Download The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet AudioBook Free
Globe evolves. From first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to single cell to verdant living landscaping, ours is a globe constantly in flux. In this radical new method of Earth's biography, older Carnegie Institution researcher and countrywide best-selling writer Robert M. Hazen reveals the way the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere - of rocks and living matter - has molded our planet into the only 1 of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos. With an astrobiologist's creativity, a historian's perspective, and a naturalist's enthusiasm for the ground beneath our legs, Hazen clarifies how changes on an atomic level translate into remarkable shifts in Earth's cosmetic over its 4.567 billion season existence. He telephone calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our planet's many iterations in vibrant fine detail - from its fast-rotating infancy when sunlight increased every 5 time and the Moon stuffed 250 times more sky than it does now, to its sea-bathed junior, before the first continents arose; from the fantastic Oxidation Event that transformed the land red, to the globe-altering volcanism that might have been the real killer of the dinosaurs. Through Hazen's theory of "co-evolution," we understand how reactions between organic molecules and rock and roll crystals may have generated Earth's first microorganisms, which in turn are accountable for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on earth - a large number of different varieties of crystals that could not exist in a nonliving world. The Story of Globe is also the story of the pioneering women and men behind the sciences. Listeners will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions' lunar dust, and the planet Warfare II Navy officer whose super-pressurized "bomb" - recycled from armed forces hardware - first simulated the molten rock and roll of Earth's mantle. As a mentor to a fresh generation of researchers, Hazen presents the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earth's harshest panoramas will revolutionize geology. Celebrated by The New York Times for writing "with wonderful clarity about technology . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along," Hazen proves a brilliant and enjoyable guide upon this grand tour of our world inside and away. Lucid, controversial, and intellectually bracing, The Story of Globe is popular technology of the best order.
