Showing titles in Earth Sciences

Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet - gradually eroding, dissolving, recycling, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we're transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?

Here is the extraordinary story of the unfolding of life on Earth, told by Michael J. Benton, a world-renowned authority on biodiversity. Ranging over four billion years, Benton weaves together the latest findings on fossils, earth history, evolutionary biology, and many other fields to highlight the great leaps that enabled life to evolve from microbe to human - big breakthroughs that made whole new ways of life possible - including cell division and multicellularity, hard skeletons, the move to land, the origin of forests, the move to the air.

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens explores money, energy, economy, and the environment with world experts and leaders to understand how everything fits together, and where we go from here.

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.

In Once and Future Giants, science writer Sharon Levy digs through the evidence surrounding Pleistocene large animal ("megafauna") extinction events worldwide, showing that understanding this history - and our part in it - is crucial for protecting the elephants, polar bears, and other great creatures at risk today. These surviving relatives of the Ice Age beasts now face an intensified replay of that great die-off, as our species usurps the planet's last wild places while driving a warming trend more extreme than any in mammalian history.

This volume, aimed at the general audience, presents life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than 500 million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth's history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than 2 million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies.

Every living being throughout history, across time and geography, has gazed up at the same moon. From the first prehistoric life that crawled onto land guided by the power of the tides, to the division of time into months and seasons for the first humans, the moon has driven the expansion and development of our world. Our Moon tells the dazzling story of how the Moon has shaped life as we know it, fuelled dramatic change across the globe and could be the key to humanity's future.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability - at the level of literature, history, and politics - to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer. Glowing Still is the story of her travelling life - what is 'important, revealing or funny' - in a notoriously testosterone-laden field. Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where 'we didn't know anyone who wasn't like us', Wheeler knew she needed to get away. In her twenties she began a dramatic escape: Pole to Pole, via Poland. Glowing Still recalls happy days on India's Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!); and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl.

On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began, a seemingly limitless odyssey through the world’s fixation with her every tragic detail. Plans to find and raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why? And of some three million shipwrecks that litter the ocean floor, why is the world still so fascinated with this one?

Tim Flannery is here to offer us a change of perspective. And he is here to inspire us. He invites us to consider again our place on earth, what it really means to be alive.Here on Earth is a revolutionary dual biography of the planet and of our species. Flannery reimagines the history of earth, from its earliest origins as a chaotic ball of elemental gases to the teeming landscape we currently call home. It is a remarkable story. How did life first emerge here? What forces have shaped it?

To many of us, the Earth's crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. For more than four billion years, in beach sand, granite, and garnet schists, the planet has kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past. Fulbright Scholar Marcia Bjornerud takes the listener along on an eye-opening tour of Deep Time, explaining in elegant prose what we see and feel beneath our feet.

Shinrin-Yoku, or forest bathing, is the practice of spending time in the forest for better health, happiness and a sense of calm. A pillar of Japanese culture for decades, Shinrin-Yoku is a way to reconnect with nature, from walking mindfully in the woods, to a break in your local park, to walking barefoot on your lawn. Forest Medicine expert Dr Qing Li's research has proven that spending time around trees (even filling your home with house plants and vaporising essential tree oils) can reduce blood pressure, lower stress, boost energy, boost immune system and even help you to lose weight.

Immerse yourself in the sounds of the riverbank, crashing tides, wild marshes filled with birds and the underwater sounds of the humble pond as we bring to life our incredible wetlands - and reveal their power to shape our future for the better. Join zoologist and wildlife presenter Megan McCubbin as she explores the wonders of our watery worlds and how wetlands have fed, inspired and transported us from countryside to city, source to sea. Our wetlands bring us together across species and continents. They’re the source of life as we know it. Yet wetlands only cover about 6% of our planet, ...

Masterfully tying together history, science, and human drama, The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt is the gripping account of two of the 20th century's great expeditions of discovery. In 1911 a German paleontologist found the remains of four entirely new dinosaurs in the Egyptian desert, but in a single night, all of his work was destroyed. Eighty-nine years later, an American grad student leads an expedition to unearth Stromer's dinosaur graveyard, and in doing so, he stuns the scientific world.

A story of defiance and determination by a controversial scientist, this is Lee Berger's own take on finding Homo naledi, an all-new species on the human family tree and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. In 2013, Lee Berger, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, heard of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave in South Africa. He put out a call around the world for petite collaborators - men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through eight-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave forty feet underground. It worked.

This is an audiobook for those who want to understand better how the water surrounding us affects our daily lives, how it imperceptibly but crucially shapes our actions and has shaped our landscape for millennia. It's for anyone who knows and loves our coast and who wants to understand, discover, surf or sail it better. Inspired by his own witnessing of the power of the sea through travelling around Britain's coastline in a panel van with his young family, William Thomson tells the story of the cycles of the sea.

In Footprints, David Farrier explores what traces we will leave for the very deep future. From long-lived materials like plastic and nuclear waste, to the 50 million kilometres of roads spanning the planet, in modern times we have created numerous objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time. Our carbon could linger in the atmosphere for 100,000 years, and the remains of our cities will still exist millions of years from now as a layer in the rock.

An earthquake shatters Haiti and a hurricane slices through Texas. We hear that nature runs rampant, seeking to destroy us through these 'natural disasters'. Science recounts a different story, however: disasters are not the consequence of natural causes; they are the consequence of human choices and decisions. we put ourselves in harm's way; we fail to take measures which we know would prevent disasters, no matter what the environment does.

Blending fiction with fact, 50 Dinosaur Tales imagines the way 50 newly described dinosaurs from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous lived in their natural habitats. Also included is a list of fun facts for each dinosaur story and facts about 108 additional dinosaurs.