The Story of Earth

The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

By: Robert M. Hazen

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

Earth evolves. From first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to single cell to verdant living landscape, ours is a planet constantly in flux. In this radical new approach to Earth’s biography, senior Carnegie Institution researcher and national best-selling author Robert M. Hazen reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere - of rocks and living matter - has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.

With an astrobiologist’s imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s passion for the ground beneath our feet, Hazen explains how changes on an atomic level translate into dramatic shifts in Earth’s makeup over its 4.567 billion year existence. He calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our planet’s many iterations in vivid detail - from its fast-rotating infancy when the Sun rose every 5 hours and the Moon filled 250 times more sky than it does now, to its sea-bathed youth, before the first continents arose; from the Great Oxidation Event that turned the land red, to the globe-altering volcanism that may have been the true killer of the dinosaurs. Through Hazen’s theory of “co-evolution,” we learn how reactions between organic molecules and rock crystals may have generated Earth’s first organisms, which in turn are responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on the planet - thousands of different kinds of crystals that could not exist in a nonliving world.

The Story of Earth is also the story of the pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Listeners will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions’ lunar dust, and the World War II Navy officer whose super-pressurized “bomb” - recycled from military hardware - first simulated the molten rock of Earth’s mantle. As a mentor to a new generation of scientists, Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earth’s harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.

Celebrated by The New York Times for writing “with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along,” Hazen proves a brilliant and entertaining guide on this grand tour of our planet inside and out. Lucid, controversial, and intellectually bracing, The Story of Earth is popular science of the highest order.

©2012 Robert M. Hazen (P)2012 Gildan Media, LLC

Critic reviews

“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)

An excellent overview of Earth history

I found the book to be well written and well read. As a professional geologist I found that I even learned a few things. I highly recommend it.

Great read

This was a thought provoking look at the 5 billion year history on the world at a the rock and mineral level as the elements interact with each other via evolutionary changes. . It is a also a horror story on a billion year scale. 2 billion years from now vast deserts. In 5 billion years the sun expires. Hazen harkens back to Sagan's call for humanity to have to seek a post world existence given the inevitable.

Please learn how to pronouce the words!

What did you love best about The Story of Earth?

Marvelous information/story, well told. I love the organization into chapters: blue planet, grey planet, black planet, and so forth. Geology was not dumbed down but very accessible.

Would you be willing to try another one of Walter Dixon’s performances?

His voice and intonations are wonderful, but it was very very disconcerting that he absolutely butchered the pronunciation of many of the geological terms. Planetesimals, isostacy, many others. If you are going to perform a geology book, wouldn't you want to be sure how to pronounce the words first?

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no.

Thorough

Any additional comments?

This is a thorough, up-to-date look at the history of the Earth and the science that has been used to discover it. As I was finishing it, I found that Nat Geo TV have computer generated special telling pretty much the same story in overview. Now I know more than I used to about the world we live on.

Must read

Not my field of expertise so lots of new and interesting info, with a focus on what is known based on current info vs speculation.

Good story but…

The book was a good overview of earths history but I was not impressed with the ending. It was another diatribe about the impending global climate change catastrophe. It’s okay to hypothesize about possible climate change scenarios but the author didn’t propose any solutions, it just sounded like whining. Perhaps he’s just afraid of the suggesting the use of nuclear power to supply the electrons needed.

Good read

I enjoyed this one. Pretty dense with information, but also entertaining. Probably going to want to listen to it another time or two.

Fascinating and overwhelming

A rapid summary of 4.5 billion years of earth. Far too much information to remember many details. The overwhelming details provide a strong image and sense of the vast changes that have continually changed the planet. The science and analysis used by researchers to create a plausible and reasonable understanding of what happened and why are awesome. You finish the book with a strong sense of what a brief moment in time we occupy - but still learn how our short lives are currently affecting the planet. Our impact on the earth will have reverberating impact on the structure and fabric of earth for millions of earths - or even until the sun eventually swallows us up.

While this book was about this third rock from the sun, it made me think about humanity and our place in the universe. very cool book.

Narration monotonous

While the information was interesting enough, the narration sounded computer generated. I nearly fell asleep a few times. It would also have been helpful when the reader was reading a section title that he state it as such.

How Earth scientists know what they know

I would have to listen several more times to Hazen's very clear explanations of the details of the scientific evidence for our understanding of the history of the planet before much of it would remain in my sieve-like memory for more than a few days. What WILL persist, however, is a deep respect for the painstaking and ingenious scientific process which has yielded so much concrete understanding of events in the unimaginably distant past. The book also provides a broadly brush-stroked sequence for the Earth's development, often featuring vivid descriptions of the landscape and dynamic processes which bring the scientific findings to life in panoramas which will remain in my memory. (The image of our moon, a mere 12,000 miles away and gigantic in the sky, hurtling by overhead every few hours sporting visible volcanic fracturing, for instance.) What's more, I never would have guessed that rocks and minerals would become so fascinating and central to my understanding of the rise of life.

Hazen's narrative is replete with details of change. Two kinds of change: that which has driven the history of the planet through constant and extraordinary formation, destruction and reformation with only occasional periods of stasis, and that which has marked the development of our scientific understanding of our own particular niche in the universe. The result is a picture of mixed certitude and conjecture, and he is quite clear about the difference between the two. This is a fascinating listen, very well read. If you can deal with a good deal of clear but fairly detailed technical explanation, I recommend it to you highly.