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Full Description
Providing a new approach to Earth history, this engaging undergraduate textbook highlights key episodes in the history of our planet and uses them to explain the most important concepts in geology. Rather than presenting exhaustive descriptions of each period of geological time, this conceptual approach shows how geologists use multiple strands of evidence to build up an understanding of the geological past, focusing on exciting events like the extinction of the dinosaurs and the formation of the Grand Canyon and the Himalaya. Beginning with an introduction to geology, tectonics, and the origin of the Universe, subsequent chapters chronicle defining moments in Earth history in an accessible narrative style. Each chapter draws on a variety of sub-disciplines, including stratigraphy, paleontology, petrology, geochemistry, and geophysics, to provide students who have little or no previous knowledge of geology with a broad understanding of our planet and its fascinating history.
Contents
Preface, Acknowledgements, 1. The Grand Canyon: reading the rocks; 2. The philosophies of geology: assumptions steer interpretations; 3. The origin of Earth: from the beginning of the universe to the early Earth; 4.The Age of Earth: historical versus modern dating approaches; 5. Plate tectonics: our unifying geological concept; 6. Evolution: natural selection and the organization of life; 7. The origin of life: our early atmosphere and the rise of early life; 8. Snowball Earth: a Neoproterozoic frozen planet; 9. An explosion of life: Ediacaran experimentation, the Cambrian explosion, and Ordovician biodiversity; 10. Iapetus and Pangea: the lost ocean and the assembly of a Paleozoic supercontinent; 11. Environmental change in the late Paleozoic: the greening of Earth, climate change, and the great dying; 12. The age of dinosaurs: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous world; 13. The Cretaceous extinction: the end of the age of dinosaurs; 14. Tectonics of western North America: a dynamic Cretaceous and Cenozoic landscape; 15. The Indo-Asian collision: the formation of the Himalayas; 16. The Messinian crisis: the great drying of the Mediterranean Sea; 17. Out of Africa: human evolution; 18. Ice ages and sea level: quaternary environmental change; 19. A human world: our impact in the Holocene; Glossary, Index.
