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Otherlands

Author : Thomas Halliday

Publisher : Random House

Page : 329 pages

File Size : 50,91 MB

Release : 2022-02-01

Category : Science

ISBN : 0593132890

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Book Description

“Immersive . . . bracingly ambitious . . . rewinds the story of life on Earth—from the mammoth steppe of the last Ice Age to the dawn of multicellular creatures over 500 million years ago.”—The Economist LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • “One of those rare books that’s both deeply informative and daringly imaginative.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Prospect (UK) The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page. This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt―or not. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life. Otherlands also offers us a vast perspective on the current state of the planet. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, for example, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone sounds improbable. But the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history. Even as he operates on this broad canvas, Halliday brings us up close to the intricate relationships that defined these lost worlds. In novelistic prose that belies the breadth of his research, he illustrates how ecosystems are formed; how species die out and are replaced; and how species migrate, adapt, and collaborate. It is a breathtaking achievement: a surprisingly emotional narrative about the persistence of life, the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, and the scope of deep time, all of which have something to tell us about our current crisis.



The Future Earth

Author : Eric Holthaus

Publisher : HarperCollins

Page : 226 pages

File Size : 30,84 MB

Release : 2020-06-30

Category : Science

ISBN : 0062883186

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Book Description

The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face. What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade? What could living in a city look like in 2030? How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States? This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.



Otherlands

Author : Thomas Halliday

Publisher : Allen Lane

Page : 416 pages

File Size : 38,69 MB

Release : 2022-02

Category : Science

ISBN : 9780241510445

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Book Description

What would it be like to experience the ancient landscapes of the past as we experience the reality of nature today? To actually visit the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among their spectacular flora and fauna, to witness their continental shifts? In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant. Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist's eye for detail and drama. Every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the shambling rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity on the shores of the great lake Lonyumun, in Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Miocene, we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the world has ever known as it fills the evaporated Mediterranean Sea; we encounter forests of giant fungus nine metres tall in Devonian-era Scotland; and we gaze at the light of a full and enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn't yet reached land. To read Otherlands is to time travel, to see the last 550 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.



Summary of Thomas Halliday's Otherlands

Author : Milkyway Media

Publisher : Milkyway Media

Page : 51 pages

File Size : 40,7 MB

Release : 2022-05-04

Category : Science

ISBN :

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Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 The Alaskan horses are close to the size of ponies, and their coats are shaggy and dun. They are the truest inhabitants of the arid north, and they remain no matter the conditions. Their life expectancy is 15 years. #2 The American lion, the largest of the three, is descended from ancestors that moved across from Eurasia about 340,000 years ago. The African lion is the daintiest. They are both large cats, and they hunt the same prey: horses and caribou. #3 Ecosystems are built piecemeal. The aggregations of species that produce a sense of place also provide a sense of time. A community is a temporary association of living things that depends on evolutionary history, climate, geography, and chance. #4 The first Americans were small communities of eastern Beringian humans, who thrived in the low plains of Beringia. As the climate changed, and humans gained an everdeeper foothold in the continent, many of the native species died out.



Summary of Thomas Halliday's Otherlands

Author : Everest Media,

Publisher : Everest Media LLC

Page : 51 pages

File Size : 48,48 MB

Release : 2022-03-22T22:59:00Z

Category : Science

ISBN : 166935766X

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Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Alaskan horses are close to the size of ponies, and their coats are shaggy and dun. They are the truest inhabitants of the arid north, and they remain no matter the conditions. Their life expectancy is 15 years. #2 The American lion, the largest of the three, is descended from ancestors that moved across from Eurasia about 340,000 years ago. The African lion is the daintiest. They are both large cats, and they hunt the same prey: horses and caribou. #3 Ecosystems are built piecemeal. The aggregations of species that produce a sense of place also provide a sense of time. A community is a temporary association of living things that depends on evolutionary history, climate, geography, and chance. #4 The first Americans were small communities of eastern Beringian humans, who thrived in the low plains of Beringia. As the climate changed, and humans gained an ever-deeper foothold in the continent, many of the native species died out.



Revolutions that Made the Earth

Author : Tim Lenton

Publisher : OUP Oxford

Page : 440 pages

File Size : 14,66 MB

Release : 2013-04-11

Category : Science

ISBN : 0191501778

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Book Description

The Earth that sustains us today was born out of a few remarkable, near-catastrophic revolutions, started by biological innovations and marked by global environmental consequences. The revolutions have certain features in common, such as an increase in complexity, energy utilization, and information processing by life. This book describes these revolutions, showing the fundamental interdependence of the evolution of life and its non-living environment. We would not exist unless these upheavals had led eventually to 'successful' outcomes - meaning that after each one, at length, a new stable world emerged. The current planet-reshaping activities of our species may be the start of another great Earth system revolution, but there is no guarantee that this one will be successful. The book explains what a successful transition through it might look like, if we are wise enough to steer such a course. This book places humanity in context as part of the Earth system, using a new scientific synthesis to illustrate our debt to the deep past and our potential for the future.



Gorgon

Author : Peter Douglas Ward

Publisher : Penguin (Non-Classics)

Page : 300 pages

File Size : 33,39 MB

Release : 2005

Category : Science

ISBN : 9780143034711

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Book Description

Based on more than a decade's research in South Africa's Karoo Desert, this remarkable journey of discovery and real-life adventure deep into Earth's history is offered by a renowned scientist. Photo insert.



The Bloodless Boy

Author : Robert J. Lloyd

Publisher : Melville House

Page : 429 pages

File Size : 32,70 MB

Release : 2021-11-02

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1612199402

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Book Description

A New York Times Best New Historical Novel of 2021 "Potent... fast-paced..." - The New York Times Book Review "Wonderfully imagined and wonderfully written . . . Superb!" -- Lee Child Part Wolf Hall, part The Name of the Rose, a riveting new literary thriller set in Restoration London, with a cast of real historic figures, set against the actual historic events and intrigues of the returned king and his court … The City of London, 1678. New Year’s Day. Twelve years have passed since the Great Fire ripped through the City. Eighteen since the fall of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of a King. London is gripped by hysteria, and rumors of Catholic plots and sinister foreign assassins abound. When the body of a young boy drained of his blood is discovered on the snowy bank of the Fleet River, Robert Hooke, the Curator of Experiments at the just-formed Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge, and his assistant Harry Hunt, are called in to explain such a ghastly finding—and whether it's part of a plot against the king. They soon learn it is not the first bloodless boy to have been discovered. Meanwhile, that same morning Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, blows his brains out, and a disgraced Earl is released from the Tower of London, bent on revenge against the King, Charles II. Wary of the political hornet’s nest they are walking into – and using scientific evidence rather than paranoia in their pursuit of truth – Hooke and Hunt must discover why the boy was murdered, and why his blood was taken. The Bloodless Boy is an absorbing literary thriller that introduces two new indelible heroes to historical crime fiction. It is also a powerfully atmospheric recreation of the darkest corners of Restoration London, where the Court and the underworld seem to merge, even as the light of scientific inquiry is starting to emerge …



Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

Author : Stephen Jay Gould

Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company

Page : 350 pages

File Size : 24,70 MB

Release : 1990-09-17

Category : Science

ISBN : 0393245209

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Book Description

"[An] extraordinary book. . . . Mr. Gould is an exceptional combination of scientist and science writer. . . . He is thus exceptionally well placed to tell these stories, and he tells them with fervor and intelligence."—James Gleick, New York Times Book Review High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.



The Ends of the World

Author : Peter Brannen

Publisher : HarperCollins

Page : 305 pages

File Size : 21,60 MB

Release : 2017-06-13

Category : Nature

ISBN : 0062364820

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Book Description

One of Vox’s Most Important Books of the Decade New York Times Editors' Choice 2017 Forbes Top 10 Best Environment, Climate, and Conservation Book of 2017 As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future. Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits. Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.