Download Ebook The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen
Again, checking out habit will consistently provide helpful advantages for you. You may not require to invest often times to review the publication The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen Just set apart numerous times in our extra or spare times while having meal or in your workplace to read. This The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen will certainly show you new thing that you could do now. It will assist you to enhance the high quality of your life. Occasion it is merely an enjoyable publication The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen, you could be healthier and much more fun to take pleasure in reading.
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen
Download Ebook The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen
Visualize that you get such particular incredible encounter as well as knowledge by just reading an e-book The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen. Exactly how can? It seems to be higher when a book could be the most effective thing to find. E-books now will certainly show up in published and also soft data collection. One of them is this e-book The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen It is so common with the published publications. However, many people often have no area to bring the publication for them; this is why they can't review the book anywhere they want.
As we stated in the past, the technology aids us to consistently recognize that life will certainly be always less complicated. Reviewing e-book The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen practice is also among the benefits to obtain today. Why? Innovation can be used to provide guide The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen in only soft documents system that could be opened up each time you really want and also all over you require without bringing this The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen prints in your hand.
Those are several of the benefits to take when getting this The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen by online. Yet, just how is the method to obtain the soft file? It's really appropriate for you to visit this web page since you can obtain the link page to download and install guide The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen Just click the link supplied in this write-up and goes downloading. It will certainly not take much time to obtain this e-book The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen, like when you have to go for book store.
This is also among the reasons by obtaining the soft file of this The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen by online. You might not require even more times to invest to visit guide shop and look for them. Occasionally, you additionally do not locate the book The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen that you are looking for. It will squander the time. However below, when you see this web page, it will be so simple to obtain and download and install the e-book The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen It will not take often times as we state before. You could do it while doing something else in your home or even in your workplace. So very easy! So, are you doubt? Just exercise what we provide right here as well as review The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet, By Robert M. Hazen exactly what you love to read!
Hailed by The New York Times for writing “with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along,” nationally bestselling author Robert M. Hazen offers a radical new approach to Earth history in this intertwined tale of the planet’s living and nonliving spheres. With an astrobiologist’s imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s eye, Hazen calls upon twenty-first-century discoveries that have revolutionized geology and enabled scientists to envision Earth’s many iterations in vivid detail—from the mile-high lava tides of its infancy to the early organisms responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties beneath our feet. Lucid, controversial, and on the cutting edge of its field, The Story of Earth is popular science of the highest order.
- Sales Rank: #12205 in Books
- Published on: 2013-07-30
- Released on: 2013-07-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.10" h x .70" w x 5.40" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
“I’m not competent to assess the accuracy of Robert Hazen’s thesis about geological and biological history, but I am competent to judge it a fascinating story, far more alive than you might guess if all you knew was the subject was old dead (?!) rocks.”
—Bill McKibben, bestselling author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
“With infectious enthusiasm for his subject, Hazen introduces readers to Earth’s defining moments . . . [and] argues that understanding the interplay between Earth’s geological and biological pasts can help us predict and prepare for the future of life on our planet.”
—Saron Yitbarek, Discover
“Hazen takes us on one of the grandest tours of them all—the 4.5 billion year history of our planet. From the atoms of the crust of the Earth come our bodies, the entire living world, and this exciting book. Read Hazen and you will not see Earth and life in the same way again.” —Neil Shubin, paleontologist and bestselling author of Your Inner Fish
“Concise and colourful� . . . Drawing on the latest research and influenced by advances in astrobiology, Hazen takes a radical standpoint . . . to tell the amazing tale of our planet’s intertwined living and non-living spheres.”
—Birger Schmitz, Nature
“A fascinating new theory on the Earth’s origins written in a sparkling style with many personal touches . . . Hazen offers startling evidence that ‘Earth’s living and nonliving spheres’ have co-evolved over the past four billion years.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Exceptionally readable [and] user-friendly . . . Science junkies and readers interested in the environment will find Hazen’s arguments compelling and his overview of Earth’s tumultuous history captivating.”
—Carl Hays, Booklist
“Hazen has a gift for explaining science in lay terms, and even readers with a minimal understanding of geology, chemistry, and physics will find this book riveting."
—Nancy R. Curtis, Library Journal
“Hazen illuminates the origins of Earth and the origins of life [in] a thoroughly accessible book, mixing a variety of scientific disciplines to tell an unforgettable story.”
—Publishers Weekly
"The Story of Earth is that rare book that can transform the way you see the world. By synthesizing a vast span of time and knowledge into crisp, delightful prose, Hazen really does make our planet into a story, and a compelling one. I was left with a new sense of context for our place in this galactic home.”
—Charles Wohlforth, author of The Fate of Nature and The Whale and the Supercomputer
About the Author
Robert M. Hazen is the Clarence Robinson professor of earth science at George Mason University and a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory. The author of numerous books—including the bestselling Science Matters—he lives in Glen Echo, Maryland.
Most helpful customer reviews
64 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
How our home was built
By Ash Jogalekar
In this excellent volume, Robert Hazen tells us the story of how earth came to be, a real story that is grander than any creation myth. He starts with the Big Bang and then leads us through the formation of stars, galaxies, the solar system and finally to the evolution of earth. Hazen is a geologist by training so he especially excels in recounting the the formation of the planet from minerals and elements and their subsequent differentiation into the core, magma and crust that define the structure of our planet.
But this is where the story is just getting warmed up. The upheavals that earth faced during the next 4.5 billion years have been tremendous and Hazen documents them exceedingly well. Earth has seen huge transitions that crucially contributed to the evolution and extinction of life. These included massive tectonic shifts, the famous continental drifts, intense periodic cycles of thawing and freezing, the waxing and waning of oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the constant churning and renewing of earth's raw materials through volcanic, oceanic and tectonic activity. The magnitude of these events is illustrated for instance by the fact that at one point in time the Appalachians were submerged in the ocean. The movement of entire continents across thousands of miles, the rise and fall of imposing mountain ranges and the obliteration of thousands of species and landscapes by the impact of meteorites is almost impossible to imagine. But the evidence is incontrovertible.
The real strength of the book is in describing the influence of this grand geological drama on the evolution of life, and how this evolution would have been impossible without the crucial interplay between geology and biology. Hazen describes the key scientific methods that told us about the massive changes in earth's history; most of these methods involve isotopic studies of one kind or another and have been paramount in revealing for instance how changes in oxygen levels decisively impacted the evolution of the shapes, sizes and ecological niches of living organisms. These studies combined with meticulous classification of fossils have provided a vision of a planet whose supposed tranquility conceals game changing events like asteroid impacts and mass extinctions. Yet where there is death there is life, and it was these catastrophes that greatly influenced the evolution of species; for instance, the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs opened up all kinds of ecological niches for mammals, a key evolutionary step without which humans may likely have not seen the light of day. Similar geological phenomena shaped the structure, function, life and death of countless species, with at least five major mass extinctions documented in the planetary record. In addition the periodic ice ages further sculpted the distribution of resources and the fate of creatures which fed on these resources.
The last part of the book struck me as especially poignant. In it Hazen dispels the silly notion that we need to "save the planet". Whatever the impacts of climate change are, the fact is that earth has always been in flux and the changes it has undergone have been so massive that although humans can affect its makeup to some extent, our planet will go on cycling between these gargantuan alterations with or without our intervention. Its history indicates that ultimately the earth does not really care what we do. As Hazen puts is, the earth will assuredly survive; what we really need to save is ourselves.
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Great popular overview of a huge subject, with a twist.
By the not-so-reverend bob
This has to be about the most coherent and readable book about the formation of our planet that I have read. It made the processes that formed Earth make sense in ways that no other book has (and I've read some good ones). But it also reads like a family album, or the biography of a beloved friend. For those reasons alone I recommend it.
The bonus of the book (and the area most likely up for debate) is the fresh viewpoint that the author brings to the symbiotic connection between biological life and geology. We all understand that without the basic elements that were gathered from the cosmos by the Earth, life could not have begun. But it also appears that it was life itself that then began to alter "lifeless" geology, mainly in the form of minerals that then became the further building blocks of ever-evolving life forms.
Life exists in many forms and in many places on and in the earth. We tend to think of the things that live and crawl on the surface, or swim in the sea, but the roots of living plants facilitate chemical reactions in rocks and soil to a degree that their actions must be considered a significant shaper of landscape -- more so than erosion by wind and rain.
It is a way to see our planet that has an elegant and fascinating complexity to it. Our life story is not one of life simply springing up on a watery planet that just happened to be the right distance from an energy-supplying sun, but of an interplay between chemistry, environment, time and chance that has played out over and over and over again through extinctions and near extinctions, changes in atmosphere and the chemical composition of the oceans as well as the surface of the planet to arrive at the biologically-rich world that we know today.
As one might expect, there is a final-chapter discussion of our current climate issue, but it is set firmly within a recognition of the dynamic nature of our planet:
"In the midst of these forces, our species has proved to be resilient, clever, and adaptable. We have learned technological tricks to shape our world to our will: we mine and refine its metals, fertilize and cultivate its soils, divert and exploit its rivers, extract and burn its fossil fuels. Our actions are not without consequences. Every day, if we are attuned to the dynamic process of our planetary home, we can experience every facet of its intertwined creative forces. And we can then understand how devastatingly changeable the world can be, and how utterly indifferent it is to our fleeting aspirations."
I highly recommend this book both as a fine tale of our home planet, and as a reminder of how many important scientific discoveries about it have come in our lifetimes.
46 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
A Tour de Force
By Graham Sharp Paul
To tell a story spanning 4.5 billion years in one book? It's a hard ask, but Robert Hazen does it and does it well, striking the right balance between too little detail and too much. The section on how competition for rock surfaces drove the organisation and concentration of complex biomolecules, the building blocks of life, was intellectually stunning. That natural selection might have been at work before life even existed came as a profound revelation, as is the thought that the same processes may have laid the foundations for life on other planets and moons (Europa for example).
Would that all those mired in superstition, fear, and ignorance might read this book with open, enquiring, and rational minds.
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen PDF
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen EPub
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen Doc
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen iBooks
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen rtf
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen Mobipocket
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar