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About this book
Contents
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Biography
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About this book
Providing a new approach to Earth history, this engaging undergraduate textbook highlights key episodes in the history of our planet and uses them to explain the most important concepts in geology. Rather than presenting exhaustive descriptions of each period of geological time, this conceptual approach shows how geologists use multiple strands of evidence to build up an understanding of the geological past, focusing on exciting events like the extinction of the dinosaurs and the formation of the Grand Canyon and the Himalaya. Beginning with an introduction to geology, tectonics, and the origin of the Universe, subsequent chapters chronicle defining moments in Earth history in an accessible narrative style. Each chapter draws on a variety of sub-disciplines, including stratigraphy, paleontology, petrology, geochemistry, and geophysics, to provide students who have little or no previous knowledge of geology with a broad understanding of our planet and its fascinating history.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. The Grand Canyon: reading the rocks
2. The philosophies of geology: assumptions steer interpretations
3. The origin of Earth: from the beginning of the universe to the early Earth
4.The Age of Earth: historical versus modern dating approaches
5. Plate tectonics: our unifying geological concept
6. Evolution: natural selection and the organization of life
7. The origin of life: our early atmosphere and the rise of early life
8. Snowball Earth: a Neoproterozoic frozen planet
9. An explosion of life: Ediacaran experimentation, the Cambrian explosion, and Ordovician biodiversity
10. Iapetus and Pangea: the lost ocean and the assembly of a Paleozoic supercontinent
11. Environmental change in the late Paleozoic: the greening of Earth, climate change, and the great dying
12. The age of dinosaurs: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous world
13. The Cretaceous extinction: the end of the age of dinosaurs
14. Tectonics of western North America: a dynamic Cretaceous and Cenozoic landscape
15. The Indo-Asian collision: the formation of the Himalayas
16. The Messinian crisis: the great drying of the Mediterranean Sea
17. Out of Africa: human evolution
18. Ice ages and sea level: quaternary environmental change
19. A human world: our impact in the Holocene
Glossary
Index
Customer Reviews
Biography
Peter Copeland is Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Houston, Texas. His expertise lies in thermochronology, geochemistry and continental tectonics, with a particular emphasis on the evolution of the continental crust. In recent years, his research has focused on the formation of the Rocky Mountains and Himalayas. From 2001 to 2004, he was co-editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin.
Janok P. Bhattacharya is the Susan Cunningham Research Chair in Geology at McMaster University (Canada). His research interests are in sedimentary rocks of the western interior of North America. Prior to becoming a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and subsequently at the University of Houston, Bhattacharya worked in the petroleum industry. He is an American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Grover Murray Distinguished Educator (2007), AAPG Distinguished Lecturer (2005-2006), and the 2023 SEPM Francis J. Pettijohn Medalist for excellence in sedimentology and stratigraphy.
