Tag Archive for: geology

Otherlands: An illustrated journey through Earth’s lost worlds | Thomas Halliday, illustrated by Gavin Scott

 

Watch thundering herds of dinosaurs crash through thick forests. Dive into a sea of glass reefs, emerging from the water to see monkeys fighting for survival on an accidental raft. Travel millions of years into the past to when dinosaurs and woolly mammoths roamed the earth. Find out how plants and trees and creatures great and small shared a world very different from our own. And uncover the footprints they left behind . . .

Starting with the last ice age and ending when the very first animals that started to swim and hunt, this illustrated journey back through time is adapted from the bestselling Otherlands by Thomas Halliday.

Age:8 to 11 years

An Anthology of Our Extraordinary Earth | Cally Oldershaw

 

Explore the beauty and majesty of planet Earth in this compendium, with more than 100 incredible stories and images.

An Anthology of Our Extraordinary Earth looks at our constantly changing planet, with striking images and scientific ideas that are easy for children to understand. Starting at the centre of the Earth, the book examines each layer in forensic detail: from Earth’s metallic core, drilling through Earth’s tough crust until emerging out onto the planet’s surface, with its lush green rainforests, sparkling oceans, and snow-capped mountains, before sailing up into Earth’s airy atmosphere.

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Earth: Over 4 Billion Years in the Making | Chris Packham and Andrew Cohen

 

A beautiful, full-colour book to accompany the 5 part BBC TV series telling the most important story of all, the deep history of our own planet. With the trademark dramatic storytelling techniques of The Planets and The Universe, Andrew Cohen and Chris Packham narrate the biography of the Earth, revealing the most epic events of its history, from the first seconds of its existence to the arrival of humans, including the moments where our planet’s future hung in the balance in the face of massive bombardments from space, extreme changes in climate, the collision of whole continents and more.

This is the epic 4 billion year story of the place we call home.

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The Alternatives | Caoilinn Hughes

Hughes’ resonant, beautifully-written story of four sisters in crisis is a masterclass in making sense of the times we live in.  Now in their thirties, each woman has been struggling with her own crises but it is Olwyn’s sudden psychic emergency that brings them together in the Irish countryside for their first meeting in years. Deftly, Hughes manages to showcase the complexities of mental health, food, climate and ecological justice, and Deep Time while keeping the sisters – all seriously bright and ferociously flawed – at the heart of the polycrisis. A deeply engaging and often funny novel by a thought-provoking writer of huge emotional intelligence and flair.  – Liz Jensen

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions | Peter Brannen

The Ends of the World - Peter Brannen

When we talk about ‘saving the planet,’ we forget that the planet is perfectly capable of saving itself. In the last half billion years there have been five major Earth catastrophes resulting in mass extinction – most as a result of changing climate, and some even caused by the lifeforms they extinguished. But each time, life has bounced back, often more glorious and incredible than before.

Journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through these mass extinctions and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future. There are many analogs with present-day climate shifts and Brannen introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who are piecing together what really happened.

Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes a deep-time tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light. A fascinating and compelling read.

– Sandy Winterbottom

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Notes from Deep Time: A Journey Through Our Past and Future Worlds | Helen Gordon

The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it’s there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation.

Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative. Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from a state-of-the-art earthquake monitoring system in California to one of the world’s most dangerous volcanic complexes in Naples.

At every step, she finds that the apparently solid ground beneath our feet isn’t quite as it seems.

‘A terrific book, especially clarifying on the Anthropocene in context. I loved the especially eye-opening last chapter on the deep future, on the disposal of nuclear waste and the human failing to think and plan beyond the individual lifespan. Sobering and instructive time travel.’ ~ Max Porter

Read more of Max’s recommendations in March 2022’s Rebel Library Hot Reads