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Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet
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Average Rating:  out of 10 Reviews
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Price: $29.95
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Sale: $18.66
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Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780674026599
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Ted Nield
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Publisher: Harvard University Press
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Dewey Decimal Number: 551.41
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Publication Date: 2007-11-15
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Reading Level: 304
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Description: To understand continental drift and plate tectonics, the shifting and collisions that make and unmake continents, requires a long view. The Earth, after all, is 4.6 billion years old. This book extends our vision to take in the greatest geological cycle of all—one so vast that our species will probably be extinct long before the current one ends in about 250 million years. And yet this cycle, the grandest pattern in Nature, may well be the fundamental reason our species—or any complex life at all—exists. This book explores the Supercontinent Cycle from scientists' earliest inkling of the phenomenon to the geological discoveries of today—and from the most recent fusing of all of Earth's landmasses, Pangaea, on which dinosaurs evolved, to the next. Chronicling a 500-million-year cycle, Ted Nield introduces readers to some of the most exciting science of our time. He describes how, long before plate tectonics were understood, geologists first guessed at these vanishing landmasses and came to appreciate the significance of the fusing and fragmenting of supercontinents. He also uses the story of the supercontinents to consider how scientific ideas develop, and how they sometimes escape the confines of science. Nield takes the example of the recent Indian Ocean tsunami to explain how the whole endeavor of science is itself a supercontinent, whose usefulness in saving human lives, and life on Earth, depends crucially on a freedom to explore the unknown. (20071001)
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: The Grandest Cycle in Nature |
Date: 2008-12-01 |
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Details: Each of us gets our three score and ten years, more or less, and as good as such a spell might be, it does not prepare us for seeing the longer picture of the past. We are used to changes in the weather, and we might even be used to earthquakes which are signs that the continents themselves are changing, but continental change comes far too slowly for us to appreciate first hand. Scientists have gradually come to understand how old the Earth is, and how active the continents are, once you take a view of hundreds of millions of years. In fact, instead of the continents we now know, 250 million years ago there was but one continent, a supercontinent called Pangaea. _Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet_ (Harvard University Press) is not, however, just about Pangaea. Author Ted Nield, the editor of _Geoscientist_, shows that although all of us may now be sitting upon "no more than Pangaea's smashed remains, the fragments of the dinner plate that dropped on the floor," Pangaea was only one in a series of supercontinents, as the land masses careened around the globe, coalesced, and split up again. They are doing the same thing now. Come back in another 250 million years, and there will again be a supercontinent (named by some "Novopangaea"). It's all dizzying, taking in this long view of things; the world is a particularly strange place in the billion year scale. Nield, however, skillfully describes the changes and relates them to our own world, and takes a good deal of the confusion out of a huge mass of data and extrapolations from it.
One of the greatest problems of understanding how the continents shifted was the problem of coming to an understanding of how old the Earth is. Archbishop Ussher's adding up of the "begats" from the Old Testament to find that creation began on 23 October 4004 BC is scientifically ludicrous, but Nield gives it surprising respect as "a serious scholarly attempt, according to the beliefs of his time." Subsequent attempts, in the nineteenth century, centered on looking at how long it would take strata to be laid down or the molten earth to cool, and showed an age of millions of years. Alfred Wegener showed not only that the outlines of the Americas and of Africa and Europe on either side of the Atlantic looked a bit like separated puzzle pieces, but that also there were correlations of rocks and fossils to show that they were originally unseparated. There was enormous resistance to this idea, more from American scientists than European. Wegener died in 1930, his ideas still not adopted by a majority of geologists; now, however, they are the fundament on which geology bases its explanation of continental movement. Nield calls the supercontinent cycle "the grandest of all the patterns in nature", since each cycle takes so many millions of years and since the continents moving around affect all geology, ocean patterns, weather, and the development of life itself. The cycle not only explains the ancient history of our planet, but has to be the foundation for our understanding immediate phenomena like earthquakes. The supercontinent cycle is a new idea, and we are only just beginning to understand it.
Nield presents the idea that science, too, is like a supercontinent, able to reconstruct the distant past and also able (if politics allows) to save thousands of lives in the next tsunami. He says that understanding the evolution of the Earth's atmosphere in the Precambrian age "helps us understand the massive, uncontrolled climate experiment in which the human race is currently engaged." He reminds us that denying one part of science is to deny all the other parts within the scientific whole that are connected to the part denied. His last pages, therefore, address the "young-Earth creationists", who use what they call "creation science" (and which Nield calls a "non-subject") to bolster their claims for an Earth no older than Ussher said it was. Science may not be able to guarantee absolute knowledge, but the likelihood that the Earth is not billions of years old is nil, and there is evidence to counter any reasonable doubt to the contrary. The key word, Nield reminds us, is "reasonable": "Nothing ever remains beyond unreasonable doubt." The way evidence is gathered and scientific explanations are made over the centuries is wonderfully described here, as is the discovery of deep time, a huge and important idea that puts us in our place in the cosmos.
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Review Summary: Absolutely Fascinating! |
Date: 2008-07-22 |
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Details: In this remarkable book, the author touches upon just about everything regarding long lost continents: how the idea of a supercontinent came about, ancient and not-so-ancient myths (Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu), why continents cannot simply sink, highlights in the lives of some of the individuals involved and, in particular, the fascinating science. After discussing how the existing continents are moving relative to each other (continental drift) and how they will likely collide in the distant future, thus forming another supercontinent, he discuses the supercontinents of the past. In so doing, the reader is treated to a history of the earth and how it works, brimming throughout with scientific facts, principles as well as theories and the evidence that supports them. The scientific processes involved and the dating techniques that are used by scientists are particularly well explained; this is not surprising given the author's credentials. The writing style is clear, elegant, authoritative, often witty and always quite engaging. As a result, this is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone, although science/geology buffs may be the ones that would savor it the most. |
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Review Summary: Good science, bad writing |
Date: 2008-07-22 |
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Details: It's interesting in a sense that if it had been someone other than Neild writing this book, I probably would have given it five stars. As it is however, the presentation of the subject matter is at times vague and at other times condascending. Science is always evolving as new ideas are put forward and old ones become obselete. As such, there's no need to criticize old ideas, even if they've been rendered null and void.
The science is still good though, so I'd recomend picking this book up. |
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Review Summary: Brilliant but Uneven |
Date: 2008-07-21 |
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Details: This book tackles the great subject of the geologic history of the Earth from the vantage point of plate tectonics. Along the way, the author writes compellingly of the origins and development of life and the history of our atmosphere. He also gets side-tracked in biographies of some key geologists in the Continental Drift controversy as well as a light-hearted discussion of fictitious 'Lost Continents'. Luckily the book is organized in such a way that these digressions can be skipped if desired. My main objection in this book is the lack of good and relevent illustrations and maps. At the very least, a detailed stratigraphic chart relating geologic periods to continent-building and other events would be helpful. Also, maps detailing the assembly and disassembly of the supercontinents would greatly enhance his narrative of these events.
In many ways this is a wonderful and informative work. Paradoxically, it is not an easy read in the most interesting sections but it is well worth the effort. |
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Review Summary: The Grand Quadrille |
Date: 2008-03-31 |
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Details: "Did the Earth move for you?", asks the voice beside you. Well, yes. Because that's what it does. All the time. The continent you live on used to be someplace else, and far away from where it is now. Your home ground has even been part of a greater landmass known as a "supercontinent" - and will be again. Hence, the title of this book. Ted Nield provides us with a fine account of how we came to learn about these movements. He has brought together the years of research tracking where the rocks have been and where they are likely to go. He likens the movement of continents to a dance of landforms - a "Grand Quadrille". A fine synopsis of the history of geology and its compelling figures - scholars who had to project what was known in their time back into a distant past.
Earth has been a busy place for the past four billion years, and it hasn't stopped to rest. We speak of the "firmness of the Earth", but that phrase is a sham. The key figure in this story is the great supercontinent of Pangaea that began breaking up 250 million years ago. Assembled from previous continents that had once joined and also separated, Pangaea's breakup into places we live on today have been traced in exquisite detail. The matching of rocks in places separated by wide seas provided the clues. In fact, as Nield relates, it was the vast Atlantic that bears the responsibility for Pangaea's fracturing to form the basis for the continents we know today. The author explains how the continents have been engaging in a Grand Quadrille and will continue to do so - for another five billion years, at least.
The progenitor of the idea of "drifting continents" was Alfred Wegener. Using maps to show how western Eurasia and Africa matched the east coasts of the Western Hemisphere, Wegener proposed they had once been joined, but had pulled apart. He couldn't provide a mechanism for the movement, and his idea was rejected - most notably by the geologic "establishment" of the United States. Rejection of the proposal was so strong there that one British geologist described it as "regarding the Declaration of Independence as retroactive to the Palaeozoic". Continents formed separately and remained so through time, it was thought.
However, one US dissident, Reginald Daly of Harvard, had been in South Africa, encountering the work of Alexander du Toit, who noted similarities in rocks of the Great Karoo and South America. That discovery, enhanced by some detailed measurements in Greenland, suggested that movement was occurring. It took a war and the hunt for submarines to reveal what prompted continental movement. An Irish geophysicist, John Joly had already postulated the mechanism, heat from radioactive elements deep in the Earth required escape. That venting pushed the softer areas in the Earth's crust around. Sitting atop that stirring material, the continents track the flow patterns of the heat.
In moving, the continents encounter each other, joining, fusing and establishing mighty landmasses that break up again. Nield skilfully describes the mechanisms and the people who have read the rocks to understand how they work. Beyond Pangaea, for example, the author cites the work of Mark McMenamin, who proposes a yet older supercontinent, Rodinia. Rodinia's importance in the history of the Earth is that it was probably the extant landform around which complex life, after over 3 billion years, finally emerged. Nield's skill in presenting all these complex ideas and their significance never wanes throughout the book. He's achieved a fine summary of the history of modern geology, supported by a collection of portraits and some line drawings. The emphasis on Pangaea is slightly overdone, but his pointer to Chris Scotese's web page of geologic ages more than overcomes that small limitation. An excellent overview. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada] |
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