Geology

The author of Cod and The Basque History of the World takes an extraordinary look at an ordinary substance — salt, the only rock humans eat — and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning....

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world...

The epic stories of our planet's 4.54-billion-year history are written in strata―ages-old remnants of ancient seafloors, desert dunes, and riverbeds striping landscapes around the world.

A geologist’s revelatory invitation to discover how our planet’s seemingly inert bones pulse with unexpected vitality If you listen, can you hear the stones speak? The question seems absurd. After all, rocks are lifeless, inert, and silent. In The Whispers of Rock, earth scientist Anjana...

The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruptions and intrigue....

Cutting-edge techniques across biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously unknown mass extinction....

Robert Macfarlane delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself....

An Instant New York Times Bestseller! New York Times best-selling journalist Jeff Goodell presents an important examination of the impact that temperature rise will have on our lives and on our planet, offering a vital new perspective on where we are headed, how we can prepare, and what is at...

The story of our world and the different living things that have populated it is an amazing epic with millions of species, exotic settings, planet-wide cataclysms, and surprising plot twists....

From the author of the bestselling The Professor and the Madman comes the fascinating story of William Smith, the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became obsessed with creating the world's first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology. In 1793...

High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It holds the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail....

Worlds in Collision - written in a brilliant, easily understandable, and entertaining style and full to the brim with precise information-can be considered one of the most important and most challenging books in the history of science....

In this radical new approach to Earth’s biography, Robert M. Hazen reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind....

What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? Walter Alvarez, one of the Berkeley scientists who discovered evidence of the impact, tells the story behind the development of the initially controversial theory....

The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World examines the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the earth's most dangerous volcano -- Krakatoa. The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the...

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California.

Para Lewis Dartnell la única manera de comprender nuestra historia consiste en explicar cómo nuestro planeta, desde el inicio de los tiempos, ha determinado nuestro destino. Toda especie está condicionada por su entorno....

The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative...

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Jan Zalasiewicz gives a brief introduction to the fascinating field of geology....

Australopithecines, dinosaurs, trilobites - such fossils conjure up images of lost worlds filled with vanished organisms. But in the full history of life, ancient animals, even the trilobites, form only the half-billion-year tip of a nearly four-billion-year iceberg....

In Earth, the acclaimed author of Trilobite! and Life takes us on a grand tour of the earth's physical past, showing how the history of plate tectonics is etched in the landscape around us....

From the author of Turning to Stone, a mediation on the stories that rock can tell us about the deep history of our planet To many of us, the Earth’s crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, the Earth’s crust, and every stone within it, is a richly illustrated...

Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future....

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A riveting narrative about the biggest earthquake in North American recorded history—the 1964 Alaska earthquake that demolished the city of Valdez and swept away the island village of Chenega—and the geologist who hunted for clues to explain how...

An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are, and have long been, using up Earth's soil.