Earth Atmosphere

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. 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.

We live at the bottom of an ocean of air - 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer - 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm - at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate.

From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story.

As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a uniquely specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In Alien Earths, she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth's history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview.

Frank Ballaro, police detective, is retiring shortly. Or is he?

A trail of blood on the curb outside his apartment leads to an alley where two young men have been severely mutilated. But they're not dead. Something keeps them alive. In the hands of one is a strange object, something he holds on to for dear life. Something he calls...atmosphere.

With seven million early deaths a year linked to air pollution, air quality is headline news around the world. But even though we breathe in and out every few seconds, few of us really know what’s in the air all around us. In Every Breath You Take, air-quality specialist - and full-time breather - Dr. Mark Broomfield connects the dots from the atmosphere on distant planets to the holes in the ozone layer to the particles in our lungs.

In the year 2444, two noble sisters, Sasha (15) and Adrianne (11), have survived a nuclear fallout, only to be torn apart. The ground splits open, and Adrianne is thrown from her horse, plummeting into the ravine. Spurned on by the hope that Adrianne lives, Sasha embarks on a journey through the desert to face the ravine that claimed her only sister. Meanwhile, deep within the earth, Adrianne is running for her life. She took something that did not belong to her.