The Story of Earth, Robert M Hazen
The Story of Earth, Robert M Hazen
6 Rating(s)
List: $39.98 | Sale: $27.98
Club: $19.98

The Story of Earth
The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

Author: Robert M Hazen

Narrator: Walter Dixon

Unabridged: 9 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 06/19/2012


Synopsis

Earth evolves. From first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to single cell to verdant living landscape, ours is a planet constantly in flux. In this radical new approach to Earth’s biography, senior Carnegie Institution researcher and national bestselling author Robert M. Hazen reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere—of rocks and living matter—has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.

With an astrobiologist’s imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s passion for the ground beneath our feet, Hazen explains how changes on an atomic level translate into dramatic shifts in Earth’s makeup over its 4.567 billion year existence. He calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our planet’s many iterations in vivid detail—from its fast-rotating infancy when the Sun rose every five hours and the Moon filled 250 times more sky than it does now, to its sea-bathed youth before the first continents arose; from the Great Oxidation Event that turned the land red, to the globe-altering volcanism that may have been the true killer of the dinosaurs. Through Hazen’s theory of “co-evolution,” we learn how reactions between organic molecules and rock crystals may have generated Earth’s first organisms, which in turn are responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on the planet—thousands of different kinds of crystals that could not exist in a nonliving world.

The Story of Earth is also the story of the pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Listeners will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions’ lunar dust, and the World War II Navy officer whose super-pressurized “bomb”—recycled from military hardware—first simulated the molten rock of Earth’s mantle. As a mentor to a new generation of scientists, Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earth’s harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.

Celebrated by the New York Times for writing “with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along,” Hazen proves a brilliant and entertaining guide on this grand tour of our planet inside and out. Lucid, controversial, and intellectually bracing, The Story of Earth is popular science of the highest order.

About Robert M Hazen

Robert M. Hazen is executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory based at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Sciences at George Mason University. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tanabrus on March 24, 2021

Il tema è interessante, la scrittura è semplice e non troppo tecnica rendendo il libro fruibile anche ai non esperti di geologia, astronomia, paleontologia o chimica. Ovviamente in alcuni punti risulta comunque più complesso, addentrandosi in spiegazioni scientifiche che possono richiedere qualche ri......more

Goodreads review by Thi on February 06, 2013

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Earth history, or Earth's future. My background: I'm a 2nd year master's student in geochemistry. I've been taking geology classes for 5+ years and I've never had the story of Earth explained in such a captivating way. I'm the type of person......more

Goodreads review by Kris on July 10, 2019

This was a fun read. The author has a talent for colorful and descriptive language that brings the science to life. I knew the broad sweep of the Earth’s history, so there were no surprises, but I enjoyed learning new details. The author’s biases show at times — he really dislikes Stanley Miller of......more

Goodreads review by Jim on February 05, 2022

Fascinating study of earth's origins and the progression of its formation from a mass of gases to what it is today, with a disturbing look at its future. There's a lot of technical stuff, but it is rendered quite clearly and I found it no obstacle to enjoying this illuminating and perspective-changi......more

Goodreads review by Adam on February 06, 2013

I never liked geology in school. Learning about rocks and how they formed was a series of exercises in memorization. It's hard to say what made me pick this book up at the library. Whatever the reason, I'm glad I did. Hazen has a way of making a topic I had always found dreadfully boring fascinating......more