num_pages: 320
description: Author Robert M. Hazen writes of how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphereof rocks and living matterhas shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System if not the entire cosmos.With an astrobiologists imagination a historians perspective and a naturalists passion for the ground beneath our feet Hazen explains how changes on an atomic level translate into dramatic shifts in Earths makeup over its 4.567 billion year existence. He calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our planets many iterations in vivid detail. Through his theory of co-evolution we learn how reactions between organic molecules and rock crystals may have generated Earths first organisms which in turn are responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on the planet.The Story of Earth is also the story of the pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Readers will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions lunar dust and the World War II Navy officer whose super-pressurized bombrecycled from military hardwarefirst simulated the molten rock of Earths mantle. As a mentor to a new generation of scientists Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earths harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.
language: English
title: The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
publisher: Viking Press