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Earth: An Intimate History
The acclaimed author of Trilobite! and Life takes us on a grand tour of the earth’s physical past, showing how the history of plate tectonics is etched in the landscape around us. • "Absorbing.... Cinematic.... The ultimate travel book, a guidebook that should be read by every person who wants to really know and understand the place we live on." —The New York TimesBeginning with Mt. Vesuvius, whose eruption in Roman times helped spark the science of geology, and ending in a lab in the West of England where mathematical models and lab experiments replace direct observation, Richard Fortey tells us what the present says about ancient geologic processes. He shows how plate tectonics came to rule the geophysical landscape and how the evidence is written in the hills and in the stones. And in the process, he takes us on a wonderful journey around the globe to visit some of the most fascinating and intriguing spots on the planet.
450 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2004
163 people are currently reading
5319 people want to read
About the author
Richard Fortey
33 books307 followersRichard Alan Fortey was a British palaeontologist, natural historian, writer and television presenter, who served as president of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 107 reviews
September 26, 2009
Is it possible for a book to be utterly fascinating and yet, at the same time, a perfect cure for insomnia? I never would have thought so, until I read this one.
That does sound horribly contradictory, and yet it is true. Reading this book, I found myself drawn in by the power of Fortey's words and this obvious enthusiasm for the subject. He's a paleontologist by trade, but his era of expertise goes so far back that it's practically geology anyway. And geology is what this book is all about.
There are those who believe that there are forces beyond our ken that shape our lives. Some believe that the universe itself is alive, filled to the brim with some kind of formless substance that wants us to have what we want. Others attribute great influence to the motion of non-terrestrial planets - just recently I saw a warning the Mercury was in retrograde, and that such apparent motion would spell disaster in communications-related endeavors. Other people believe there are gods, or ghosts, or fairies whose wishes and whims have decided who we are and who we will be. But Fortey knows what's really going on.
Fortey knows it's the rocks.
Not just the garden-variety ones you pick up in your garden, no - the real rocks. The gneiss and the schist and the granite, the great, lumbering tectonic plates, relentless in their motion across the face of the Earth, carrying the continents on their backs. The churning, unknowable mantle that holds it all up, revealing only the tiniest glimpses of itself through the effluvium of volcanoes. The Earth tells us who we are and who we will be, for it is the motions of the Earth that made our world what it is. It gave shape to the continents, it has raised and lowered mountains, created and unmade deserts a hundred times over. The rich and fertile fields in which we grow our crops, the barren wastelands that we avoid because we know that they are places where we do not belong - all of those were created by the engine of plate tectonics. Billions of years of relentless motion, of continents smashing into each other, coming apart and then colliding again, have conspired to create the thin, almost evanescent period of time in which we live. And it will continue, long after we are gone, without ever having bothered to notice that we are here.
This book is humbling, to say the least. When you think that the Appalachians used to be mountains that rivaled the Alps and the Himalayas, that they were the product of not the most recent supercontinent, Gondwana, nor the one before that, Laurasia. The gentle, rolling hills of the Appalachians, along which thousands of summer and weekend hikers travel, were born three hundred million years ago in the creation of Pangaea. Time, wind and rain wore them down to what they are today, but they stand as evidence of Earth's deep history. Though not quite as old as the Grenville rocks of Central Park, remnants of mountains formed a billion years ago, before life was more than a thin film of algae on a hypoxic sea.
Fortey writes well. It's hard to overstate how important that is when considering a book meant for the general audience. Not only can you tell that he obviously loves his subject, but you can see that he is a good and devoted writer, who spent a great deal of time thinking of ways to communicate the literally unthinkable amount of time necessary for the motions of the Earth to have put things where they are today. Geologic events are slow and hard to picture in our minds eyes, but he tries. He tries to get into your head the vast temperatures and pressures that operate just a few miles below where we sit right now, and the utterly alien environment they create. He brings to life the arguments and battles that went on between geologists who tried their best over centuries to untangle the folded and twisted stories of the rocks and figure out how they came to be the way they were. The story that Fortey is telling is four and a half billion years in the making, a timespan that we simple humans cannot truly grasp.
And he does have an excellent way of phrasing his points. In talking about the hot springs of Italy in which the ancient Romans lounged, he says, "These springs were the exhalations of the magmatic unconscious." In reminding us that the movements of the Earth determine where we can live, what animals we can raise and what crops we can grow, he says, "The geological Unconscious cannot be denied, for it still guides the way we use the land, and rules the plough. We are all in thrall to the underworld." Finally, in a phrase that evoked Sagan in my mind's ear, he says, "In this way, the depths intercede in our superficial lives: there are unseen and unbidden forces, as indifferent to the fate of the sentient organisms living above them as the distant stars." The man has a way with words, that much is for sure.
For all that this is the story of our world and, therefore, ourselves, it is a hard book to keep up with. Indeed, I found myself nodding off more than once, no matter that I wanted to keep reading about the manner in which the Colorado River cut through the ever-rising plateau through which it coursed. The book, I believe, skirts the edge of Popular Science and Specialist Science. Fortey doesn't skimp on the technical language, and seems to be talking to an audience that already has a pretty good grasp on the terminology and concepts of geology. The readers that he's after in this book are the ones who used to be called "rock hounds" when they were kids, and who know a gneiss from a granite. Which I, technically speaking, do not.
While I do love science, and find the whole history of plate tectonics fascinating, I never got into geology as deeply as I did other sciences. And that's not to say that I never will - if anything, this book made me look more closely at the rocks I see around me and wonder at their provenance. The granite facing of buildings all the way to the simple sand of a baseball field - they're all ancient in different ways and have fascinating stories. When I read the book, though, I was lacking in a certain entry-level understanding of the science, and that was probably what made it such a tough book to get through.
So if you're a rock hound, or know someone who is, pick up a copy of this book. If you like to break your brain thinking about the vast expanses of time required to make a planet on which Homo sapiens can be the species it always wanted to be, this is the book for you. If you are having trouble getting to sleep and you aren't fond of using medication to send you off to slumberland, well... This book probably wouldn't hurt.
That does sound horribly contradictory, and yet it is true. Reading this book, I found myself drawn in by the power of Fortey's words and this obvious enthusiasm for the subject. He's a paleontologist by trade, but his era of expertise goes so far back that it's practically geology anyway. And geology is what this book is all about.
There are those who believe that there are forces beyond our ken that shape our lives. Some believe that the universe itself is alive, filled to the brim with some kind of formless substance that wants us to have what we want. Others attribute great influence to the motion of non-terrestrial planets - just recently I saw a warning the Mercury was in retrograde, and that such apparent motion would spell disaster in communications-related endeavors. Other people believe there are gods, or ghosts, or fairies whose wishes and whims have decided who we are and who we will be. But Fortey knows what's really going on.
Fortey knows it's the rocks.
Not just the garden-variety ones you pick up in your garden, no - the real rocks. The gneiss and the schist and the granite, the great, lumbering tectonic plates, relentless in their motion across the face of the Earth, carrying the continents on their backs. The churning, unknowable mantle that holds it all up, revealing only the tiniest glimpses of itself through the effluvium of volcanoes. The Earth tells us who we are and who we will be, for it is the motions of the Earth that made our world what it is. It gave shape to the continents, it has raised and lowered mountains, created and unmade deserts a hundred times over. The rich and fertile fields in which we grow our crops, the barren wastelands that we avoid because we know that they are places where we do not belong - all of those were created by the engine of plate tectonics. Billions of years of relentless motion, of continents smashing into each other, coming apart and then colliding again, have conspired to create the thin, almost evanescent period of time in which we live. And it will continue, long after we are gone, without ever having bothered to notice that we are here.
This book is humbling, to say the least. When you think that the Appalachians used to be mountains that rivaled the Alps and the Himalayas, that they were the product of not the most recent supercontinent, Gondwana, nor the one before that, Laurasia. The gentle, rolling hills of the Appalachians, along which thousands of summer and weekend hikers travel, were born three hundred million years ago in the creation of Pangaea. Time, wind and rain wore them down to what they are today, but they stand as evidence of Earth's deep history. Though not quite as old as the Grenville rocks of Central Park, remnants of mountains formed a billion years ago, before life was more than a thin film of algae on a hypoxic sea.
Fortey writes well. It's hard to overstate how important that is when considering a book meant for the general audience. Not only can you tell that he obviously loves his subject, but you can see that he is a good and devoted writer, who spent a great deal of time thinking of ways to communicate the literally unthinkable amount of time necessary for the motions of the Earth to have put things where they are today. Geologic events are slow and hard to picture in our minds eyes, but he tries. He tries to get into your head the vast temperatures and pressures that operate just a few miles below where we sit right now, and the utterly alien environment they create. He brings to life the arguments and battles that went on between geologists who tried their best over centuries to untangle the folded and twisted stories of the rocks and figure out how they came to be the way they were. The story that Fortey is telling is four and a half billion years in the making, a timespan that we simple humans cannot truly grasp.
And he does have an excellent way of phrasing his points. In talking about the hot springs of Italy in which the ancient Romans lounged, he says, "These springs were the exhalations of the magmatic unconscious." In reminding us that the movements of the Earth determine where we can live, what animals we can raise and what crops we can grow, he says, "The geological Unconscious cannot be denied, for it still guides the way we use the land, and rules the plough. We are all in thrall to the underworld." Finally, in a phrase that evoked Sagan in my mind's ear, he says, "In this way, the depths intercede in our superficial lives: there are unseen and unbidden forces, as indifferent to the fate of the sentient organisms living above them as the distant stars." The man has a way with words, that much is for sure.
For all that this is the story of our world and, therefore, ourselves, it is a hard book to keep up with. Indeed, I found myself nodding off more than once, no matter that I wanted to keep reading about the manner in which the Colorado River cut through the ever-rising plateau through which it coursed. The book, I believe, skirts the edge of Popular Science and Specialist Science. Fortey doesn't skimp on the technical language, and seems to be talking to an audience that already has a pretty good grasp on the terminology and concepts of geology. The readers that he's after in this book are the ones who used to be called "rock hounds" when they were kids, and who know a gneiss from a granite. Which I, technically speaking, do not.
While I do love science, and find the whole history of plate tectonics fascinating, I never got into geology as deeply as I did other sciences. And that's not to say that I never will - if anything, this book made me look more closely at the rocks I see around me and wonder at their provenance. The granite facing of buildings all the way to the simple sand of a baseball field - they're all ancient in different ways and have fascinating stories. When I read the book, though, I was lacking in a certain entry-level understanding of the science, and that was probably what made it such a tough book to get through.
So if you're a rock hound, or know someone who is, pick up a copy of this book. If you like to break your brain thinking about the vast expanses of time required to make a planet on which Homo sapiens can be the species it always wanted to be, this is the book for you. If you are having trouble getting to sleep and you aren't fond of using medication to send you off to slumberland, well... This book probably wouldn't hurt.
April 20, 2025
"No play of textual opposites too facile, no miscellany of graboid factlings too precious or twee, no angsty bourgeois whine too petty. How will I find the strength to finish this?"
I didn't.
An exercise in irritation. More, a disquisition on irritation, and on what it means to be irritated. I read this book several years ago, and finished it. It did not irritate me then,
or if it did, I did not notice.
Yet now.. Now, he grates. And grating, the grating of cheese, is a good close metaphor for the experience in its mildness, relentlesness and dispersed harm. We are the cheese.
I find myself, reading Fortey, thinking more and more, not about the rocks, but about the cognitive texture of the man, of how low-grade frustrated I am by him, and of how difficult it is to understand or express how and why I am annoyed.
For subtlety is the very breath of irritation; a discomfort so minor that, in any particular moment, the action taken to relieve it feels a too-great expenditure of effort, and with the mixture of regularity that defines near-drizzling rain, just enough to splash the screen of an exposed phone, or dampen hair, to redouble sweat if you rush, but not enough to ensure you take strong protective measures, like; opening an umbrella, putting up a hood or layering a thicker coat.
THE SUPERIOR TOURIST
Every chapter begins with Richad Fortey visiting some out of the way place, as a tourist,
discovering that it has been overrun by tourists, and moaning about how commercial it is.
THE AGONISING SENTANCE CONSTRUCTION
The man loads a sentence like a junkie shoving stolen goods into a shopping bag;
"A cursory search on the Internet will show the curious observer how many outré' theories exist about the drowned kingdom." [Atlantis].
Think about re-writing that to make a less twatty sentence. A cursory search will show the curious observer? Were you written by a drunk Dickens?
...
"With tragic irony, Marie Curie died of the consequences of the radiation she helped to explain to the world: cancer had yet to be linked with damage to dividing cells."
This sentence has cancer. Its malformed, inside-out and is linked to the damage it does in the colophon, which explains how nobody knew how cancer works in a manner near irrelevant to the meaning at the start. What matters is that radiation causes cancer and that she didn't know, not precisely that it interferes with 'dividing cells'.
Imagine being given a chance to write one sentence to be sent into the past to warn Marie Curie and ending up with "Cancer is linked to damage to dividing cells."
The very next sentence is worse and makes everything worse;
"Radiation was to become at once a medical weapon and the agent of mass destruction."
Probably he thought he was being clever writing 'medical weapon' (which at least sounds cool, though it means little), and 'agent of mass destruction', instead of 'medical agent' and 'weapon of mass destruction.
It didn't happen at once.
Again; superficially clever, awkwardly wrong and totally inaccurate.
...
"Who can doubt the reality of the countries beyond the sea that Jonathan Swift peopled so skilfully for his hero Lemuel Gulliver to visit, not merely to stimulate the imagination, but as a ruse to illustrate human frailties: puffed up and monstrous in Brobdingnag, or shrunk in Lilliput to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns?"
Let’s look in detail at what is actually happening in this sentence, and who is doing or making what, and to whom, and in what order.
Part One; We and the Who
"Who can doubt the reality of the countries beyond the sea.."
So the "who" is we/us/me-Richard Fortey. The places are not simpler "strange lands" or "imagined lands", but the slightly longer "countries beyond the sea".
Part Two - The Doer and the Deed
"..that Jonathan Swift peopled so skilfully for his hero Lemuel Gulliver to visit,"
The subject, or one of them; 'Jonathan Swift' has done a verb, 'peopled so skilfully', (not 'skilfully peopled', or 'populated', for another; the Hero belonging to the subject; 'Leumuel Gulliver'.
Part Three - Superficially Smart
",not merely to stimulate the imagination, but as a ruse to illustrate human frailties:"
We break off to tell the reader that the doer and the deed were not involved in anything as _common_ as 'simulating the imagination', but were in fact engaged in a 'ruse', making them tricksters, tricking their audience, (but not Richard Fortey), to 'illustrate human frailties'.
Part Four - The Frailties of the Text
"..puffed up and monstrous in Brobdingnag, or shrunk in Lilliput to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns?"
The Liliputians were exactly as 'puffed up' as the Brobingnagians but we will move on and focus first on the simple arrangement of words. Not 'pompous giants of Brobdingnag', but puffed up (?) and monstrous IN Brobdingnag. Then not 'shrunken and small in Lilliput', or 'shrunken to petty proportions in Lilliput', which might match the first half this phrase, but 'shrunk in Lilliput" ..... "to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns."
This is one sentence by Fortey, and almost everything about it is *mildly* out of place. The choice of words is always a little too Latinate and disembodied. The arrangement of the 'who' (us), the doer (Jonathan Swift), and the doer-and-done (Lemuel Gulliver), is badly jointed, everything existing, experiencing, doing and being done in a mild garble.
Then comes the superficial and inaccurate self-pleasing cleverness; Fortey is good enough to inform us that Gullivers Travels is a satire, a 'ruse', and not just about pleasing the imagination, making it therefore a legitimate form of art for someone as clever as Richard Fortey thinks he is.
Then, finally, the awkward, arrhythmic, inaccurate and Fomorian final enlightenment; "to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns."
And the sentence itself is wrong, because we *can* actually doubt the reality of these islands, because they are fucking imaginary. Fortey intends to use these imagined lands in reference to Gondawana, which he argues, and wishes us clearly to regard as, fundamentally real, but simply hard to imagine.
I don't speak here of cataclysmic argument-destroying wrongs, or crippling inaccuracies; enough to wreck a book, but of a persistently leaky ship, where words, phrases and concepts that should lead cleanly and simply one to another, making the structure whole, are awkwardly annealed and slide past each other like wet planks in ill seas. Yet, and this is absolutely crucial for you to understand, never enough to *ruin*, but always enough to *annoy*.
It is the continual pitter-patter of these sentences, like raindrops, the soft, near-frustrating activation of negative neurones, not enough to scratch the itch, but just enough to flush the skin, and the demoralising relentlessness, the knowledge that more such sentences are coming, several hundred pages worth, and that Fortey will be deeply pleased with all of them. This is what I speak of when I speak of 'irritation'.
...
He is not so bad on the rocks, when he gets onto them, but it is a rough time getting there. I gave up half way through.
I didn't.
An exercise in irritation. More, a disquisition on irritation, and on what it means to be irritated. I read this book several years ago, and finished it. It did not irritate me then,
or if it did, I did not notice.
Yet now.. Now, he grates. And grating, the grating of cheese, is a good close metaphor for the experience in its mildness, relentlesness and dispersed harm. We are the cheese.
I find myself, reading Fortey, thinking more and more, not about the rocks, but about the cognitive texture of the man, of how low-grade frustrated I am by him, and of how difficult it is to understand or express how and why I am annoyed.
For subtlety is the very breath of irritation; a discomfort so minor that, in any particular moment, the action taken to relieve it feels a too-great expenditure of effort, and with the mixture of regularity that defines near-drizzling rain, just enough to splash the screen of an exposed phone, or dampen hair, to redouble sweat if you rush, but not enough to ensure you take strong protective measures, like; opening an umbrella, putting up a hood or layering a thicker coat.
THE SUPERIOR TOURIST
Every chapter begins with Richad Fortey visiting some out of the way place, as a tourist,
discovering that it has been overrun by tourists, and moaning about how commercial it is.
THE AGONISING SENTANCE CONSTRUCTION
The man loads a sentence like a junkie shoving stolen goods into a shopping bag;
"A cursory search on the Internet will show the curious observer how many outré' theories exist about the drowned kingdom." [Atlantis].
Think about re-writing that to make a less twatty sentence. A cursory search will show the curious observer? Were you written by a drunk Dickens?
...
"With tragic irony, Marie Curie died of the consequences of the radiation she helped to explain to the world: cancer had yet to be linked with damage to dividing cells."
This sentence has cancer. Its malformed, inside-out and is linked to the damage it does in the colophon, which explains how nobody knew how cancer works in a manner near irrelevant to the meaning at the start. What matters is that radiation causes cancer and that she didn't know, not precisely that it interferes with 'dividing cells'.
Imagine being given a chance to write one sentence to be sent into the past to warn Marie Curie and ending up with "Cancer is linked to damage to dividing cells."
The very next sentence is worse and makes everything worse;
"Radiation was to become at once a medical weapon and the agent of mass destruction."
Probably he thought he was being clever writing 'medical weapon' (which at least sounds cool, though it means little), and 'agent of mass destruction', instead of 'medical agent' and 'weapon of mass destruction.
It didn't happen at once.
Again; superficially clever, awkwardly wrong and totally inaccurate.
...
"Who can doubt the reality of the countries beyond the sea that Jonathan Swift peopled so skilfully for his hero Lemuel Gulliver to visit, not merely to stimulate the imagination, but as a ruse to illustrate human frailties: puffed up and monstrous in Brobdingnag, or shrunk in Lilliput to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns?"
Let’s look in detail at what is actually happening in this sentence, and who is doing or making what, and to whom, and in what order.
Part One; We and the Who
"Who can doubt the reality of the countries beyond the sea.."
So the "who" is we/us/me-Richard Fortey. The places are not simpler "strange lands" or "imagined lands", but the slightly longer "countries beyond the sea".
Part Two - The Doer and the Deed
"..that Jonathan Swift peopled so skilfully for his hero Lemuel Gulliver to visit,"
The subject, or one of them; 'Jonathan Swift' has done a verb, 'peopled so skilfully', (not 'skilfully peopled', or 'populated', for another; the Hero belonging to the subject; 'Leumuel Gulliver'.
Part Three - Superficially Smart
",not merely to stimulate the imagination, but as a ruse to illustrate human frailties:"
We break off to tell the reader that the doer and the deed were not involved in anything as _common_ as 'simulating the imagination', but were in fact engaged in a 'ruse', making them tricksters, tricking their audience, (but not Richard Fortey), to 'illustrate human frailties'.
Part Four - The Frailties of the Text
"..puffed up and monstrous in Brobdingnag, or shrunk in Lilliput to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns?"
The Liliputians were exactly as 'puffed up' as the Brobingnagians but we will move on and focus first on the simple arrangement of words. Not 'pompous giants of Brobdingnag', but puffed up (?) and monstrous IN Brobdingnag. Then not 'shrunken and small in Lilliput', or 'shrunken to petty proportions in Lilliput', which might match the first half this phrase, but 'shrunk in Lilliput" ..... "to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns."
This is one sentence by Fortey, and almost everything about it is *mildly* out of place. The choice of words is always a little too Latinate and disembodied. The arrangement of the 'who' (us), the doer (Jonathan Swift), and the doer-and-done (Lemuel Gulliver), is badly jointed, everything existing, experiencing, doing and being done in a mild garble.
Then comes the superficial and inaccurate self-pleasing cleverness; Fortey is good enough to inform us that Gullivers Travels is a satire, a 'ruse', and not just about pleasing the imagination, making it therefore a legitimate form of art for someone as clever as Richard Fortey thinks he is.
Then, finally, the awkward, arrhythmic, inaccurate and Fomorian final enlightenment; "to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns."
And the sentence itself is wrong, because we *can* actually doubt the reality of these islands, because they are fucking imaginary. Fortey intends to use these imagined lands in reference to Gondawana, which he argues, and wishes us clearly to regard as, fundamentally real, but simply hard to imagine.
I don't speak here of cataclysmic argument-destroying wrongs, or crippling inaccuracies; enough to wreck a book, but of a persistently leaky ship, where words, phrases and concepts that should lead cleanly and simply one to another, making the structure whole, are awkwardly annealed and slide past each other like wet planks in ill seas. Yet, and this is absolutely crucial for you to understand, never enough to *ruin*, but always enough to *annoy*.
It is the continual pitter-patter of these sentences, like raindrops, the soft, near-frustrating activation of negative neurones, not enough to scratch the itch, but just enough to flush the skin, and the demoralising relentlessness, the knowledge that more such sentences are coming, several hundred pages worth, and that Fortey will be deeply pleased with all of them. This is what I speak of when I speak of 'irritation'.
...
He is not so bad on the rocks, when he gets onto them, but it is a rough time getting there. I gave up half way through.
September 3, 2009
About a month ago, I was looking through the courses I had to choose from as an Environmental Science major, making up a short list for class sign-up in September. The options were evenly divided between Biology and Geology classes, and I was leaning heavily toward the former; geology seemed quite drab. Having picked up Earth at a used book store near the end of July, under the impression or at least with the hopes that it would be a more general, chronological overview of the formation of the Earth, the changes it has experienced and their causes, etc. However, Fortey has completely changed my perception of geology and redeemed my mal-expectations.
Fortey's erudition and admirable life of scientific fieldwork fills in the cracks between bundles of crunchy geology basics. Through dozens of real-world examples, he illustrates the fascinating fundamentals of plate tectonics, often also tying in not only the exceedingly clever techniques geologists have used to move ever closer to the truth of the matter, but even peaks at the personalities of the geologists behind the discoveries.
If you don't know how fascinating geology is, or if you are interested but haven't looked into the subject much, I would offer my recommendation for Earth. Without being repetitive or overbearing, he illustrates how incomprehensibly slow and massive geological processes are and how they have shaped so much of our world. An excellent concentration of knowledge on a subject essential to a rational understanding of the Universe.
There are a couple of issues on which I would have liked further clarification, but with Wikipedia handy for further investigation and more recent data, I can't imagine a much better Geology 101 book. We'll see, however, as we're reading Marcia Bjornerud's Reading the Rocks The Autobiography of the Earth winter term in Freshman Studies, which seems to be the same book minus 150 pages or so.
Fortey's erudition and admirable life of scientific fieldwork fills in the cracks between bundles of crunchy geology basics. Through dozens of real-world examples, he illustrates the fascinating fundamentals of plate tectonics, often also tying in not only the exceedingly clever techniques geologists have used to move ever closer to the truth of the matter, but even peaks at the personalities of the geologists behind the discoveries.
If you don't know how fascinating geology is, or if you are interested but haven't looked into the subject much, I would offer my recommendation for Earth. Without being repetitive or overbearing, he illustrates how incomprehensibly slow and massive geological processes are and how they have shaped so much of our world. An excellent concentration of knowledge on a subject essential to a rational understanding of the Universe.
There are a couple of issues on which I would have liked further clarification, but with Wikipedia handy for further investigation and more recent data, I can't imagine a much better Geology 101 book. We'll see, however, as we're reading Marcia Bjornerud's Reading the Rocks The Autobiography of the Earth winter term in Freshman Studies, which seems to be the same book minus 150 pages or so.
September 4, 2020
Who'd have thought that a book about rocks would be so compelling. I quite literally sat up at night reading this till 2 am over various nights. Richard Fortey explains why the continents have their shape and form. In doing so, he describes how paleogeologists worked out the system of tectonic plates that undergird this world.
I've known about tectonic plates, and supercontinents and that stuff from school textbooks but Fortey makes it fascinating and compelling because he structures each chapter by looking at the evidence of the rocks in a particular area and from that evidence describes how geologists worked out how that area must have been built up. From the basic premise that physical effects of erosion and heat metamorphosis of rocks that we can observe now worked in the same way and at the same rate in the past, he shows us how paleogeologists worked out how the continents have their present form, working back 4.5 billion years to the creation and breaking up and recreation of multiple supercontinents over the course of Deep Time. It's like a detective story but for rocks, and all buoyed up with lush prose on the landscapes before him.
The only thing that I would have loved to have had was videos to accompany the text. But that is what youtube is for, I guess. Mind officially boggled now.
I've known about tectonic plates, and supercontinents and that stuff from school textbooks but Fortey makes it fascinating and compelling because he structures each chapter by looking at the evidence of the rocks in a particular area and from that evidence describes how geologists worked out how that area must have been built up. From the basic premise that physical effects of erosion and heat metamorphosis of rocks that we can observe now worked in the same way and at the same rate in the past, he shows us how paleogeologists worked out how the continents have their present form, working back 4.5 billion years to the creation and breaking up and recreation of multiple supercontinents over the course of Deep Time. It's like a detective story but for rocks, and all buoyed up with lush prose on the landscapes before him.
The only thing that I would have loved to have had was videos to accompany the text. But that is what youtube is for, I guess. Mind officially boggled now.
December 12, 2011
I am not very fond of geology, but the beautiful poetic style of Richard Fortey's prose makes this book a joy to read. For example, he writes,
"The cycles of the earth--the generation and destruction of plates--probably happened andante cantabile rather than largo."
Fortey interleaves poetry among his prose, and thereby shows his overwhelming enthusiasm for geology--though I could have done with a bit less of the poetry. He shows his enthusiasms in other ways, too, by announcing where his personal interests lie:
"There are no rocks of Ordovician or Silurian age in the canyon, and I have always been an Ordovician man."
The main theme of this book, is how the theory of plate tectonics has become the central paradigm of geology. Some people have dismissed this book because of the interleaving of Fortey's personal travels with the geological discussions. But this is really missing the point; Fortey shows how ethnic cultures have been guided by the local geological structures. By making personal observations from his travels, he shows the extent to which geology has shaped human experience.
"The cycles of the earth--the generation and destruction of plates--probably happened andante cantabile rather than largo."
Fortey interleaves poetry among his prose, and thereby shows his overwhelming enthusiasm for geology--though I could have done with a bit less of the poetry. He shows his enthusiasms in other ways, too, by announcing where his personal interests lie:
"There are no rocks of Ordovician or Silurian age in the canyon, and I have always been an Ordovician man."
The main theme of this book, is how the theory of plate tectonics has become the central paradigm of geology. Some people have dismissed this book because of the interleaving of Fortey's personal travels with the geological discussions. But this is really missing the point; Fortey shows how ethnic cultures have been guided by the local geological structures. By making personal observations from his travels, he shows the extent to which geology has shaped human experience.
August 9, 2011
Fortey's love of geology really comes through in this work. It was both fascinating and insightful. The pictures were great, the timeline was not linear so it really kept a good pacing. It kind of meandered around topics and points of interest on the earths crust similar to how your mind would analyze a problem. A wonderful edition truly.
August 6, 2009
The Earth is a big, fat (480 page) book about geology. Richard Fortey writes extremely well and it’s an impressive attempt to make a fairly dense subject exciting.
I have to admit though I nearly didn’t finish it; by about halfway though I’d had about as much as I could take of schist, gneiss, nappes and the endless litany of different places, geological periods and minerals that every new page seemed to require. So I put it down for a few weeks.
But eventually I built up the willpower to finish it off, and I’m glad I did; there’s plenty of interesting stuff in there, like the fact that the rocks of England and Scotland were formed on different sides of the Atlantic — or at least a previous ocean that lay between previous versions of Europe and America. Or the fact that in university laboratories, geologists have built vast machines that can squeeze minute samples of rock to the point where they mimic the temperatures and pressures found hundreds of kilometres below the earth’s surface.
I have to admit though I nearly didn’t finish it; by about halfway though I’d had about as much as I could take of schist, gneiss, nappes and the endless litany of different places, geological periods and minerals that every new page seemed to require. So I put it down for a few weeks.
But eventually I built up the willpower to finish it off, and I’m glad I did; there’s plenty of interesting stuff in there, like the fact that the rocks of England and Scotland were formed on different sides of the Atlantic — or at least a previous ocean that lay between previous versions of Europe and America. Or the fact that in university laboratories, geologists have built vast machines that can squeeze minute samples of rock to the point where they mimic the temperatures and pressures found hundreds of kilometres below the earth’s surface.
March 9, 2011
I really liked the subject material in this book, and I liked the fact he used a lot of easy to understand examples, but I think he talked a little too long about some of them. I would have loved this book if it had been about 1/4-1/3 shorter. I'm not sure if this is because I have a strong background in geology and didn't need to have such an in depth example to understand or what, but parts of the book were seriously difficult to slog through.
That being said, when he was on top of his game, this book was great. Parts of it flew by and were really riveting. I partially attribute this to the fact he covered such a wide range of subject matter in his book, not all of it is interesting to everyone. (I for one am tired of faults and basalts, too much geology on the west coast)
Overall a great book for people who want to know more about geology but don't want a super technical explanation and want a lot of examples they can see or visualize. And don't mind the the verbosity of British Academics. A great book for people with a lot of background in geology too, as long as skipping chapters that don't interest them as much doesn't bother them (I know that I have a really hard time skipping parts of books, I feel like I have to read the whole thing).
That being said, when he was on top of his game, this book was great. Parts of it flew by and were really riveting. I partially attribute this to the fact he covered such a wide range of subject matter in his book, not all of it is interesting to everyone. (I for one am tired of faults and basalts, too much geology on the west coast)
Overall a great book for people who want to know more about geology but don't want a super technical explanation and want a lot of examples they can see or visualize. And don't mind the the verbosity of British Academics. A great book for people with a lot of background in geology too, as long as skipping chapters that don't interest them as much doesn't bother them (I know that I have a really hard time skipping parts of books, I feel like I have to read the whole thing).
March 15, 2020
This book is as informative as boring as glimpsing through an encylopedia. I struggled so much to end it, and towards the last bits, I was worried I didn't enjoy reading ANYTHING at all (to test that, I started the first chapter of In Europe by Geert Mak and immediatly relieved)!
A few complaints: If only the book included some more graphics and maps, it would have been much more easy, absorbing to read. With the plain text, you just could not imagine the field.
The writing is not academic (lack of references section proves that), tough that did not make things any easier. On the contrary!
I was hoping that I would read more about the geography in the field, in the everyday life. That was not the case with this book. In fact, I now understand why Geology sounds so boring: It IS boring, unfortunate state, and can never be changed.
A few complaints: If only the book included some more graphics and maps, it would have been much more easy, absorbing to read. With the plain text, you just could not imagine the field.
The writing is not academic (lack of references section proves that), tough that did not make things any easier. On the contrary!
I was hoping that I would read more about the geography in the field, in the everyday life. That was not the case with this book. In fact, I now understand why Geology sounds so boring: It IS boring, unfortunate state, and can never be changed.
May 17, 2016
Essentially about plate tectonics, in this book we travel over and inside the earth and take a look at all the processes that shaped our planet. From Italy to Hawaii, from Newfoundland to Scotland, the Alps, volcanoes, fault lines, mountain ranges, subduction zones, different oceans and supercontinents, everything you want to know about how the earth came to be as it is now. Fortey did a lot of traveling himself, and his personal stories are interwoven in this beautifully written tale of our planet. I did need some serious Google Earth-traveling to take it all in, but that only adds to understanding and appreciating this book. Looking forward to reading 'Trilobite'.
April 5, 2014
As with Fortey's other books, I really enjoyed this -- and that seems more important with this one since it's about geology, which is not something that's ever been a particular interest of mine. Fortey has a discursive, conversational style, while still getting in a lot of information and technical language. And in all of his books, it's a sort of travelogue, too, which is quite interesting.
It's hardly a completely exhaustive history of Earth, but it takes exemplars from various geographies and shows how they apply to the whole of the planet. It works quite well, though it is still a pretty dense book.
It's hardly a completely exhaustive history of Earth, but it takes exemplars from various geographies and shows how they apply to the whole of the planet. It works quite well, though it is still a pretty dense book.
February 12, 2009
A fascinating introduction to geology. Geology books didn't attract me as potential for a great read until I read an early review of this one. A vast area of knowledge which was vague to me turns out to be endlessly fascinating. Highly recommended, as are Professor Fortey's other books: especially fond of the trilobite he is.
October 18, 2024
A book I have read and re-read.
Fortey's personal charm illuminates the tales of his geological adventures and his elegant prose enhances the rich subject matter.
I not only look on my local environment with a fresh eye, thanks to Richard Fortey, but have developed an extra affection for and interest in our besieged planet.
Fortey's personal charm illuminates the tales of his geological adventures and his elegant prose enhances the rich subject matter.
I not only look on my local environment with a fresh eye, thanks to Richard Fortey, but have developed an extra affection for and interest in our besieged planet.
Read
May 5, 2008This book is beautiful. The Earth deserves this book. It is more than geography and geology (which are more than sufficient), but it is these too; it is a love story about our planet.
December 9, 2024
A geologist friend loaned me this one as a return favour for sharing ‘The Rush that never ended”, about Australia’s mineral resource discoveries. Fortey has been on the to-read list for a while so it was a welcome opportunity to read something so well regarded. While economic mineral deposits are touched on, this is a broader history of the rocks that make up planet earth, with the author’s experience woven into many of the stories told. It is also something of a history of geology as a science, focussed in particular on how we came to accept the role of plate tectonics in forming and re-forming the earth’s surface.
Although most was familiar, there was enough analysis of the detail to refresh and challenge my understanding of how the planet works, and has worked in the past. The book starts with Pompei and Vesuvius, which was also a focus for “Volcanoland”, a recently read volume dedicated to the role of volcanoes – with further overlap with the flood basalts, Iceland and Hawaii. Clearly the swiss geologists who unravelled the Alps, Dr (I assume) Suess the most prominent, receive repeated reference. Explaining mountains certainly pushed forward the idea that the crust is in motion, although it was the opposite, bathymetric ocean surveys, which clinched the deal for plat tectonics.
I liked the number of questions, asked and unasked, that I found myself asking as I read. Does the depth of sea and ocean crust equal the displacement of the thicker but lower density continental crust? How much further can the Hawaii hot spot be traced beyond the seamounts in the Pacific? (and what started it or has it ‘always’ been there?) Will the Pacific Ocean eventually close or could it re-open, and the Atlantic stall instead? Do mountain ranges induce changes in the mantle which result in new oceans? Thus, is the line of the Himalayas the locus for a future ocean as was somewhat the case for the Atlantic-Larentide rift? If shrinkage and expansion cannot explain plate structure, was there a point in time when they played some role? What initiated the tectonic dynamics back in the Archean? How extensive could ice cover have been in the ‘boring billion’ and could the build up have been massive enough to stall and re-start tectonic activity? Is there really no way of knowing if Everest is the highest mountain ever in Earth’s history? As my family may point, out, I may be simply enjoying the asking of these without actually wanting answers!
Much effort is made to demonstrate the Lyellian thesis that the present is a key to the past, but it felt overstated at times. There have been times when unusual rocks have formed which have no analogy in the present, Banded Iron Formation and Dolomites for example. What was the role of contingent events such as the K-T asteroid impact (amongst others)? Have these disrupted mantle processes to the extent that plate trajectories are different if they had not taken place when and where they did (which would not need be millions of years, but hours)? I am left with a view that uniformitarianism is a doctrine not a science: it is not really falsifiable since if something did happen it must have been a natural part of geological processes, therefore uniformitarian. But nothing new there, nor am I opposed to it, but for the value it added once, I suspect it no longer has the role it once did. (I’m not trying to be heretical – simply a lot of thought provoking stuff in this and happy to have friendly discussion on any or all of the above!)
Although most was familiar, there was enough analysis of the detail to refresh and challenge my understanding of how the planet works, and has worked in the past. The book starts with Pompei and Vesuvius, which was also a focus for “Volcanoland”, a recently read volume dedicated to the role of volcanoes – with further overlap with the flood basalts, Iceland and Hawaii. Clearly the swiss geologists who unravelled the Alps, Dr (I assume) Suess the most prominent, receive repeated reference. Explaining mountains certainly pushed forward the idea that the crust is in motion, although it was the opposite, bathymetric ocean surveys, which clinched the deal for plat tectonics.
I liked the number of questions, asked and unasked, that I found myself asking as I read. Does the depth of sea and ocean crust equal the displacement of the thicker but lower density continental crust? How much further can the Hawaii hot spot be traced beyond the seamounts in the Pacific? (and what started it or has it ‘always’ been there?) Will the Pacific Ocean eventually close or could it re-open, and the Atlantic stall instead? Do mountain ranges induce changes in the mantle which result in new oceans? Thus, is the line of the Himalayas the locus for a future ocean as was somewhat the case for the Atlantic-Larentide rift? If shrinkage and expansion cannot explain plate structure, was there a point in time when they played some role? What initiated the tectonic dynamics back in the Archean? How extensive could ice cover have been in the ‘boring billion’ and could the build up have been massive enough to stall and re-start tectonic activity? Is there really no way of knowing if Everest is the highest mountain ever in Earth’s history? As my family may point, out, I may be simply enjoying the asking of these without actually wanting answers!
Much effort is made to demonstrate the Lyellian thesis that the present is a key to the past, but it felt overstated at times. There have been times when unusual rocks have formed which have no analogy in the present, Banded Iron Formation and Dolomites for example. What was the role of contingent events such as the K-T asteroid impact (amongst others)? Have these disrupted mantle processes to the extent that plate trajectories are different if they had not taken place when and where they did (which would not need be millions of years, but hours)? I am left with a view that uniformitarianism is a doctrine not a science: it is not really falsifiable since if something did happen it must have been a natural part of geological processes, therefore uniformitarian. But nothing new there, nor am I opposed to it, but for the value it added once, I suspect it no longer has the role it once did. (I’m not trying to be heretical – simply a lot of thought provoking stuff in this and happy to have friendly discussion on any or all of the above!)
June 24, 2023
Silly, finishing school comments about the best this, the most that, etc. seem to be a constant with English academics. Margaret Macmillan does it as well, it's irritating, if you live outside that silly bubble of the curated, polished life.
Aside from these occasional irritants, and a tone a bit like a hill station grandee, lamenting the folly of mankind (of course he's far above it), this is a fantastic introduction to the earth. All I can wonder is for all the piles of texts on cosmology sitting on my shelves, why it has taken so long for me to read something on the subject matter. If you take the time and have the patience to read it completely you may be able to see something of the age and complexity of which you are part. I'm a bit naive I suppose, I've always looked to the natural world for what I can no longer find in human culture. I imagine many of us do, this book will provide you with a manner of walking in the world when in it, a manner of taking notes on something more than the self.
As I was working my way through Fortety's book, I was lucky to stumble across the late 1990s BBC documentary "Earth Story". The series is slow, detailed and full of first hand reminisces by geologist from all over world. Together they both underline how new geology is, and how recent and profound its discoveries are; it may be a good idea to have something of the like handy, as you can take a bit of a break when Fortey begins to get long winded.
The organization is a problem as well, it takes him half the book the define terms he's been using throughout, a glossary would be in order. So would an actual introduction to explain where the book will "go" and how it will do it. If you've no familiarity with geology you'll find yourself flying blind for a chapter or two.
There's a general lack of knowledge about geology, that's curious in itself, seeing what it is we walk on and it's hard not to see a bias, preference for what is "up there". Most of the scientific "heroes" (spare me) of the 20th century would seem to be astrophysicists, cosmologists and the like who like to come up with the big picture, so big as to be completely hermetic other than to other specialists in the field . We all know their names, I won't repeat them, but who knows the names of Lydell, Wegener etc.? In addition many of the groundbreaking work is fairly recent, plate tectonics, for instance, has only been accepted since the 1960s. I went to the table of contents of Lightman's "The Discoveries" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho...) to see how much time he spent on geology, the answer? Zero. There are 22 scientific discoveries and their relevant scientific paper to be found in the volume, none of it them to do with the earth. That's just plain bizarre if you think about it. Actually it's downright ignorant. Maybe cosmologists and geologists don't like each other....
Aside from these occasional irritants, and a tone a bit like a hill station grandee, lamenting the folly of mankind (of course he's far above it), this is a fantastic introduction to the earth. All I can wonder is for all the piles of texts on cosmology sitting on my shelves, why it has taken so long for me to read something on the subject matter. If you take the time and have the patience to read it completely you may be able to see something of the age and complexity of which you are part. I'm a bit naive I suppose, I've always looked to the natural world for what I can no longer find in human culture. I imagine many of us do, this book will provide you with a manner of walking in the world when in it, a manner of taking notes on something more than the self.
As I was working my way through Fortety's book, I was lucky to stumble across the late 1990s BBC documentary "Earth Story". The series is slow, detailed and full of first hand reminisces by geologist from all over world. Together they both underline how new geology is, and how recent and profound its discoveries are; it may be a good idea to have something of the like handy, as you can take a bit of a break when Fortey begins to get long winded.
The organization is a problem as well, it takes him half the book the define terms he's been using throughout, a glossary would be in order. So would an actual introduction to explain where the book will "go" and how it will do it. If you've no familiarity with geology you'll find yourself flying blind for a chapter or two.
There's a general lack of knowledge about geology, that's curious in itself, seeing what it is we walk on and it's hard not to see a bias, preference for what is "up there". Most of the scientific "heroes" (spare me) of the 20th century would seem to be astrophysicists, cosmologists and the like who like to come up with the big picture, so big as to be completely hermetic other than to other specialists in the field . We all know their names, I won't repeat them, but who knows the names of Lydell, Wegener etc.? In addition many of the groundbreaking work is fairly recent, plate tectonics, for instance, has only been accepted since the 1960s. I went to the table of contents of Lightman's "The Discoveries" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho...) to see how much time he spent on geology, the answer? Zero. There are 22 scientific discoveries and their relevant scientific paper to be found in the volume, none of it them to do with the earth. That's just plain bizarre if you think about it. Actually it's downright ignorant. Maybe cosmologists and geologists don't like each other....
February 12, 2025
Fortey's volume is probably the best introduction to the core concepts and history that a non-geologist could read.
I read The Earth on its publication and, perhaps not unnaturally, I'd forgotten most of what it had taught me. So a re-read was due.
Starting with, naturally, a chapter located in The Bay of Naples and of course Vesuvius, we are introduced to the cutting-edge of geology at work; erupting volcanos. The human dimension; how our history has been shaped by the Earth's geology, is a paramount thread running throughout the book, and the value of that is established in the very first chapter.
Then it's off to Hawi'i and its north-to-south erupting volcanos, progressing from the ocean floors movement above magma chambers. Chapter 6 is for me the moment when this book gets really interesting, with insight into the opening, closing and re-opening of The Atlantic, with a bit of what would become Europe - travelling through the mechanism of continental drift to what we now know as Newfoundland.
Just when the subject starts getting a bit too much to take in, some relief is provided with the next chapter; The Dollar and then we over to India, and The Deccan Traps and a long look at that almost invincible rock - granite. Then faults, The Grand Canyon by mule descent, and my favourite chapter Deep Things about the world we can only see with seismic scans and laboratory experiments. The final chapter World View takes us on a Puck-like whirlwind tour of the Earth, from Great Britain to North America, across the North Pacific to East Asia and Australasia, east again to South America, then Africa and...back to Italy. It's great finish, reiterating what the reader might have picked-up (if they were paying attention).
There are several color photo sections and an index (essential if you need a reminder about who-is-who and what-is-what).
Fortey made an effort to avoid The Earth being a dry academic book, and he succeeded. The human element, though in the face of the mighty forces at play, seem meaningless, are nonetheless emphasised. The key discoverers, not least those from the 18th & 19th centuries who discerned so much through sheer persistence and observation, get their due credit. Like Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, the pace at which society (first the British, then the US, then, well, everyone else) comprehended that The Earth was way older than The Bible's 6,000 years, and way, way more complex in its structure is a credit to our predecessors. I was taught plate tectonics (as 'continental drift') in the late 1960s, though it had been mooted as a suspicion decades before, until confirming evidence was secured. The Earth confirms geology to be a 'proper' science.
I'm still not certain the same can be said about geography!
I read The Earth on its publication and, perhaps not unnaturally, I'd forgotten most of what it had taught me. So a re-read was due.
Starting with, naturally, a chapter located in The Bay of Naples and of course Vesuvius, we are introduced to the cutting-edge of geology at work; erupting volcanos. The human dimension; how our history has been shaped by the Earth's geology, is a paramount thread running throughout the book, and the value of that is established in the very first chapter.
Then it's off to Hawi'i and its north-to-south erupting volcanos, progressing from the ocean floors movement above magma chambers. Chapter 6 is for me the moment when this book gets really interesting, with insight into the opening, closing and re-opening of The Atlantic, with a bit of what would become Europe - travelling through the mechanism of continental drift to what we now know as Newfoundland.
Just when the subject starts getting a bit too much to take in, some relief is provided with the next chapter; The Dollar and then we over to India, and The Deccan Traps and a long look at that almost invincible rock - granite. Then faults, The Grand Canyon by mule descent, and my favourite chapter Deep Things about the world we can only see with seismic scans and laboratory experiments. The final chapter World View takes us on a Puck-like whirlwind tour of the Earth, from Great Britain to North America, across the North Pacific to East Asia and Australasia, east again to South America, then Africa and...back to Italy. It's great finish, reiterating what the reader might have picked-up (if they were paying attention).
There are several color photo sections and an index (essential if you need a reminder about who-is-who and what-is-what).
Fortey made an effort to avoid The Earth being a dry academic book, and he succeeded. The human element, though in the face of the mighty forces at play, seem meaningless, are nonetheless emphasised. The key discoverers, not least those from the 18th & 19th centuries who discerned so much through sheer persistence and observation, get their due credit. Like Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, the pace at which society (first the British, then the US, then, well, everyone else) comprehended that The Earth was way older than The Bible's 6,000 years, and way, way more complex in its structure is a credit to our predecessors. I was taught plate tectonics (as 'continental drift') in the late 1960s, though it had been mooted as a suspicion decades before, until confirming evidence was secured. The Earth confirms geology to be a 'proper' science.
I'm still not certain the same can be said about geography!
November 21, 2024
Starting in Italy as the author focuses on Vesuvius and the potential danger Naples faces every day, I really wondered if we were going to be stuck in Italy as the author talks about it for pages with the obvious enthusiasm of a fan but eventually we start crossing the world as he discusses the field of geology - how it developed as well as the many theories that it has undergone since that fatal day in 79 A.D. to the present day (published in 2004).
So of course, he had started with volcanoes - Hawai'i and the shield volcanoes verses the other types to the oceans and continents. The Alps with the shells hundreds if not thousands of feet above sea level and the beginning of the plate tectonic theory. The massive plates and how they move about, forming and splitting apart the supercontinents. Ancient mountain ranges that have been eroded by time, water and wind. The fault lines that house quake zones. Construction of various stone.
One must keep in the back of their mind as they're reading that we are talking about millions of years. Unless an earthquake jars the land, most of us will never even see a few inches of plate movement in our lifetime. General rate is similar to human fingernail growth but some move faster or slower.
Note that this is not really a beginner's geology book - it's more for the person familiar with the science and willing to listen to a new perspective of our ever-evolving planet. The only real negative I can offer is that the narrator of the audio-book was - well - dry. I would have to focus on the book rather than make it available to accompany my work. I would have to stop, rewind and listen again occasionally because I would realize that I had no idea how we had gotten to the currently discussed topic. But that is more likely me and your mileage may vary.
2024-010
So of course, he had started with volcanoes - Hawai'i and the shield volcanoes verses the other types to the oceans and continents. The Alps with the shells hundreds if not thousands of feet above sea level and the beginning of the plate tectonic theory. The massive plates and how they move about, forming and splitting apart the supercontinents. Ancient mountain ranges that have been eroded by time, water and wind. The fault lines that house quake zones. Construction of various stone.
One must keep in the back of their mind as they're reading that we are talking about millions of years. Unless an earthquake jars the land, most of us will never even see a few inches of plate movement in our lifetime. General rate is similar to human fingernail growth but some move faster or slower.
Note that this is not really a beginner's geology book - it's more for the person familiar with the science and willing to listen to a new perspective of our ever-evolving planet. The only real negative I can offer is that the narrator of the audio-book was - well - dry. I would have to focus on the book rather than make it available to accompany my work. I would have to stop, rewind and listen again occasionally because I would realize that I had no idea how we had gotten to the currently discussed topic. But that is more likely me and your mileage may vary.
2024-010
July 13, 2023
Perhaps I've forgotten the knack of reading nonfiction, but I reminded myself that I'm not reading this in order to pass some kind of test, but to let more information seep into the nooks and crannies of my brain. Plenty of these chapters I could not give you a summary of immediately after having read them, but that doesn't matter, because my total base level of knowledge has increased. It lies beneath the surface thoughts, waiting for the right movement to release it upwards and out.
This book is at its strongest when it grounds itself in Fortey actually personally walking across a landscape; I'm here in the shadow of Vesuvius, on the outer Hawaiian islands, scrambling over the Alps, descending into the Grand Canyon. It's at its worst when it's just a list of rocks and minerals and chemical processes.
But perhaps herein lies the dilemma: we are best at relating to things through human means, but geology--and particularly deep geology--is removed from our regular understandings of space and time. It operates on scales that are difficult to comprehend, though Fortey does his best to make them comprehensible. Though I'm going to look for something a little more poetic, I enjoyed my time here and learned a bunch of new things; there's no more to ask of a book like this.
This book is at its strongest when it grounds itself in Fortey actually personally walking across a landscape; I'm here in the shadow of Vesuvius, on the outer Hawaiian islands, scrambling over the Alps, descending into the Grand Canyon. It's at its worst when it's just a list of rocks and minerals and chemical processes.
But perhaps herein lies the dilemma: we are best at relating to things through human means, but geology--and particularly deep geology--is removed from our regular understandings of space and time. It operates on scales that are difficult to comprehend, though Fortey does his best to make them comprehensible. Though I'm going to look for something a little more poetic, I enjoyed my time here and learned a bunch of new things; there's no more to ask of a book like this.
December 18, 2021
I’d consider this review 3.5 because the book really wasn’t terrible. I just wouldn’t go the full 4. There were errors and omissions I found deeply annoying throughout. On page 71, the Trieste is discussed. The inventors first name (Auguste) was misspelled and it was erroneously purported that Auguste Picard was the sole occupant of the submersible. What about oceanographer Lt. Don Walsh PhD that piloted the vessel? How much research did Fortey actually do on this dive. For better coverage see “In Oceans Deep” by Bill Streever. Page 139 George Gaylord Simpsons name is misspelled. At one point he refers to Mt. Kinabalu as being in Indonesia… it’s not, it’s in Malaysia. I know, I’ve climbed it. There are typos where entire units are wrong such the one found on page 319 where “billions” were confused for “millions.” “If life was there 3.8 million years ago, it would have experienced a day only five hours long, as a result of the earth spinning faster, and the moon would’ve hung large and close in the sky.” To be clear there were Australopithecines in Africa 3.8 million years ago. The units do matter.
August 9, 2018
This book is an informative but rather rambling mix of geology and travel writing. The book revolves around the various facets of plate tectonics, how each piece of the theory was puzzled out and how those pieces fit together to give us the Earth we have today. Fortey uses examples from all over the world to illustrate the various geological processes. Everything from fault lines, development of mountain ranges and oceans, subduction zones, volcanoes, earthquakessupercontinents, the Earth's interior, mining, minerals and gems, as well as a bit of ecology are covered. Fortey also emphasizes how the geology and geomorphology of a specific area has shaped ethinic culture and human experiences. The author is enthusiastic about his subject. The wirting is poetic and colourful, often dramatic, though sometimes a bit long-winded. The book contains photographs but is in desperate need of illustrations and diagrams of the various processes discussed. An interesting book for the intelligent layreader, who isn't afraid of a few technical terms.
June 3, 2022
I’m sure this was a very informative book but I really don’t remember anything except this vague feeling of being soothed/calmed by how the book was written. I have retained nothing, but at least I wasn’t annoyed or angry or anything. Absolutely a bedtime book as a couple of pages got me sleepy.
Some observations:
1. Fortey will always write like he’s only allowed 3-4 paragraphs per page
2. Fortey’s footnotes won’t elucidate but instead include some term or phrase that will not clarify a single jot of whatever he was appending the footnote to
But overall a far better book than Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum — that book was a disaster — and I’m glad I read this after as it kind of reestablishes Fortey — for me — as an author I like.
Some observations:
1. Fortey will always write like he’s only allowed 3-4 paragraphs per page
2. Fortey’s footnotes won’t elucidate but instead include some term or phrase that will not clarify a single jot of whatever he was appending the footnote to
But overall a far better book than Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum — that book was a disaster — and I’m glad I read this after as it kind of reestablishes Fortey — for me — as an author I like.
September 22, 2025
Did not finish.
For the 20 or so pages of each chapter, you wait for him to get to the point. After about 20 pages in, when he's still wandering about and talking about random things, you start getting confused. Is this a book about geology or a travelogue about all the places related to geology that the author has been to? You start to wonder if it was a conscious choice to write the book this way, and if so why?
After a point, you get annoyed by simply looking at the book. I'm sure there will be some who will like that digressive style of story telling, but then depends on how you encountered the book in the first place. I got this to read about geology, not some random Brit's travelogue. I'll try this again when I'm 40. Maybe it'll hit different.
For the 20 or so pages of each chapter, you wait for him to get to the point. After about 20 pages in, when he's still wandering about and talking about random things, you start getting confused. Is this a book about geology or a travelogue about all the places related to geology that the author has been to? You start to wonder if it was a conscious choice to write the book this way, and if so why?
After a point, you get annoyed by simply looking at the book. I'm sure there will be some who will like that digressive style of story telling, but then depends on how you encountered the book in the first place. I got this to read about geology, not some random Brit's travelogue. I'll try this again when I'm 40. Maybe it'll hit different.
October 3, 2017
This is a well written, panoramic portrait of earth marred only by the occasional Eurocentric pimple. For example: the author-scientist rides Buttermilk the Donkey down into the Grand Canyon, carefully explaining the millions of years of earth's history hidden in plain sight, when, oops, out pops a racist cliche - that a white European was the first to "explore" this natural wonder in the mid 19th century. Huh? This, while also describing how Native peoples have lived there for thousands of years! Fortey also dates himself when he uses the term "oriental." Still, this, and his other book about Life are well worth the read.
November 16, 2025
Richard Fortey is no more - he died this year - but his lovely books and legacy as a fine palaeontologist and writer remain. This is one of his most accessible books on the story of our planet. I was happy to have known Richard since the mid 60s as contemporaneous students and have enjoyed his books. He was a trilobite man; for me it is very dead fish. We both relished moving bits of continent around anddelving into deep time. Sadly 'my' fish and Richard's trilos didn't co-habit ( well, not overwhelmingly although found in the same realms in the Palaeozoic. Vale Richard and heartfelt condolences to your family.
March 16, 2019
Essentially a quick history of 20th century geology through visits to important field sites; Hawai'i, Gulf of Naples, etc--this is a basic, good pop-sci book about geology!
i also appreciate the author's tone. He doesn't waste much time on uninteresting things like many 'pop-sci' authors think is necessary (it's not!)--it's a book about rocks, and how we understand them, and he talks about rocks, and how we understand them (or don't, yet, as the case may be!).
i also appreciate the author's tone. He doesn't waste much time on uninteresting things like many 'pop-sci' authors think is necessary (it's not!)--it's a book about rocks, and how we understand them, and he talks about rocks, and how we understand them (or don't, yet, as the case may be!).
November 29, 2019
A tough read. The title contains the words "Intimate History." Therefore, I was expecting something akin to a story. In fairness, there were some narrative elements to the book, but about 80% of the book's content was just a literal description of the look of various geological features and the processes by which those features were made. This subject matter would be an excellent topic for a documentary film, but as a book, it was incredibly tedious.
November 20, 2020
Mostly entertaining but sometimes a little dry. The author definitely knows his stuff but he doesn’t feel like the best tour guide for his subject. I was dazzled by the breadth of content as well as the myriad windows into the history of geology as well as the earth. I just found it very easy to put down, unfortunately, which led me to look on it as more of a coffee-table book than a serious historical effort, which it really is.
December 13, 2022
I am no geologist so a fair bit of this went over my head but I was determined to finish as this book was given to me as a leaving present years ago and I had been working with earth scientists then. I have to say that the author's vivid descriptions painted pictures of earth's physical features in such a way that even a non-scientist like me could picture mountains rising up, volcanoes exploding and rocks under pressure to make gems.
July 8, 2025
What a fascinating and overflowing description of the earths physical beginnings, evolution and landscape changes. Brilliantly informative. I found the content to be so very considered and widespread in its descriptively academic coverage of the planet, that it takes commitment to read it all the way through, so I carried the volume with me for a long time before eventually finishing the book, but it was worth every minute of the wait.
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