The Planet in a Pebble
A journey into Earth's deep history
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space.
This is a narrative of the Earth's long and dramatic history, as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal realms of the Universe, in the Big Bang and in supernova explosions and continues amid the construction of the Solar System. Jan Zalasiewicz shows the almost incredible complexity present in such a small and apparently mundane object. Many events in the Earth's ancient past can be deciphered from a pebble: volcanic eruptions; the lives and deaths of extinct animals and plants; the alien nature of long-vanished oceans; and transformations deep underground, including the creations of fool's gold and of oil.
Zalasiewicz demonstrates how geologists reach deep into the Earth's past by forensic analysis of even the tiniest amounts of mineral matter. Many stories are crammed into each and every pebble around us. It may be small, and ordinary, this pebble - but it is also an eloquent part of our Earth's extraordinary, never-ending story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zalasiewicz, a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, uses the pebble as his muse, traveling backwards in time to explain how it came into existence. As Zelasiewicz writes, "In some ways the pebble is like one of the newer computer chips, tightly packed with more information than one could ever surmise from gazing on its smooth surface." The pebble's journey into existence is fascinating, but the real magic trick here is how immensely readable Zalasiewicz's book is. It's packed with scientific fact, down to the atomic structure of the elements found in the pebble, but still comprehensible to the layman. Zalasiewicz also deploys his dry sense of humor, noting, for example, that "the underground realm is pervasively fluid-soaked... regrettably dinosaur-free" (no matter what science fiction may claim). No one who reads this book will ever kick a pebble down the road or pocket one from the beach in the same careless way ever again. Photos.
