Supercontinent
Ten Billion Years in the Life of our Planet
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
The shifting continents of the Earth are heading for inevitable collision: 250 million years from now, all the land masses on this planet will come together in a single, gigantic supercontinent which no human is ever likely to see. That future supercontinent will not be the first to form on Earth, nor will it be the last. Each cycle lasts half a billion years, making it the grandest of all the patterns in nature. It is scarcely a century since science first understood how Pangaea, the supercontinent which gave birth to dinosaurs, split apart, but scientists can now look back three-quarters of a billion years into the Earth's almost indecipherable past to reconstruct Pangaea's predecessor, and computer-model the shape of the Earth's far-distant future. Ted Nield's book tells the astounding story of how that science emerged (often in the face of fierce opposition), and how scientists today are using the most modern techniques to draw information out of the oldest rocks on Earth. It also reveals the remarkable human story of the Altantis-seeking visionaries and madmen who have been imagining lost or undiscovered continents for centuries. Ultimately all supercontinents exist only in the human imagination, but understanding the 'Supercontinent Cycle' represents nothing less than finally knowing how our planet works.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For centuries, people have dreamed of lost continents. Today, the author of this fascinating book shows, geologists can detect evidence of a continuing cycle of formation, breakup and re-formation of one giant landmass a supercontinent over billions of years. Nield, editor of Geoscientist magazine, imagines what these supercontinents might have looked like and tells the stories of the scientists who have discovered and studied them: Alfred Wegener, a German geophysicist who proposed in 1912 that these giant landmasses are formed by continents drifting together; John Joly, who showed in 1924 that supercontinents break apart due to radiogenic heat; and Roy Livermore, who currently uses computer-modeling to demonstrate how the plates of the earth's crust move. The first recognizable supercontinent existed three billion years ago, and the next supercontinent will have formed in about 250 million years. Seen in this context, humans, who evolved a mere six million years ago, are of little consequence. Nield deplores the hubris of those who believe in creation myths rather than science. If scientific knowledge had been properly deployed, he shows, many lives could have been saved in the 2004 tsunami, triggered by an earthquake as continents moved together. Making highly technical material understandable, Nield explains why "the Earth's Supercontinent Cycle matters to everyone, everywhere."
