Vanished ocean
Subtitle: how Tethys reshaped the world
By: Dorrik Stow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 300
ISBN-13: 9780199214280
Subjects: Tethys (Paleogeography); Marine ecology; Oceanography; Paleobiogeography
Description: "The Earth ever changes, and even vast oceans come and go. This is the story of such an ocean: how it grew to stretch in a wide belt across the Earth, the creatures that lived in it and at its shores, the changes it experienced, and how it shrank, broke up, and finally disappeared. Tethys, the geologists named it, after the sea goddess of Greek myth, daughter of Gaia and mother of great rivers. It began to form some 260 million years ago and vanished five and a half million years ago. How, then, do we know that it ever existed? Tethys has left us many clues: slivers of what used to be the sea floor, a whale graveyard, and oil--the oil of the Middle East on which so many rely today was formed from the decay of millions of tiny creatures that lived in its waters. Dorrik Stow, an oceanographer and geologist, tells how scientists have painstakingly pieced together these clues as he takes us through the life of Tethys." -- dust jacket flap.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-276) and index.
Table of contents: title: Tethys the sea goddess; title: Pangaea the supercontinent and the birth of Tethys; title: Extinction, evolution and the great cycles of life; title: Tethyan fecundity in the Jurassic seas; title: Black death to black gold; title: The greatest flood of all time : rise and fall of the seas; title: End of an era : the debate continues; title: Portrait of the Tethys seaway; title: Closing ocean, rising mountain; title: Death throes of an ocean; title: Epilogue : perspective on the future.