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There have been many books about Antarctica in the past, but all
have focused on only one aspect of the continent - its science, its
wildlife, the heroic age of exploration, personal experiences or
the sheer awesome beauty of the landscape- but none have managed to
capture the whole story, until now. Gabrielle Walker, author,
consultant to New Scientist and regular broadcaster with the BBC
has written a book unlike any that has ever been written about the
continent. Antarctica weaves all the significant threads into an
intricate tapestry, made up of science, natural history, poetry,
epic history, what it feels like to be there and why it draws so
many different kinds of people back there again and again. It is
only when all the parts come together that the underlying truths of
the continent emerge. Antarctica is the most alien place on Earth,
the only part of our planet where humans could never survive
unaided. It is truly like walking on another planet. And yet, in
its silence, its agelessness and its mysteries lie the secrets of
our past, and of our future.
¿Sucumbió la Tierra a una superglaciación, en la que todo el
planeta, desde los polos al Ecuador, quedó cubierto de hielo? En
Cataclismo climático, la escritora Gabrielle Walker ha creado una
historia de aventuras e intriga a escala global, siguiendo los
pasos del brillante cientÃfico Paul Hoffman y de un elenco de
intrépidos geólogos en su batida por el planeta. De ese modo,
descubre una pista sorprendente tras otra y pretende demostrar que
hace setecientos millones de años la Tierra se congeló por
completo y se convirtió en una gigantesca «bola de nieve» en el
transcurso de la peor catástrofe climática de la historia.Lejos
de acabar con la vida en la Tierra, este proceso de
ultracongelación global fue el desencadenante de la explosión
cámbrica, ese momento en la historia de nuestro planeta en que
emergieron las formas de vida actuales.
We don't just live in the air; we live because of it. It's the most
miraculous substance on earth, responsible for our food, our
weather, our water, and our ability to hear. In this exuberant
book, gifted science writer Gabrielle Walker peels back the layers
of our atmosphere with the stories of the people who uncovered its
secrets:
- A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy our air
really is: The air filling Carnegie Hall, for example, weighs
seventy thousand pounds.
- A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds a set of winds that
constantly blow five miles above our heads.
- An impoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes move
in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door.
- A well-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer.
- A reclusive mathematical genius predicts, thirty years before
he's proved right, that the sky contains a layer of floating metal
fed by the glowing tails of shooting stars.
Last year, awareness about global warming reached a tipping point.
Now one of the most dynamic writers and one of the most respected
scientists in the field of climate change offer the first concise
guide to both the problems and the solutions. Guiding us past a
blizzard of information and misinformation, Gabrielle Walker and
Sir David King explain the science of warming, the most
cutting-edge technological solutions from small to large, and the
national and international politics that will affect our efforts.
While there have been many other books about the problem of
global warming, none has addressed what we can and should do about
it so clearly and persuasively, with no spin, no agenda, and no
exaggeration. Neither Walker nor King is an activist or politician,
and theirs is not a generic green call to arms. Instead they
propose specific ideas to fix a very specific problem. Most
important, they offer hope: This is a serious issue, perhaps the
most serious that humanity has ever faced. But we can still do
something about it. And they'll show us how.
We not only live in the air, we live because of it. At ground level
air transforms miraculously; it wraps our planet in a blanket of
warmth, while the outer layer of our atmosphere soaks up violent
flares from the sun. In this fascinating celebration of the Earth's
fragile atmosphere, Gabrielle Walker traces a journey of
groundbreaking scientific discovery from the first experiments in
the Renaissance to recent findings in space.
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