it has been tamed by engineers to make our lives more comfortable. Charting the development of engineering and technology from the earliest prehistoric drills to the gas turbine, Roland Ennos presents a riveting account of human ingenuity and the seemingly infinite ways spin affects our daily lives.

Ever since innovations in agriculture vastly expanded production of the staples of food energy, our remarkable achievements in reshaping nature have brought about an overwhelming expansion in the life chances of billions of people. Yet every technological innovation has also empowered humans to exploit each other. Reinterpreting a history previously seen from a Euro-and-anthropocentric viewpoint, Amrith relates in brilliant prose, and on the largest canvas, a magisterial, mind-altering epic - vibrant with stories, characters, vivid images and rich archival resources.

If you're a person who wants to know the secrets of humankind, nature, and evolution, then you're about to discover how to increase sensitivity to the problems of our planet right now! If you're serious about increase sensitivity to the problems of our planet and you really want to know the answers to these great life's questions, then you need to get a copy of A World without Humans: Pros & Cons of Our Eventual Extinction right now.

From the secret fossils of London to the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from state-of-the-art Californian laboratories to one of the world's most dangerous volcanic complexes hidden beneath the green hills of western Naples, set out on an adventure to those parts of the world where the Earth's life-story is written into the landscape. Helen Gordon turns a novelist's eye on the extraordinary scientists who are piecing together this planetary drama.

Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus, and triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films.

Sixty years ago, cars and airplanes were still death traps waiting to happen. Today, both are safer than ever, thanks in part to one pioneering air force doctor's research on seatbelts and ejection seats. The exploits of John Paul Stapp (1910-1999) come to thrilling life in this biography of a Renaissance man who was once blasted - faster than a .45 caliber bullet - across the desert in his Sonic Wind rocket sled, only to be slammed to a stop in barely a second.

From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before. Life teems through Henry Gee’s lyrical prose - colossal supercontinents drift, collide and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today.

Balancing a broad array of archaeological, botanical, and historical evidence, Fruit from the Sands presents the fascinating story of the origins and spread of agriculture across Inner Asia and into Europe and East Asia. Through the preserved remains of plants in archaeological sites, Robert N. Spengler III identifies the regions where our most familiar crops were domesticated and follows their routes as people carried them around the world. Vividly narrated, Fruit from the Sands explores how the foods we eat have shaped the course of human history.

We need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new materialist, kinetic ethics of the earth that speaks to this moment.

The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women, and children sought their fortunes in every part of the globe, from the British Empire to the United States, in cities and on prairie farms, as traders, bankers, missionaries, soldiers, politicians, and engineers.

In 1990, Peter Larson, with his team of commercial fossil hunters from the Black Hills Institute, discovered the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen in history. He dubbed it "Sue" after the field paleontologist who first saw it sticking out of a sandstone cliff on the ranch of Maurice Williams, a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe member in South Dakota's badlands. Because the skelton was 90% complete, its study promised to yield up priceless information on the life and habits of the T Rex.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped - and about human folly.

Eggs are the origins of ninety percent of the Earth's organisms. They can be found as far apart as deep-sea volcanoes and in space. Yet despite their fundamental importance, eggs often find themselves an afterthought in the discussion of evolution of life on Earth as the interests of scientists congregate around the things that emerge from eggs rather than the eggs themselves.

Experience Earth from the big bang to the dinosaurs and beyond in this beautifully written, vibrant overview of our home planet's journey from creation to our time today.

History is full of strange animal stories, invented by the brightest and most influential, from Aristotle to Disney, and they reveal as much about us and the things we believe as they do about the animals they misrepresent. We once thought that eels were born from sand, that swallows migrated to the moon, and that bears gave birth to formless lumps that were licked into shape by their mothers.