Acclaimed Harvard geologist Andrew Knoll delivers a sweeping and
definitive new narrative history of Earth, charting our home
planet's epic 4.6 billion year history and placing our current
environmental crisis in deep context. The story of our planetary
home and the organisms spread across its surface is far grander and
more spectacular than any Hollywood blockbuster, filled with enough
plot twists to rival a bestselling thriller. More than four billion
years ago, a small planet accreted out of rocky debris circling a
modest young star. In its early years, Earth lived on the edge of
cataclysm, frequently bombarded with comets and meteors, while
roiling magma oceans covered the surface and toxic gases choked the
atmosphere. With time, however, continents formed, only to be
ripped apart and later collide, throwing up spectacular mountain
ranges, most of which have been lost to time. Volcanoes a million
times larger than anything ever witnessed by humans. Cycles of
global glaciation. Dramatic change and violent extremes. Countless
lost worlds we are only beginning to piece together. Somehow on
this dynamic stage, life established a foothold and eventually
transformed our planet's surface, paving the way for trilobites,
dinosaurs, and a species that can speak, reflect, fashion tools
and, in the end, change the world again. Earth's story helps us to
understand how the mountains, oceans, trees, and animals around us
came to be, as well as gold, diamonds, coal, oil, and the very air
we breathe. And in so doing, it provides the context needed to
understand how human activities are transforming the world in the
twenty-first century. For most of its history, our home was
inhospitable to humans, and indeed, among the enduring lessons of
Andrew Knoll's essential and timely book, is a recognition of how
fleeting and fragile our present moment is. Placing twenty
first-century climate change in the context of the vast history of
our home, A Brief History of Earth is a gripping and essential look
at where we've been and where we're going.
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