Showing titles in Earth Sciences

Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years.

The rise of human civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, known as the Holocene. Until very recently, we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene. Now we do. In this engrossing and captivating look at the human effects of climate variability, Brian Fagan shows how climate functioned as what the historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the “deeper transformations” of history—a more important historical factor than we understand.

This is the true story of a Harvard graduate who forsook his studies for two years of the grueling life of an ordinary seaman. This exciting tale was the first to realistically describe the lives of the roughly treated, poorly paid sailors of the merchant marine.

In this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times best-selling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven's Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections between the farthest reaches of space and life here on Earth.

How did the world as we know it—from the soil beneath our feet to the air we breathe and the life that surrounds us—come to be? Geologists have proposed one set of answers while biologists have proposed another. Earth and Life is the first book to reveal why we need to listen to both voices—the physical and the biological—to understand how we and our planet became possible.

There's so much we don't know about what lies deep beneath the ocean's surface - and the time to find out is growing increasingly precious . . . Professor Alex Rogers is one of the world's leading experts in marine biology and oceanology, and has spent his life studying the deep ocean - and in...

""A rip-roaring tale, Fossil Men is one of those rare books that can be a prism through which to view the world, exposing the fabric of the Earth and illuminating the Tree of Life."" —New York Times bestselling author Peter Nichols A behind-the-scenes account of the shocking discovery of the...

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness. Distinguished scholar Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America.

Two long-term friends explore despair, optimism and hope in the face of environmental change. Cate and Danny return with Season 2 of the acclaimed series Climate of Change where they interview guests along the way, discussing the challenges humankind faces and celebrate the ground-breaking work tackling the crisis.

Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully...

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson's mission to bring together the fight against climate change and the global struggle for human rights has taken her all over the world. It also brought her to a heartening revelation: that that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. 

Marcia Bjornerud's life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world. As one of few women in her field, she witnessed the shift in our understanding of the Earth, from solid object to an entity in a constant state of transformation. In the most tumultuous times of her own life, a deep understanding of our rocky planet imbued her life with meaning.

An earthquake shatters Haiti and a hurricane slices through Texas. We hear that nature runs rampant, seeking to destroy us through these 'natural disasters'. Science recounts a different story, however: disasters are not the consequence of natural causes; they are the consequence of human...

Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero have written an entertaining, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence and systematically challenging the pseudoscience that perpetuates their myths. After examining the nature of science and pseudoscience and their relation to cryptozoology, Loxton and Prothero take on Bigfoot; the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and its cross-cultural incarnations; the Loch Ness monster and its highly publicized sightings; the evolution of the Great Sea Serpent; and more.

Here is the extraordinary story of the unfolding of life on Earth, told by Michael J. Benton, a world-renowned authority on biodiversity. Ranging over four billion years, Benton weaves together the latest findings on fossils, earth history, evolutionary biology, and many other fields to highlight the great leaps that enabled life to evolve from microbe to human - big breakthroughs that made whole new ways of life possible - including cell division and multicellularity, hard skeletons, the move to land, the origin of forests, the move to the air. 

In Footprints, David Farrier explores what traces we will leave for the very deep future. From long-lived materials like plastic and nuclear waste, to the 50 million kilometres of roads spanning the planet, in modern times we have created numerous objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time. Our carbon could linger in the atmosphere for 100,000 years, and the remains of our cities will still exist millions of years from now as a layer in the rock.

Yorkshire is 'a continent unto itself', a region where mountain, plain, coast, downs, fen and heath lie close. By weaving history, family stories, travelogue and ecology, Richard Morris reveals how Yorkshire took shape as a landscape and in literature, legend and popular regard. The result is a...

From scorching deserts to frozen seabeds, from the highest peaks of the Himalaya to the hadal depths of the oceans, there are habitats on this Earth that appear inimical to life - yet in which it flourishes nevertheless. During the midday heat of the Sahara, silvery ants sprint from their nests...

Gilles Fonteneau, a longtime colleague of the legendary Jacques Cousteau's Calypso team, fulfilled a lifelong dream when in 2001 he launched his own exploration, aboard the 45-foot catamaran Prince de Vendee, into the silent world of the sea. Little did he know when he set out that his efforts to better understand the dynamics of the tectonic plates of the region would have such worldwide significance, as shown by the tsunami disaster of southeast Asia in December 2004.

With wonder, wit, and flair - and in record time and space - geophysicist David Bercovici explains how everything came to be everywhere, from the creation of stars and galaxies to the formation of Earth's atmosphere and oceans to the origin of life and human civilization. Bercovici marries humor and legitimate scientific intrigue, rocketing listeners across nearly 14 billion years and making connections between the essential theories that give us our current understanding of topics as varied as particle physics, plate tectonics, and photosynthesis.