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The Road to Gondwana: In Search of the Lost Supercontinent
The Road to Gondwana traces the steps science took to find Gondwana, and the journey Gondwana itself took through 500 million years of Earth history. The road to Gondwana took western science many hundreds of years to travel. And like Scott’s epic haul across the ice of Antarctica, it was a journey jagged with many dead ends and wasted miles. When it was finally realised, Gondwana still remained fuzzy, hard to picture. It is still that way.
Gondwana is a place that no longer exists, and yet which still connects half the world, because the 3 billion people who live in Africa, South America, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and Arabia spend their lives walking around on what’s left of it.
But more than that, Gondwana has shaped the world we all live in. Many of the species we share the planet with evolved there. Had Gondwana never existed, the planet would be a very different place. The trees of our forests would be different. The animals we live amongst would not be the same. Had Gondwana not existed, maybe we wouldn’t either.
The Road to Gondwana is a story about deep time, and the challenges that face those who venture there. It’s a story about the importance of imagination in science, and the reasons that the journey towards understanding is sometimes more important than the destination.
Gondwana is a place that no longer exists, and yet which still connects half the world, because the 3 billion people who live in Africa, South America, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and Arabia spend their lives walking around on what’s left of it.
But more than that, Gondwana has shaped the world we all live in. Many of the species we share the planet with evolved there. Had Gondwana never existed, the planet would be a very different place. The trees of our forests would be different. The animals we live amongst would not be the same. Had Gondwana not existed, maybe we wouldn’t either.
The Road to Gondwana is a story about deep time, and the challenges that face those who venture there. It’s a story about the importance of imagination in science, and the reasons that the journey towards understanding is sometimes more important than the destination.
271 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 8, 2022
11 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
About the author
Bill Morris
37 books8 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
Born in 1952.
Born in 1952.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 18, 2022
Really enjoyed this hunt for Gondwana
March 21, 2023
I’m not usually interested in geological theories, but something made me pick up this book, and it was not just the superb quality – gorgeous colours, paper, design, and that it was so pleasurable to hold and read. No need to tell you that’s getting rarer these days.
Bill Morris’s storytelling prowess won me from the outset when he related, with pathos, the story of the 1910 expedition to the South Pole led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott. You might wonder why that story is retold as the prologue of this book—simply because Scott collected fossils there, which held the key to the very existence of the great southern continent, Gondwana.
Morris’s character and abilities showed themselves the more I read. He’s a gifted writer and researcher and a warm human being. He has a light and sometimes humorous way of filtering heaps of scientific data, spiced with stories about the people whose geological discoveries contributed to the discovery of Gondwana. For me his ability to create word pictures was the best part of the book, though there are many actual pictures and diagrams too. It turns out that I did find most of the scientific data quite interesting, getting lost only at one segment, which I simply skimmed, and was able to pick up the threads in the next chapter.
He’s from New Zealand and tells us, “The Pacific Ocean fusses at the shore of my country, gently eating us one mouthful of sand at a time. …Only in the last century have we at last begun to peer into the Pacific’s watery eye. And when we did, we at last found the truth about our restless mother, Earth.”
His ability to put research into layman’s language is shown so well when he tells us that a seed can be seen as a life capsule. Apparently, some 32,000 year old seeds were found in Russian permafrost and then germinated in a modern laboratory. “In human terms this was the equivalent of resurrecting a cave-dwelling Stone Age hunter and sitting him down to coffee in a modern city café.”
The book is dotted with time lapse segments. In the one covering the period of 280 million years ago he describes: “The first of a young shoot breaks the surface of the ground, emerging into the shade of the forest. It bursts into a world of dripping profusion, a chattering whisper-world, cool and buggy. Dropping its protective embryonic leaf, it spirals toward the light.”
He’s in Argentina, Buenos Aires, in 2018, in search of Gondwana clues. “…in the late spring, the heat and wind of the South American continent lambasting the city, ratcheting up the tension, throaty cars heaving like seals. I suck in the city till my lungs croak and wish for the cool of the evening. When it comes it brings rain, a drenching absolution that washes the city clean.”
Now Morris is over three days’ drive from Argentina and, “The outcrop we’re standing on, it turns out, is chock-full of brachiopods, bivalves, coral, and bryozoans. Hundreds of kilometres from the sea, and in one of the driest places I’ve been, we’re standing on the remains of a coral reef…. We also find shark’s teeth, bright and sharp as if they fell out of the ancient predator’s mouth only yesterday.”
They’re on the road again next day and find, “a nondescript chunk of rock protruding like the stump of a broken tooth out of the grassland”. Spoiler alert: When they crack open that rock there is the proof that South America was indeed part of this great southern land—and that tracks right back to the discovery by Scott and his party in the Antarctic.
I love this next excerpt to demonstrate his mastery of the transferred epithet, and his humanity: “An all-night bus trip through Patagonia, a long sleepless vigil staring out at the passing blackness of old Gondwana. Racing through silent, nameless midnight towns, looking out through the bus window at shattered streets and sleeping houses, wondering about the lives that exist here that I will never know.”
More gorgeous word pictures—Morris describes the ancestors of reptiles that lived 254 million years ago: “heavy-footed tanks of animals that pug the Earth around the edge of these lakes, chomping through the tough woody plants with their industrial-strength jaws.” And “The air smells of decomposition in one wet, woody breath”.
Recounting the movement of continents and how seas appeared and disappeared over the eons, he says, “For a geological while, you might swim from one to the other, then South America vanishes from sight across the curve of the horizon and the Atlantic Ocean is born.” See how he gets dry science information into our heads in such a palatable way.
Who’d have thought a book about geology could be such a good read? And what a gift to find a talented writer who has done all the research so that we don’t have to: “I set out to find Gondwana, imagining I could go there, understand its shape, its climates, its moods. In looking for Gondwana I have travelled halfway around the world, trawled through hundreds of scientific papers and books and talked to dozens of scientists. It has at times been a frustrating experience. The scientific literature is dense and prolific. After hours of reading I was often left with my head drowning in detail.”
I was left feeling very thankful that this man has not only contributed to the world of science but also to the world of literature. I had the disappointment on finishing the book that accompanies the end of any good book—don’t stop now!
Reviewed by Elizabeth Jewell Stephens, founding editor of LivingNow magazine
Bill Morris’s storytelling prowess won me from the outset when he related, with pathos, the story of the 1910 expedition to the South Pole led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott. You might wonder why that story is retold as the prologue of this book—simply because Scott collected fossils there, which held the key to the very existence of the great southern continent, Gondwana.
Morris’s character and abilities showed themselves the more I read. He’s a gifted writer and researcher and a warm human being. He has a light and sometimes humorous way of filtering heaps of scientific data, spiced with stories about the people whose geological discoveries contributed to the discovery of Gondwana. For me his ability to create word pictures was the best part of the book, though there are many actual pictures and diagrams too. It turns out that I did find most of the scientific data quite interesting, getting lost only at one segment, which I simply skimmed, and was able to pick up the threads in the next chapter.
He’s from New Zealand and tells us, “The Pacific Ocean fusses at the shore of my country, gently eating us one mouthful of sand at a time. …Only in the last century have we at last begun to peer into the Pacific’s watery eye. And when we did, we at last found the truth about our restless mother, Earth.”
His ability to put research into layman’s language is shown so well when he tells us that a seed can be seen as a life capsule. Apparently, some 32,000 year old seeds were found in Russian permafrost and then germinated in a modern laboratory. “In human terms this was the equivalent of resurrecting a cave-dwelling Stone Age hunter and sitting him down to coffee in a modern city café.”
The book is dotted with time lapse segments. In the one covering the period of 280 million years ago he describes: “The first of a young shoot breaks the surface of the ground, emerging into the shade of the forest. It bursts into a world of dripping profusion, a chattering whisper-world, cool and buggy. Dropping its protective embryonic leaf, it spirals toward the light.”
He’s in Argentina, Buenos Aires, in 2018, in search of Gondwana clues. “…in the late spring, the heat and wind of the South American continent lambasting the city, ratcheting up the tension, throaty cars heaving like seals. I suck in the city till my lungs croak and wish for the cool of the evening. When it comes it brings rain, a drenching absolution that washes the city clean.”
Now Morris is over three days’ drive from Argentina and, “The outcrop we’re standing on, it turns out, is chock-full of brachiopods, bivalves, coral, and bryozoans. Hundreds of kilometres from the sea, and in one of the driest places I’ve been, we’re standing on the remains of a coral reef…. We also find shark’s teeth, bright and sharp as if they fell out of the ancient predator’s mouth only yesterday.”
They’re on the road again next day and find, “a nondescript chunk of rock protruding like the stump of a broken tooth out of the grassland”. Spoiler alert: When they crack open that rock there is the proof that South America was indeed part of this great southern land—and that tracks right back to the discovery by Scott and his party in the Antarctic.
I love this next excerpt to demonstrate his mastery of the transferred epithet, and his humanity: “An all-night bus trip through Patagonia, a long sleepless vigil staring out at the passing blackness of old Gondwana. Racing through silent, nameless midnight towns, looking out through the bus window at shattered streets and sleeping houses, wondering about the lives that exist here that I will never know.”
More gorgeous word pictures—Morris describes the ancestors of reptiles that lived 254 million years ago: “heavy-footed tanks of animals that pug the Earth around the edge of these lakes, chomping through the tough woody plants with their industrial-strength jaws.” And “The air smells of decomposition in one wet, woody breath”.
Recounting the movement of continents and how seas appeared and disappeared over the eons, he says, “For a geological while, you might swim from one to the other, then South America vanishes from sight across the curve of the horizon and the Atlantic Ocean is born.” See how he gets dry science information into our heads in such a palatable way.
Who’d have thought a book about geology could be such a good read? And what a gift to find a talented writer who has done all the research so that we don’t have to: “I set out to find Gondwana, imagining I could go there, understand its shape, its climates, its moods. In looking for Gondwana I have travelled halfway around the world, trawled through hundreds of scientific papers and books and talked to dozens of scientists. It has at times been a frustrating experience. The scientific literature is dense and prolific. After hours of reading I was often left with my head drowning in detail.”
I was left feeling very thankful that this man has not only contributed to the world of science but also to the world of literature. I had the disappointment on finishing the book that accompanies the end of any good book—don’t stop now!
Reviewed by Elizabeth Jewell Stephens, founding editor of LivingNow magazine
August 14, 2024
I liked this book a lot. It is written without much literary flair (which lets it down), but still conveys the story of Gondwanaland breaking away from the supercontinent of Pangaea and all the turmoil that eventuated in our current climate with ease and enjoyment for the subject matter.
Bill Morris begins his story with Captain Scott and his geological success despite his personal failure and uses the Glossopteris plant, and the evidence for its existence, to trace the lineage forward through many geological upheavals, continental drifting, and theories that were once wrong, proven right, and vice versa. And it is quite an interesting story, if not entirely enthralling. I did start to become personally moved in the final chapters that discussed the mining of coal in India, child labour, and industrial pollution using these natural resources that took millions of years to be created. It seems quite depressing at this point, but there is an upside an a positive outlook in the end.
This is really a wonderful book that includes colour illustrations by Paulina Barry that imagine many of the prehistoric inhabitants, plantlife, and climates, along with a series of side-imaginings that act as an overseer telling the story from 750 million years ago, flying over the lands as they appear then, and ending up in a final place long after humans are gone. These "side-imaginings" (or descriptions), are placed at the end of chapters to compliment Morris's own personal accounts from his travels and research.
Recommended.
Bill Morris begins his story with Captain Scott and his geological success despite his personal failure and uses the Glossopteris plant, and the evidence for its existence, to trace the lineage forward through many geological upheavals, continental drifting, and theories that were once wrong, proven right, and vice versa. And it is quite an interesting story, if not entirely enthralling. I did start to become personally moved in the final chapters that discussed the mining of coal in India, child labour, and industrial pollution using these natural resources that took millions of years to be created. It seems quite depressing at this point, but there is an upside an a positive outlook in the end.
This is really a wonderful book that includes colour illustrations by Paulina Barry that imagine many of the prehistoric inhabitants, plantlife, and climates, along with a series of side-imaginings that act as an overseer telling the story from 750 million years ago, flying over the lands as they appear then, and ending up in a final place long after humans are gone. These "side-imaginings" (or descriptions), are placed at the end of chapters to compliment Morris's own personal accounts from his travels and research.
Recommended.
July 17, 2023
This year I had a major surgery – open heart surgery for an aortic valve replacement! As I checked into the hospital for my operation and recovery a number of Jen’s doctor friends came to visit me. I really appreciated their time. Amazingly, a couple of them bought me some books! I hardly even buy myself books these days.
This one was a gift from the ever-kind, Hayleigh. It took me forever to read because I found it quite hard to maintain concentration on reading post-surgery. I put it down to the energy needed for recovery and the general anaesthetic.
The book is well-written, interesting and very informative. It turns out I really like reading and learning about paleontology and paleobiology. Really fascinating stuff. I need more visuals to help visualise the animals, forests and plants being described, though! Pure words-to-brain imagery is perhaps not my forte.
The human element of the story around the scientific quest to understand geology, evolution, extinction, and related fields was also super interesting. I wasn’t aware that Robert Falcoln Scott was interested in science and that his expedition had a scientific element to it. I had presumed it was all adventure!
Highly recommended.
This one was a gift from the ever-kind, Hayleigh. It took me forever to read because I found it quite hard to maintain concentration on reading post-surgery. I put it down to the energy needed for recovery and the general anaesthetic.
The book is well-written, interesting and very informative. It turns out I really like reading and learning about paleontology and paleobiology. Really fascinating stuff. I need more visuals to help visualise the animals, forests and plants being described, though! Pure words-to-brain imagery is perhaps not my forte.
The human element of the story around the scientific quest to understand geology, evolution, extinction, and related fields was also super interesting. I wasn’t aware that Robert Falcoln Scott was interested in science and that his expedition had a scientific element to it. I had presumed it was all adventure!
Highly recommended.
April 22, 2023
I loved this book. The storytelling is excellent and I found the book was hard to put down. The writing is clear and conversational, with Bill Morris incorporating his own journey into the story. The book also has many great and informative illustrations, especially those of the ancient life forms. Morris also has a way of creating such vivid descriptions of Gondwana, that it felt like I was there. Thank you to Edelweiss and Exisle Publishing for the digital review copy.
June 21, 2023
This is a beautiful book which gives an accessible overview of the birth and break up of the Gondwana supercontinent over many millions of years.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews