Explorers of Deep Time

by Roy Plotnick
Explorers of Deep Time
Author: Roy Plotnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0231551312
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Paleontology is one of the most visible yet most misunderstood fields of science. Children dream of becoming paleontologists when they grow up. Museum visitors flock to exhibits on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. The media reports on fossil discoveries and new clues to mass extinctions. Nonetheless, misconceptions abound: paleontologists are assumed only to be interested in dinosaurs, and they are all too often imagined as bearded white men in battered cowboy hats. Roy Plotnick provides a behind-the-scenes look at paleontology as it exists today in all its complexity. He explores the field’s aims, methods, and possibilities, with an emphasis on the compelling personal stories of the scientists who have made it a career. Paleontologists study the entire history of life on Earth; they do not only use hammers and chisels to unearth fossils but are just as likely to work with cutting-edge computing technology. Plotnick presents the big questions about life’s history that drive paleontological research and shows why knowledge of Earth’s past is essential to understanding present-day environmental crises. He introduces readers to the diverse group of people of all genders, races, and international backgrounds who make up the twenty-first-century paleontology community, foregrounding their perspectives and firsthand narratives. He also frankly discusses the many challenges that face the profession, with key takeaways for aspiring scientists. Candid and comprehensive, Explorers of Deep Time is essential reading for anyone curious about the everyday work of real-life paleontologists.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane
Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Author: Robert Macfarlane
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0393242153
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National Bestseller • New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" • NPR "Favorite Books of 2019" • Guardian "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award "Mesmerizing…Underland is a portal of light in dark times." —Terry Tempest Williams, New York Times Book Review In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time—from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come—Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

Why Dinosaurs Matter

by Kenneth Lacovara
Why Dinosaurs Matter
Author: Kenneth Lacovara
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2017-09-19
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1501120107
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What can long-dead dinosaurs teach us about our future? Plenty, according to paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, who has discovered some of the largest creatures to ever walk the Earth. By tapping into the ubiquitous wonder that dinosaurs inspire, Lacovara weaves together the stories of our geological awakening, of humanity’s epic struggle to understand the nature of deep time, the meaning of fossils, and our own place on the vast and bountiful tree of life. Go on a journey––back to when dinosaurs ruled the Earth––to discover how dinosaurs achieved feats unparalleled by any other group of animals. Learn the secrets of how paleontologists find fossils, and explore quirky, but profound questions, such as: Is a penguin a dinosaur? And, how are the tiny arms of T. rex the key to its power and ferocity? In this revealing book, Lacovara offers the latest ideas about the shocking and calamitous death of the dinosaurs and ties their vulnerabilities to our own. Why Dinosaurs Matter is compelling and engaging—a great reminder that our place on this planet is both precarious and potentially fleeting. “As we move into an uncertain environmental future, it has never been more important to understand the past.”

The Book of Unconformities

by Hugh Raffles
The Book of Unconformities
Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2022-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1891241745
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From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

Digressions in Deep Time

by Declan Lloyd
Digressions in Deep Time
Author: Declan Lloyd
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 166694842X
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“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in particular: that deep time thinking and ecocriticism should be considered in conjunction, and that literature and the arts play a vital role in fostering a deep time awareness. Digressions in Deep Time is the first collection of essays which considers the multifarious representations of deep time across literature and the arts, assembling the work of a wide range of prominent scholars whose research frequently engages with temporality and ecocriticism. Featured contributions include work by the Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee, who popularised the term deep time in the late seventies, as well as chapters by Richard Irvine (author of An Anthropology of Deep Time), Benjamin Morgan (author of The Outward Mind) and Andrew Tate (author of Apocalyptic Fiction).

Expedition Deep Ocean

by Josh Young
Expedition Deep Ocean
Author: Josh Young
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1643136771
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The riveting story of the exploration of the final frontier of our planet—the deep ocean—and history-making mission to reach the bottom of all five seas. Humankind has explored every continent on earth, climbed its tallest mountains, and gone into space. But the largest areas of our planet remain largely a mystery: the deep oceans. At over 36,000 feet deep, there areas closest to earth’s core have remained nearly impossible to reach—until now. Technological innovations, engineering breakthroughs and the derring-do of a team of explorers, led by explorer Victor Vescovo, brought together an audacious global quest to dive to the deepest points of all five oceans for the first time in history. The expedition pushed technology to the limits, mapped hidden landscapes, discover previously unknown life forms and began to piece together how life in the deep oceans effects our planet—but it was far from easy. Expedition Deep Ocean is the inside story of this exploration of one of the most unforgiving and mysterious places on our planet, including the site of the Titanic wreck and the little-understood Hadal Zone. Vescovo and his team would design the most advanced deep-diving submersible ever built, where the pressure on the sub is 8 tons per square inch—the equivalent of having 292 fueled and fully loaded 747s stacked on top of it. And then there were hurricane-laden ocean waters and the byzantine web of global oceanography politics. Expedition Deep Ocean reveals the marvelous and other-worldly life found in all five deep ocean trenches, including several new species that have posed as of yet unanswered questions about survival and migration from ocean to ocean. Then there are the newly discovered sea mounts that cause tsunamis when they are broken by shifting subduction plates and jammed back into the earth crust, something that can now be studied to predict future disasters. Filled with high drama, adventure and the thrill of discovery, Expedition Deep Ocean celebrates courage and ingenuity and reveals the majesty and meaning of the deep ocean.

Deep Time

by Noah Heringman
Deep Time
Author: Noah Heringman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2023-01-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691235805
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How the concept of “deep time” began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries In this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman argues that the concept of “deep time”—most often associated with geological epochs—began as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about “the abyss of time” created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. Heringman, examining stories about the deep past by visionary thinkers ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin, challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, he argues, it has a rich imaginative history. Heringman considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook’s second voyage around the world, who, inspired by encounters with Pacific islanders, connected the scale of geological time to human origins and cultural evolution; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who drew on travel narrative, antiquarian works, and his own fieldwork to lay out the first modern geological timescale; Blake and Johann Gottfried Herder, who used the language of fossils and artifacts to promote ancient ballads and “prehistoric song”; and Darwin’s exploration of the reciprocal effects of geological and human time. Deep time, Heringman shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.

The Eternal Darkness

by Robert D. Ballard
The Eternal Darkness
Author: Robert D. Ballard
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781865082882
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One of the great scientific and archaeological challenges of our time has been to cast light on the 'eternal darkness' of the deep sea. This is the story of how that challenge has been met, told by the man who has done more than any other to make it possible: Robert Ballard.