Skip to main content

The Story of Earth - Robert M. Hazen ****

Among popular science books, those that deal primarily with geology are sometimes approached with trepidation. It’s not uncommon to feel a touch of anxiety in trying to remember from past school lessons the different classes of rock and how they are formed, not to mention the chemistry involved.

Robert M. Hazen, Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University and a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory and author of several books, makes the subject very approachable and fascinating in The Story of Earth. Published in 2012, it presents the physical and geological history of the Earth over the past 4.5 billion years. The book is remarkable for its brevity, the main text coming in at 283 pages, without giving the reader the impression that he has merely skimmed over the history of our planet. For example, Hazen manages to explain in-depth the complex attraction between elements that allowed the fine particles that surrounded the Sun as it ignited, explaining the physics and chemistry that caused small clumps of dust to gather and grow in size, eventually forming Earth. 

At times, these in-depth explanations of fundamental geological chemistry can be a bit too extensive for the reader that has forgotten much of the basics of chemistry from school. Hazen does an excellent job at keeping the story moving forward, however, and the parts of the book that have deeper explanations that cause the reader to lose focus are relatively short. It is also an inherent danger with explaining any complex area of science to general readers to lose them in the thicket of complex terminology. This isn’t a major problem, though I did find myself flipping back to the opening chapters in the book to remind myself of certain key terms of rock formations when they appeared later on as certain basic terms were too similar to remember. This, of course, could be more of a failing on my part than Hazen’s, but a gentle reminder of what terms mean would have been helpful. 

Certain areas of the book stand out as exceptionally interesting and well-written. One is the discussion of the formation of the Moon and the history of the various theories surrounding the creation of our natural satellite. Of particular interest is the dominant theory of our past twin planetoid Theia and its collision with Earth that, it is thought, created the Moon and explains the various geological differences between the Earth and the Moon. Another fascinating area is the contributions of rock and mineral to the foundations of organic life.

Hazen does an excellent job of giving the reader a great insight into how much personality and collective thinking govern the science community, like other communities in human affairs. It is also to Hazen’s credit that he removes some of the romanticism around scientific discovery and depicts the evolution of science in a more realistic light. Hazen is also to be commended for presenting numerous examples of research and geological discoveries by women. This is not to say that he gives the impression of favouritism or preferential treatment by including them for political or sociological reasons, but it is refreshing to see so many examples of excellent and important work done by female scientists highlighted. 

In the final part of the book, Hazen speculates on the future of the Earth and discusses anthropomorphic climate change. Here he makes the case that the Earth is constantly changing and will continue to survive regardless of what happens to humans. The Earth will go on, but will humans be a part of that continuing story until the death of the planet when the Sun finally exhausts itself in another five billion years? Hazen explains in-depth the threat of human actions on the climate, precisely because it is known that the Earth will react, but it is unknown how and the feedback loops that have occurred in the past and that could be triggered by ignorant human activity could have disastrous consequences for human life on the planet. His arguments and reasoning in this part of the book should be required reading for everyone, regardless of their views on climate change, as he is one of the few writers, and scientists, that I have read who puts the problem in its proper historical and Earth science context. 

In short, The Story of Earth is a highly interesting read and a great introduction to modern geological thought on the formation of our planet, both where we came from and where we might be going.


Paperback 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Ian Bald

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur