Apocalyptic Planet
Field Guide to the Future of the Earth
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the deserts of Chile, through the genetic wasteland of central Iowa, to the drowned land bridge of the Bering Sea, the author of House of Rain uncovers the cataclysms that tell us what could be next—and the undeniable science that reveals both the earth’s strengths and frailties.
"A fascinating travelog of an excitable, seething and perilous planet." —Science News
Ours is not a stable planet. It is prone to sudden, violent natural disasters and extremes of climate. In this exhilarating exploration of our globe, Craig Childs goes to where the apocalypse can be seen now and reveals what could be next: forthcoming ice ages, super volcanoes, and the conclusion of planetary life cycles. Childs delivers a sensual feast in his descriptions of the natural world. Bearing witness to the planet’s sweeping and perilous changes, he shows how we can alter the future, and how the world will live on, though humans may not survive to see it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an adventure tale, scientific overview, requiem, and celebration, Childs offers a mesmerizing and provocative look at our ever-changing, "everending" planet. We live on "an excitable planet," one where mass extinctions five previous and a sixth currently underway happen in cycles we're only beginning to understand. To deconstruct popular notions of impending apocalypse and what such an event might entail, Childs, an adventure journalist and science commentator, sweeps readers away to Earth's most extreme environments: from Mexico's Sonoran desert where clustered bones of Pleistocene animals mark an ancient watering hole to a frigid, treeless expanse on the west coast of Greenland. In northern Patagonia, he visits a great melting ice field, the "last of the Ice Age in retreat." Hiking in Grundy County, Iowa, through steamy, humid fields ruthlessly cleansed of everything but dense rows of genetically modified corn, he notes how "biodiversity, one of the key indicators for environmental quality, has tanked in these agricultural regions." Stunning descriptions underscore that, by all evidence, "This is what every mass extinction in earth's history has looked like." Childs's lively writing reveals awesome, otherworldly landscapes a rock-riddled, monsoon-swollen river in northeastern Tibet; the stark, searing lava fields around Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano sharing his wonder at their existence as much as what they reveal about our planet's future and past.
