World Geology

From the author of Apocalyptic Planet, an unsparing, vivid, revelatory travelogue through prehistory that traces the arrival of the First People in North America 20,000 years ago and the artifacts that enable us to imagine their lives and fates. This book upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were.

To geologists, rocks are beautiful, roadcuts are windowpanes, and the earth is alive, a work in progress. The cataclysmic movement that gives birth to mountains and oceans is ongoing and can still be seen at certain places on our planet. One of these is the Basin and Range region centered in Nevada and Utah.

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 William...

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 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. Mark Kurlansky has produced a kaleidoscope of history, a multi-layered masterpiece that blends economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records into a rich and memorable tale.

Earth and Life: From a Molten World to the Age of Primates is a cause-and-effect journey through 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history—told in plain, clear language, but built on real science. This is not a timeline of facts. It is a logical reconstruction of how a dead, molten planet became a stable world with oceans, continents, ecosystems, dinosaurs, mammals, and eventually primates. You begin at the true starting line: a universe that initially had almost no heavy elements, the birth and death of ancient stars, and the formation of the solar system. From there, the book follows ...

Science Concepts Explained for Non-Scientists: Clear Guides to How the World Works Geology Explained for Non-Scientists: How Earth Forms, Changes, and Records Its Deep History is a clear and accessible guide to understanding the forces that shape our planet. Written for curious readers with no scientific background, this book breaks down complex geological ideas into straightforward explanations that reveal how Earth actually works. From the structure of the planet’s interior to the slow sculpting of landscapes and the vast timescales of deep time, geology is presented as a connected ...

Principles of Geology [1830] is a groundbreaking classic of science. Mentioned in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, glowingly, it captivated such contemporaries as Melville, Emerson, Tennyson, and George Eliot. It is now here for a new generation interested in Earth Science, climate and sustainability.

Rising From the Plains takes McPhee to the high country of Utah along the Continental Divide. His guide is David Love, "the grand old man of Rocky Mountain geology". Helping McPhee see the physical changes that have shaped this region over millions of years, Love also traces his own family's history in this oil-rich, windswept land.

“Immersive . . . bracingly ambitious . . . rewinds the story of life on Earth—from the mammoth steppe of the last Ice Age to the dawn of multicellular creatures over 500 million years ago.”—The Economist LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE “One of those rare books that’s...

Discover how Mount Tambora's catastrophic eruption plunged the world into darkness, altering the global climate and inspiring the likes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This remarkable story of disaster and survival is brought to life by the award-winning author of The Mona Lisa Vanishes. The...

From the bestselling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493—an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the...

John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize-winning Annals of the Former World takes readers on mind-expanding adventures in geology. In the first book, Basin and Range, McPhee traveled to Nevada with a proponent of plate techtonics. Now, an engaging sceptic working for the United States Geological Survey is his guide to some of eastern America's most fascinating geologic formations.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. He takes subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry, and particle physics, and aims to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists, Bill Bryson reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

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...

Super Volcanoes revels in the incomparable power of volcanic eruptions past and present, Earth-bound and otherwise, and explores how these eruptions reveal secrets about the worlds to which they belong. Science journalist and volcanologist Robin George Andrews describes the stunning ways in which volcanoes can sculpt the sea, land, and sky, and even influence the machinery that makes or breaks the existence of life. 

Brought to you by Penguin. An eye-opening journey through the secret forces shaping our opinions, this book reveals why we think what we think – and why disagreement matters Our opinions – whether we believe in God or in ghosts, our views on sex or animal rights or immigration, our basic...

Is the Grand Canyon a breathtaking monument to millions of years, or to the global Flood described in Genesis? Towering cliffs, vivid rock layers, and a mile-deep chasm stretching for over 270 miles—few natural wonders stir the imagination like the Grand Canyon. But beyond its stunning beauty lies a scientific and spiritual controversy. Did the Colorado River carve this vast canyon slowly over eons, or was it shaped rapidly by catastrophic forces during and after Noah’s Flood? Are you tired of textbooks teaching your kids that the Grand Canyon “proves” evolution? Have you ever ...

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.

“[A] winningly obsessive history of our relationship with underground places” (The Guardian), from sacred caves and derelict subway stations to nuclear bunkers and ancient underground cities—an exploration of the history, science, architecture, and mythology of the worlds beneath our feet...