Description |
ix, 360 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Contents |
Making history a science -- Nature's own antiquities -- Sketching big pictures -- Expanding time and history -- Bursting the limits of time -- Worlds before Adam -- Disturbing a consensus -- Human history in nature's history -- Eventful deep history -- Global histories of the earth -- One planet among many. |
Summary |
Earth has been witness to mammoths and dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically to the surface, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it all. But how was it discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? And what kinds of people have sought to reconstruct this past that no human witnessed or recorded? In this sweeping and magisterial book, Martin J. S. Rudwick, the premier historian of the earth sciences, tells the gripping human story of the gradual realization that the Earth’s history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful. |
Subject(S) |
Earth sciences -- History.
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Natural history -- History.
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Religion and science.
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ISBN |
9780226203935 (cloth) (alkaline paper) |
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022620393X (cloth) (alkaline paper) |
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