{"product_id":"earth-isbn-9780375706202","title":"Earth","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eTrilobite! \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Life \u003c\/i\u003etakes 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. • \"Absorbing.... Cinematic.... The ultimate travel book, a guidebook that should be read by every person who wants to really know and understand the place we live on.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeginning with Mt. Vesuvius, whose eruption in Roman times helped spark the science of geology, and ending in a lab in the West of England where mathematical models and lab experiments replace direct observation, Richard Fortey tells us what the present says about ancient geologic processes. He shows how plate tectonics came to rule the geophysical landscape and how the evidence is written in the hills and in the stones. And in the process, he takes us on a wonderful journey around the globe to visit some of the most fascinating and intriguing spots on the planet.\"Absorbing. . . . Cinematic. . . . The ultimate travel book, a guidebook that should be read by every person who wants to really know and understand the place we live on. . . . This enticing book deserves to be read many times over.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Riveting. . . . Wonderfully engaging . . . tackles the biggest rock of all and how its geology has affected the lives of those who inhabit it. . . . In Fortey's hands, geology is a tale of high drama and action.\" --\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Crammed with interesting material, vividly and colorfully conveyed. . . . Fortey is a writer with a gift for making natural history come alive. . . . A delightful book to dip into, a treasure-house of mind-expanding lore.\" --\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Spectacular. . . . A tour de force. . . . For the science it covers, the human stories and the leisurely style in which it conveys vast amounts of information, \u003ci\u003eEarth\u003c\/i\u003e deserves to be a bestseller.\" --\u003ci\u003eNew Scientist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Enthralling. . . . Fortey's writing is lovely. There's poetry in [his] words. . . . His gift for description is both intellectual and imaginative.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Village Voice\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A whopping read even if you are scientifically and geologically impaired.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Fortey] takes the reader on a journey around the world including Mount Vesuvius, the Alps, Newfoundland, Los Angeles and the Deccan Traps in India. He is an eloquent guide.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eScientific American\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Engaging. . . . With a naturalist's view of the land and a geologist's understanding of gradual change, Fortey does an admirable job of bringing the field to life.\" --\u003ci\u003eScience News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A dazzling voyage of discovery showing how our ancient, battered planet endlessly recycles itself.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Fortey illuminates the world we know, and enriches our understanding of its past and future. Enjoy this remarkable book.” --\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dazzling . . . Important and timely. We now look at the world in a different way, and Fortey provides a tour of the high ground and the hot spots. This book could be classed as history, or as science, or science history, or even travel. Forget all categories: it is simply a splendid book.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A winning combination of bouncy prose and authoritative science has made Richard Fortey’s previous natural history books best sellers. His latest offering deserves the same success.” --\u003ci\u003eLiterary Review \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Richard Fortey is the Raymond Chandler of science writing. His prose is angelic, his phrases well-turned. . . . And though \u003cb\u003eEarth\u003c\/b\u003e is no murder story, it is a mystery book and, in its own way, a thriller.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003eRICHARD FORTEY is a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.  \u003ci\u003eLife\u003c\/i\u003e was short-listed for the Rh™ne-Poulenc Prize in 1998, \u003cb\u003eTrilobite!\u003c\/b\u003e was short-listed  for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001, and \u003cb\u003eThe Hidden Landscape\u003c\/b\u003e was awarded the Natural  World Book of the Year in 1993. He was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for science  writing by Rockefeller University in 2004. He was Collier Professor for the Public  Understanding of Science at the University of Bristol in 2002 and is now a Fellow  of the Royal Society. He lives in London.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Up and Down\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It should be difficult to lose a mountain, but it happens all the time   around the Bay of Naples. Mount Vesuvius slips in and out of view,   sometimes looming, at other times barely visible above the lemon   groves. In parts of Naples, all you see are lines of washing draped   from the balconies of peeling tenements or hastily constructed   apartment blocks: the mountain has apparently vanished. You can   understand how it might be possible to live life in that city only half   aware of the volcano on whose slopes your home is constructed, and   whose whim might control your continued existence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As you drive eastwards from the centre of the city, the packed streets   give way to a chaotic patchwork of anonymous buildings, small   factories, and ugly housing on three or four floors. The road traffic   is relentless. Yet between the buildings there are tended fields and   shaded greenhouses. In early March the almonds are in flower,   delicately pink, and there are washes of bright daffodils beneath the   orchard trees; you can see women gathering them for market. In the   greenhouses exotic flowers such as canna lilies can be glimpsed, or   ranks of potted plants destined for the supermarket trade. Oranges and   lemons are everywhere. Even the meanest corner will have one or two   citrus trees, fenced in and padlocked against thieves. The lemons hang   down heavily, as if they were too great a burden for the thin twigs   that carry them. The soil is marvellously rich: with enough water,   crops would grow and grow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This was an abundant garden in Roman times, and it still is, even if   crammed between scruffy apartments and scrap-metal yards. Volcanic soil   is rich in minerals; it is correspondingly generous to crops. Outside   the city, Vesuvius is more of a continuous presence; the ground rises   gently towards its brown summit. New buildings cling on to the side of   the mountain, even high up among the low trees and broom bushes that   clothe its flanks. The buildings are indistinct, however, hidden by a   creamy-yellow haze of petrochemical smog spreading outwards from the   frantic centre of Naples towards the mountainside. You pass a road sign   to Pompeii, but from the road there is little to distinguish this   suburb from any other, for all its fame.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When the road rises into the hills that abut the southern margin of the   Bay of Naples, the urban sprawl begins to thin out. The orange groves   are more orderly, with the trees neatly planted in rows inside cages   made of makeshift wooden struts, draped over the top with nets. The   slopes become much steeper than on the volcanic flanks—close terraces   piled one upon the other, each banked up with a wall of pale limestone   blocks. Medium-sized trees with small grey-green leaves—which appear   almost silvery in the afternoon light—cling to the most precipitous   terraces. These are olive trees, the definitive Mediterranean   survivors, oil producers and suppliers of piquant fruit. Their deep   roots can seek out the narrowest cracks. They relish limestone soils,   however poor they are in comparison with volcanic loam. The villages in   this part of the bay are as you would expect of regular, tourist Italy,   with piazzas and ristorante-pizzerias and youths with slick hairstyles   on the lookout for a fast buck. Even this long before the summer season   there is opportunity for a smooth operator. You find yourself agreeing   to hire a cab for a day for ¬200 to hug the congested roads, when you   could travel faster on the excellent Circumvesuviana railway for a tiny   fraction of the price. Somehow, you, the visitor, have become the rich   volcanic soil primed to yield a good harvest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Near the tip of the southern peninsula, Sorrento commands a wonderful   prospect of Mount Vesuvius across the entire Bay of Naples. From this   steep-sided town, Vesuvius looks almost the perfect, gentle-sided cone.   It could be a domestic version of Mount Fuji, the revered volcanic   mountain in Japan. It can appear blue, or grey, or occasionally stand   revealed in its true brown colours. On clear days Vesuvius is starkly   outlined against a bright sky: a dark, heavy, almost oppressive   presence. Or on a misty morning its conical summit can rise above a   mere sketch or impression of the lower slopes, which are obscured in   vapour, as if it were cut off from the world to make a house for the   gods alone. At night, ranks of lights along Neapolitan roads twinkle   incessantly. Vesuvius is often no more than a dark shape against a   paler, but still Prussian blue sky. The lights might persuade you that   the mountain was still in the process of eruption, with points of white   illumination tracking lava flows running down the hillsides. From   Sorrento, you can make of Vesuvius what you will, for within a day it   will have remade itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Bay of Naples is where the science of geology started. The   description of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii   in a.d. 79 by Pliny the Younger is probably the first clear and   objective description of a geological phenomenon. No dragons were invoked, no clashes between   the Titans and the gods. Pliny provided observation, not speculation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Not quite two millennia later, in 1830, Charles Lyell was to use an   illustration of columns from the so-called Temple of Serapis at   Pozzuoli, north of Naples, as the frontispiece to volume 1 of the most seminal work in geology—his Principles of Geology. This book influenced the young   Charles Darwin more than any other source in his formulation of   evolutionary theory: so you could say that the Bay of Naples had its part to play, too, in the most important biological revolution. Everybody who was anybody in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries visited the bay,   and marvelled at its natural and archaeological phenomena. For   geology—a latecomer to the pantheon of sciences—the area is the nearest thing to holy ground that there is. If you were going to choose   anywhere to retrace the growth in our understanding about how the earth   is constructed, what better place to begin? Where else more appropriate to explain first principles? The long intellectual journey that eventually led to plate tectonics started in this bite out of the western shin of Italy’s boot-shaped profile. A voyage around this particular bay is a pilgrimage to the foundations of comprehension about our planet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Everything about Sorrento is rooted in the geology. The town itself is   in a broad valley surrounded by limestone ranges, which flash white   bluffs on the hillsides and reach the sea in nearly vertical cliffs—an   incitement to dizziness for those brave enough to look straight down   from the top. Seen from a distance, the roads that wind up the sides of   the hills look like folded tagliatelle. Stacked blocks of the same   limestone are used in the walls that underpin the terraces supporting   the olive groves. In special places there are springs that spurt out   fresh, cool water from underground caverns. These sources are often   flanked by niches containing the statue of a saint, or of the Virgin:   water is not taken for granted in these parts. There are deep ravines   through the limestone hills, probably marking where caves have   collapsed. The country backing the Bay of Naples is known as Campania,   and the same name, Campanian, is applied to a subdivision of geological   time belonging to the Cretaceous period. If you look carefully on some   of the weathered surfaces of the limestones, you will see the remains   of seashells that were alive in the age of the dinosaurs. I saw some   obvious clams and sea urchins, belonging to extinct species, emerging   from the cliffs as if they were on a bas-relief. A palaeontologist can   identify the individual fossil species, and use them to calibrate the   age of the rocks, since the succession of species is a measure of   geological time. The implication is clear enough: in Cretaceous times   all these hilly regions were beneath a shallow, warm sea. Limy muds   accumulated there as sediments, and entombed the remains of the animals   living on the sea floor. Time and burial hardened the muds into the   tough limestones we see today. They are sedimentary rocks, subsequently   uplifted to become land; earth movements then tilted them—but this is   to anticipate. What one can say is that the character of the limestone hills is a product of an ancient sea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The massive limestones continue westwards on to the island of Capri,   which is a twenty-minute ferry ride from Sorrento and bounds the   southern edge of the Bay of Naples. The island rises sheer from the   sea, circumscribed by steep limestone cliffs, and your first thought is how could it support the smallest village, let alone a town. The town of Capri lies at the top of a vertiginous funicular railway running from the harbour. The buildings are ancient and quaint, and, naturally enough, built of the local stone. The blocks themselves are often concealed under stucco. There is a fine medieval charterhouse where the pale limestone is put to good effect in columns supporting cloisters.   Almost everything else is fabricated of limestone—walls, floors, piazzas. In the bright Mediterranean light there is an overwhelming sense of whiteness; some of the villas glimpsed on the hillside have the appearance of frosted cakes tucked under umbrella pines. Only dark basalt must have been imported from Vesuvius to make the surfaces of the streets: this volcanic rock is less liable to shatter than   limestone. It is not difficult to imagine the racket that iron-rimmed wheels made as they clattered over these roughly matched, large blocks.   On the inner side of the island there are truly astonishing vertical limestone cliffs dropping hundreds of metres to the sea. The Roman Emperor Tiberius spent his declining years in a palace on the island, the ruins of which endure. According to the prurient accounts of his chronicler Suetonius, he indulged every kind of sexual perversion in a life of epicene   self-gratification. Small boys were favoured. Those who displeased him   were liable to be thrown off the monstrous cliffs. There is a subtle   undercurrent in the Caprese atmosphere that hints at such darker things. Just offshore there are two enormous and forbidding   sea-stacks—masses of limestone isolated from the main cliff by the   relentless erosion of the sea. According to Norman Douglas, this was   the abode of the Sirens, whose alluring and fatal song Odysseus was   able to resist only by being strapped to the mast of his vessel, while   his muffled crew rowed onwards to safety. Capri makes you wonder   whether an idyllic hilltop haven might eventually also deprave and   destroy. One of the grandest villas (now a hotel) overlooking the   fearsome cliffs was built by the Krupps dynasty, once the armourers of   German ambitions. Unexpectedly, the builder apparently immersed himself   in studying the growth of lampreys, a primitive and parasitic fish. On   this island there is a seamless continuity with the past—with Hellenic   myth and Roman decadence and medieval devotion. The island gardens have   seen the ages come and go, perched high upon the hardened sediments of  a sea far more ancient than human frailty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There is something different about the cliffs behind the harbour in the   middle of Sorrento. From afar they have a greyish cast, a dull   uniformity, lacking all the brilliance of limestone. The streets career   downwards towards the sea below the central piazza, following a   steep-sided valley. Now you can see the rock in the valley sides. It is   brownish, like spiced cake, and displays little obvious structure. Look   closely and you see that embedded within it, like dates in a home-bake,   there are darker patches. Some are little more than wisps, others are   larger—angular pieces of another rock, here nearly black, there umber   brown, some including little bubbles. Then you notice that the same   rock has been recruited by the local builders to construct the high   walls that line the steeply sloping path, comprising blocks a few tens   of centimetres across, neatly cut and used like bricks. Clearly, this   rock is softer than the rough limestones that bolster the hilly   vineyards and terraces. Then you notice that the same stone has been   used to construct the older buildings. Down by the port there are shops   and cafés painted jolly ochre and sienna, but where the stucco has peeled—  or where warehouses have simply been left undecorated—the same rock is revealed as having been used for their construction. Much of the town has grown from the identical rock that forms the steep cliffs backing the harbour.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This rock is called the Campanian Ignimbrite. Its origin was a catastrophe that happened 35,000 years ago: a gigantic volcanic   explosion threw out at least 100 cubic kilometres of pumice and ash.   The evidence still covers an area of more than 30,000 square kilometres around the Bay of Naples, extending from Roccamonfina in the north to   Salerno in the south. The violence of this eruption would make the   event that buried Pompeii seem like a small afterthought. An explosion   of steam and gluey lava blew out a great hole in the earth at the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea—not so much a bite out of Italy’s profile as a   huge punch. A vast cloud of incandescent material buoyed up with gas   flowed like a fiery tidal wave across the limestone terrain. Lumps of   volcanic rock were carried along willy-nilly in the mayhem: destruction of vegetation was complete. When the cloud settled, in many places it   was hot enough to fuse solid: the wispy remains of volcanic fragments   testify to this welding.* There were almost certainly Palaeolithic   human witnesses to this destruction, who must have thought the gods had gone berserk. The legacy of the earth’s ferocity is this apparently   mundane rock that looks like cake. The angular fragments of rock within   can now be seen for what they are—pieces of a destroyed volcano. It is   ironic that this destruction has now been reversed into constructing   buildings that are “safe as houses.” Naturally, nothing is safe in this   uncertain world. Looking down from the limestone hills you can imagine   the hot, devastating clouds settling over where limoncello is now   brewed and pizzas are spun, dumping down on the low ground as a thick,   lethal blanket. These kinds of rocks were deposited from pyroclastic   surges. Another eruption about 23,000 years later was marginally less   devastating and did not spread so widely—it produced a different   deposit known as the Tufo Galliano Napoletano, the Neapolitan yellow tuff. Rather than the colour of cake, it is the colour of Dijon   mustard. Once you can recognize it, you spot blocks of it in many walls and buildings around Naples itself—it is almost reminiscent of the   “London stock” bricks that make the Georgian parts of the English   capital so appealing. It is there in the walls of Roman remains. Most   experts believe that the volcanoes that remain to this day in the Campi   Flegrei are aligned around the edge of the massive hole, or caldera, left behind as the legacy of this second huge eruption. The Bay of Naples itself hides most of it. It may yet blow again.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301702095077,"sku":"NP9780375706202","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375706202.jpg?v=1767725803","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/earth-isbn-9780375706202","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}