Tells the story of William Smith, the eighteenth-century Englishman known as the father of modern geology, discussing his discovery of distinct layers of rock in the Earth, his publication of a map that displayed his findings, and his long road to attaining the recognition he deserved.

From Graham Hancock, bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, comes a mesmerizing book that takes us on a captivating underwater voyage to find the ruins of a lost civilization that's been hidden for thousands of years beneath the world's oceans. While Graham Hancock is no stranger to stirring up heated controversy among scientific experts, his books and television documentaries have intrigued millions of people around the world and influenced...

Introduces readers to what rocks are and how they form.

"Come closer and look at these rocks: they're not normal stones at all! They're thousands and thousands of mollusks, fossilized together in the sediment. But how did a million oysters ever land on top of a mountain? Written by a geologist, this inquisitive journey guides readers through the movements of seas, strata, and tectonic plates. The landscapes of the present can be clues to events in the past. Lush, atmospheric illustrations offer fascinating...

Explains why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to planetary survival and offers suggestions for how to create a more time-literate society. "Why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival: Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of...

The author surveys the traces we will leave for peoples in the very distant future. He shows that modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, including the plastic polluting the oceans, the nuclear waste entombed within the earth, and the thirty million miles of paved roads spanning the planet. This is his medition on climate change and the Anthropocene, and an urgent search for fossils--industrial,...