Five Billion Years of Global Change
Subtitle: A History of the Land
Publisher: The Guilford Press; Guilford Press
Published: December 1, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9781572309586
Subjects: NATURAL HISTORY, COUNTRY LIFE & PETS; Science/Mathematics; Human settlements; Science; World - General; Earth Sciences - Geography; Science / Geography; History; Earth; Land use
First sentence: Were I to run a probe, let's say from outer space, down through the stratosphere (through the ozone layer), through the tropopause and the troposphere, through whatever clouds of water vapor (is it raining?), down through the branches of a flamboyan (the raindrops breaking up on the leaves, bouncing and dripping and slipping off), through the zinc-plated roof beneath it, into a room, through a person, perhaps through his head and then his hand, through his cuatro (he's hunched over it, playing it against the sound of the rain on the roof), down through the floor boards, through the space beneath the house, through the shallow, red, friable, crumbling clay beneath it, through the rest of the lithosphere, through the asthenosphere, through the outer liquid core of nickel-iron into the solid mass that may lie there at the center of the Earth, at no point-at no point-would I have encountered a system at rest, a ground zero, a firm place on which to stand from which to observe the motion of everything else: it's all in motion.