The Story Of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust To Living Planet,New

Earth Evolves. From First Atom To Molecule, Mineral To Magma, Granite Crust To Single Cell To Verdant Living Landscape, Ours Is A Planet Constantly In Flux. In This Radical New Approach To Earths Biography, Senior Carnegie Institution Researcher And National Bestselling Author Robert M. Hazen Reveals How The Coevolution Of The Geosphere And Biosphereof Rocks And Living Matterhas Shaped Our Planet Into The Only One Of Its Kind In The Solar System, If Not The Entire Cosmos.With An Astrobiologists Imagination, A Historians Perspective, And A Naturalists Passion For The Ground Beneath Our Feet, Hazen Explains How Changes On An Atomic Level Translate Into Dramatic Shifts In Earths Makeup Over Its 4.567 Billion Year Existence. He Calls Upon A Flurry Of Recent Discoveries To Portray Our Planets Many Iterations In Vivid Detailfrom Its Fastrotating Infancy When The Sun Rose Every Five Hours And The Moon Filled 250 Times More Sky Than It Does Now, To Its Seabathed Youth Before The First Continents Arose; From The Great Oxidation Event That Turned The Land Red, To The Globealtering Volcanism That May Have Been The True Killer Of The Dinosaurs. Through Hazens Theory Of Coevolution, We Learn How Reactions Between Organic Molecules And Rock Crystals May Have Generated Earths First Organisms, Which In Turn Are Responsible For More Than Twothirds Of The Mineral Varieties On The Planetthousands Of Different Kinds Of Crystals That Could Not Exist In A Nonliving World.The Story Of Earth Is Also The Story Of The Pioneering Men And Women Behind The Sciences. Readers Will Meet Blackmarket Meteorite Hawkers Of The Sahara Desert, The Guntoting Feds Who Guarded The Apollo Missions Lunar Dust, And The World War Ii Navy Officer Whose Superpressurized Bombrecycled From Military Hardwarefirst Simulated The Molten Rock Of Earths Mantle. As A Mentor To A New Generation Of Scientists, Hazen Introduces The Intrepid Young Explorers Whose Dispatches From Earths Harshest Landscapes Will Revolutionize Geology.Celebrated By The New York Times For Writing With Wonderful Clarity About Science . . . That Effortlessly Teaches As It Zips Along, Hazen Proves A Brilliant And Entertaining Guide On This Grand Tour Of Our Planet Inside And Out. Lucid, Controversial, And Intellectually Bracing, The Story Of Earth Is Popular Science Of The Highest Order.