Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Earth An Intimate History by Richard Fortey The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey – review. S cience books – I am fond of pointing this out – are the ultimate in non-fiction, the latest if not the last word, each an exploration of those ideas that are still standing after a remorseless kicking from the community that spawned them. Earth science books occupy a special place on the shelf of tested reality. They might be described as the ground truth; the down-to-earth, the practical, the lived-in version of science. Popular cosmology spins wonderful stories of a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Palaeoanthropology evokes episodes in the great human journey around the world with barely a leg to stand on (in the case of Boxgrove man 500,000 years ago, just a shin). But earth science books really are different. We can go out and see for ourselves, we can ask the same questions and learn how to test the answers. We may be misled by the stories graven in stone, but the rocks themselves don't lie: their testimony is enigmatic, but you can interrogate them again and again. One of the riches of Richard Fortey's book is the awareness that so many wonderfully observant people before him have looked at the same evidence, and reached a very different verdict. "History envelops the past in uncertainty, like the mist obscuring the beech trees in the valley below me. The deeper the history, the more the outlines blur, the more inferences about the past are subject to change," he writes, contemplating the view of the Alps from the Jura mountains in Switzerland. "We have a vision for our time but we can be certain it will not be the last." The Earth is not just about how our planet's surface was made – about why things are as they are in the mountains, deserts, atolls, volcanoes and floodplains – but about how we came to see things as they are: what we once thought and why we changed our minds. This book is a more than usually personal choice for the Guardian Science Book Club. We kicked off in March 2009 with Fortey's Life: An Unauthorised Biography. Forty or so reviews later, it seemed time to pay this author a second visit. On the back of the paperback edition of The Earth is an enthusiastic quotation from a nameless Guardian reviewer: me, as it happens. Sometimes one can love a book, read it greedily, recommend it wholeheartedly and then, a few years later, pick it up again and find nothing much there at all. The first response wasn't an illusion: the second response was a recognition that the book had already given up its secrets, told you something you could digest and absorb, and that was that: a good meal but you can't enjoy it twice. This book is different. It seems to me richer on the second read, with more to tell me, and with more that provokes thought. But there is another and more immediate reason for choosing it for public examination, and for public discussion at a literary festival in Cambridge this weekend. That is because we have a golden anniversary moment. The way we now think about the crust of the planet on which we depend for everything was informed by the publication of one particular research paper 50 years ago (and that came from Cambridge). The paper, says Fortey, is referred to "in the trade as 'Vine and Matthews', and is one of those rare classics that provides a benchmark in the progress of science, like the determination of the speed of light or Planck's Constant," says Fortey. Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews published their paper in Nature, proposing that if new ocean floor formed at mid-ocean ridges, and disappeared in subduction zones at continental margins, then there would be a sure, unequivocal way of testing this, by "reading" the ocean floor for a record of periodic magnetic reversals, preserved for ever in the iron-rich basalt, symmetrically on either side of the ridge. Before this proposal, people could happily argue that the mountains existed because the Earth was shrinking and wrinkling as it cooled or (one or two seriously proposed this) that it was expanding because of the heat generated within by radioactive decay. Afterwards, they could not. This was not, Fortey points out "one of those 'Eureka' discoveries, where prediction met result in happy consummation." It took three years or more, some very costly voyages and some very sensitive new technology to clinch the argument, and a little longer to establish the logic of plate tectonics, and really begin to change the textbooks, the world view and the human perception of everything about us. "It was nothing less than a unifying history of the world." I have quoted from just two chapters in Fortey's circumnavigation of the globe and his journey through time. This book really does cover the ground: he visits, or revisits, Pompeii and Naples, the Hawaiian archipelago, the Alps, the deserts of Oman, the fjords of Norway and other realms of ice and fire. He goes underground at Jáchymov, or Joachimsthal, the little Bohemian town that gave its name to the silver thaler, or dollar; and deeper too, in the metaphorical sense, to explore the mantle and core of the Earth. And he does it with words and cadences that carry an echo of the great works of the 17th and 18th centuries (and he does list Swift as a literary hero). If there are clichés, I missed them. He bobs across the rocks of Newfoundland "like a restless seagull". The rebound of isostasy is like "a depressed rubber duck bouncing back upwards in a bath". Little pods of ocean floor that survive in the Norwegian nappes must have been "like apple pits squeezed out from a cider mill". So, a great story – the story that matters most to all of us, because Earth is the only place with life on it, and the history of the planet itself is a long prelude to our own short story – told in terrific language, and in a book you could read again and again; romantic, and of course all true, as far as anybody can tell right now. I still think the world of it. On Sunday Tim Radford and Richard Fortey will discuss this book – and science writing – at Wordfest, the Cambridge literary festival. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive. Our next Science Book Club choice is The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss, which Tim will review on Friday 14 June. The Earth: An Intimate History. The face of the Earth, criss-crossed by chains of mountains like the scars of old wounds has changed constantly over billions of years, and the testament of the remote past is all around us. In this book, Richard Fortey teaches us how to read its character, laying out the dominions of the world before us. He shows how everything – human culture, natural history, even the shape of cities – roots back to a deeper geological truth. Far from being the driest of sciences, he proves that geology informs all our lives in the most intimate way. Nothing in this book seems to be at rest. The surface of the Earth dilates and collapses; seas and mountains rise and fall; continents move. We climb the Alps, wallow in Icelandic hot springs, dive down to the ocean floor; we explore the barren rocks of Newfoundland, walk through the lush ecosystems of Hawaii, cross the salt flats of Oman and saunter along the San Andreas Fault. And Fortey is the ideal guide, his descriptions of natural beauty as memorable as the best travel-writers, his prose as gripping as the best novelist, his crystal-clear scientific explanations fascinating and often surprising. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. The Earth: An Intimate History is prize-winning science writer Richard Fortey's latest book and an ambitious attempt to tell the geological story of planet Earth for the general reader. Several centuries and the combined efforts of thousands of professional geologists have been required to make any real sense of the Earth's structure and its 4.5 billion-year history. That Fortey manages to turn the most important aspects of all this into an enjoyable narrative for the general reader is a considerable achievement. The book is a sort of guided tour around a number of geological sites with which Fortey is personally familiar, such as the Grand Canyon, the European Alps and Vesuvius (the description of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 by Pliny the Younger is probably the first clear and objective description of a geological phenomenon.) He then uses their particular geological details to build a more general story of the geology of earth as it is generally understood today. As a professional geologist at London's Natural History Museum, Fortey is well-qualified to tell this story. His writing skills have been widely acclaimed in earlier books such as Life: An Unauthorised Biography and Trilobite Eyewitness to Evolution . By giving the story a historical slant we can more readily understand how the present understanding of the earth story has been built up over the centuries and it introduces real people into the narrative. Consequently, the more technical aspects of present day earth science are rendered more palatable and understandable. The text is supported by a number of black and white diagrams and other pictures, which help illustrate some of the more complex processes and features of the earth. -- Douglas Palmer . Praise for Richard Fortey’s work: ‘This is not a book for people who like science books. It is a book for people who love books, and life. [Fortey] has written a wonderful book.’ Tim Radford, Guardian. ‘Read this book because it is, indeed, the best natural history of the first four billion years of life on earth.’ John Gribbin, Sunday Times. ‘Fortey writes beautifully and this is a wonderful biography of rock and life. He has restored palaeontology to its rightful place in the pantheon.’ Lewis Wolpert, Observer. ‘Richard Fortey is a scientist. but his big, rich history of four billion years of evolution is written with an artist’s zest for life and language. Anyone who wants to understand how we came to be here on earth, 4,000,000,000 years after life began, should read this sparkling book.’ Maggie Gee, Daily Telegraph. From the early reviews of Earth: An Intimate History. ‘A dazzling voyage of telluric discovery. it is greatly to Fortey’s credit, as both scientist and writer, that he has been able to piece together such a readable and coherent survey of this vast and disparate subject. The Earth is a true delight: full of awe-inspiring details. it blends travel, history, reportage and science to creat an unforgettable picture of our ancient earth.’ Sunday Times. ISBN 13: 9780375406263. From the acclaimed author of Life and Trilobite!, a fascinating geological exploration of the earth’s distant history as revealed by its natural wonders. The face of the earth, crisscrossed by chains of mountains like the scars of old wounds, has changed and changed again over billions of years, and the testament of the remote past is all around us. In this book Richard Fortey teaches us how to read its character, laying out the dominions of the world before us. He shows how human culture and natural history–even the shape of cities–are rooted in this deep geological past. In search of this past, Fortey takes us through the Alps, into Icelandic hot springs, down to the ocean floor, over the barren rocks of Newfoundland, into the lush ecosystems of Hawai’i, across the salt flats of Oman, and along the San Andreas Fault. On the slopes of Vesuvius, he tracks the history of the region down through the centuries?to volcanic eruptions seen by fifteenth-century Italians, the Romans, and, from striking geological evidence, even Neolithic man. As story adds to story, the recent past connects with forgotten ages long ago, then much longer ago, as he describes the movement of plates and the development of ancient continents and seas. Nothing in this book is at rest. The surface of the earth dilates and collapses; seas and mountains rise and fall; continents move. Fortey again proves himself the ideal guide, with his superb descriptions of natural beauty, his gripping narratives, and his crystal-clear, always fascinating scientific explanations. Here is a book to change the way we see the world. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Richard Fortey is a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Life was short-listed for the Rhône-Poulenc Prize in 1998, Trilobite! was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001, and The Hidden Landscape was awarded the Natural World Book of the Year in 1993. He was Collier Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2002 and is now a Fellow of the Royal Society. He lives in London. Richard Fortey’s Life and Trilobite are available in Vintage paperback. Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. : 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Earth. From the acclaimed author of Life and Trilobite!, a fascinating geological exploration of the earth's distant history as revealed by its natural wonders. The face of the earth, crisscrossed by chains of mountains like the scars of old wounds, has changed and changed again over billions of years, and the testament of the remote past is all around us. In this book Richard Fortey teaches us how to read its character, laying out the dominions of the world before us. He shows how human culture and natural history–even the shape of cities–are rooted in this deep geological past. In search of this past, Fortey takes us through the Alps, into Icelandic hot springs, down to the ocean floor, over the barren rocks of Newfoundland, into the lush ecosystems of Hawai'i, across the salt flats of Oman, and along the San Andreas Fault. On the slopes of Vesuvius, he tracks the history of the region down through the centuries to volcanic eruptions seen by fifteenth-century Italians, the Romans, and, from striking geological evidence, even Neolithic man. As story adds to story, the recent past connects with forgotten ages long ago, then much longer ago, as he describes the movement of plates and the development of ancient continents and seas. Nothing in this book is at rest. The surface of the earth dilates and collapses; seas and mountains rise and fall; continents move. Fortey again proves himself the ideal guide, with his superb descriptions of natural beauty, his gripping narratives, and his crystal-clear, always fascinating scientific explanations. Here is a book to change the way we see the world. Chapter 1 Up and Down. 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. 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 . ISBN 13: 9780375706202. In Earth , the acclaimed author of Trilobite! and Life takes 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. Beginning 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. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. From the acclaimed author of "Life and "Trilobite!, a fascinating geological exploration of the earth's distant history as revealed by its natural wonders. The face of the earth, crisscrossed by chains of mountains like the scars of old wounds, has changed and changed again over billions of years, and the testament of the remote past is all around us. In this book Richard Fortey teaches us how to read its character, laying out the dominions of the world before us. He shows how human culture and natural history-even the shape of cities-are rooted in this deep geological past. In search of this past, Fortey takes us through the Alps, into Icelandic hot springs, down to the ocean floor, over the barren rocks of Newfoundland, into the lush ecosystems of Hawai'i, across the salt flats of Oman, and along the San Andreas Fault. On the slopes of Vesuvius, he tracks the history of the region down through the centuries?to volcanic eruptions seen by fifteenth-century Italians, the Romans, and, from striking geological evidence, even Neolithic man. As story adds to story, the recent past connects with forgotten ages long ago, then much longer ago, as he describes the movement of plates and the development of ancient continents and seas. Nothing in this book is at rest. The surface of the earth dilates and collapses; seas and mountains rise and fall; continents move. Fortey again proves himself the ideal guide, with his superb descriptions of natural beauty, his gripping narratives, and his crystal-clear, always fascinating scientific explanations. Here is a book to change the way we see the world. "From the Hardcover edition. About the Author : Richard Fortey is a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Life was short-listed for the Rh™ne-Poulenc Prize in 1998, Trilobite! was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001, and The Hidden Landscape 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.