The Planet in a Pebble by Jan Zalasiewicz
This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space. This is a narrative of the Earth's long and dramatic history, as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal realms of the Universe, in the Big Bang and in supernova explosions and continues amid the construction of the Solar System. Jan Zalasiewicz shows the almost incredible complexity present in such a small and apparently mundane object. Many events in the Earth's ancient past can be deciphered from a pebble: volcanic eruptions; the lives and deaths of extinct animals and plants; the alien nature of long-vanished oceans; and transformations deep underground, including the creations of fool's gold and of oil. Zalasiewicz demonstrates how geologists reach deep into the Earth's past by forensic analysis of even the tiniest amounts of mineral matter. Many stories are crammed into each and every pebble around us. It may be small, and ordinary, this pebble - but it is also an eloquent part of our Earth's extraordinary, never-ending story.
Extraordinary bookTimes Literary Supplement I have rarely learned so much in so few pages, and this book...has the making of a minor classic. Geographical It builds to a satisfying picture of how our planet's history is etched into every fragment of the pebble. New Scientist Impressively skilful narrative...Geology has a gifted new popular science writer. New Scientist
Jan Zalasiewicz is a Geology Lecturer at the University of Leicester, having previously worked for the British Geological Survey. He is a field geologist, palaeontologist, and stratigrapher who teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students various areas of geology and Earth history and is a researcher of fossil ecosystems and environments spanning over half a billion years of geological time. He is the author of The Planet After Us: What Legacy Would Humans Leave in the Rocks, which has been published in over a hundred scientific journals.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780199569700 |
| ISBN 10 | 0199569703 |
| Title | The Planet in a Pebble |
| Author | Jan Zalasiewicz |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year published | 2010-09-23 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |