Turning to Stone
Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing
“A beautiful book—at once intimate and sweeping, informative and moving.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky
Earth is vibrantly alive and full of wisdom for those who learn to listen.
Earth has been reinventing itself for more than four billion years, keeping a record of its experiments in the form of rocks. Yet most of us live our lives on the planet with no idea of its extraordinary history, unable to interpret the language of the rocks that surround us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes that our lives can be enriched by understanding our heritage on this old and creative planet.
Contrary to their reputation, rocks have eventful lives–and they intersect with our own in surprising ways. In Turning to Stone, Bjornerud reveals how rocks are the hidden infrastructure that keep the planet functioning, from sandstone aquifers purifying the water we drink to basalt formations slowly regulating global climate.
Bjornerud’s life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery in the geosciences. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world and witnessed the emergence of a new understanding of the Earth as an animate system of rock, air, water and life. We are all, most fundamentally, Earthlings and we can find existential meaning and enduring wisdom in stone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stimulating blend of memoir and science, Bjornerud (Geopedia), a geology professor at Lawrence University, meditates on the rock formations she's encountered throughout her life and what they reveal about natural and human history. She recounts traveling to the Canadian Arctic to study turbidites ("distinctive, repetitively layered, sedimentary rocks" that form around the edges of continental shelves) and describes how in the 1960s, research on such rocks led to the discovery that mountains are created by continental collisions. Other chapters focus on humanity's relationship with the land, as when Bjornerud laments how oil companies have destroyed farmland around her northwestern Wisconsin hometown by mining it for sandstone, which they use to prop open underground fissures in fracking operations. Bjornerud's distinctive perspective encourages readers to view rocks as active protagonists in Earth's history. She notes, for instance, that surging basalt lava flows 250 million years ago expelled huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and triggered the largest mass extinction the planet has ever experienced. Throughout, the lithe prose impresses (she writes of the sandstone-lined creeks she frequented as a child, "Great cascading icicles would form on the banks, some like stately architectural colonnades, others suggesting the fangs of monstrous creatures"). It's a remarkably human take on the geological world.
