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9780199593576

The Goldilocks Planet The 4 Billion Year Story of Earth's Climate

by ;
  • ISBN13:

    9780199593576

  • ISBN10:

    0199593574

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2012-05-18
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Summary

Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal inThe Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years. Indeed, the vast history that the authors relate here is dramatic and often abrupt--with massive changes in global and regional climate, from bitterly cold to sweltering hot, from arid to humid. They introduce us to the Cryogenian period, the days of Snowball Earth seven hundred million years ago, when ice spread to cover the world, then melted abruptly amid such dramatic climatic turbulence that hurricanes raged across the Earth. We read about the Carboniferous, with tropical jungles at the equator (where Pennsylvania is now) and the Cretaceous Period, when the polar regions saw not ice but dense conifer forests of cypress and redwood, with gingkos and ferns. The authors also show how this history can be read from clues preserved in the Earth's strata. The evidence is abundant, though always incomplete--and often baffling, puzzling, infuriating, tantalizing, seemingly contradictory. Geologists, though, are becoming ever more ingenious at deciphering this evidence, and the story of the Earth's climate is now being reconstructed in ever-greater detail--maybe even providing us with clues to the future of contemporary climate change. And through all of this, the authors conclude, the Earth has remained perfectly habitable--in stark contrast to its planetary neighbors. Not too hot, not too cold; not too dry, not too wet--"the Goldilocks planet."

Author Biography


Jan Zalasiewicz is Senior Lecturer in Geology at Leicester University. He is the author of The Earth After Us and The Planet in a Pebble.
Mark Williams is Reader in Geology at Leicester University. Both are established researchers into palaeoclimates and climate change.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgementsp. ix
List of Illustrationsp. xi
Prologuep. xiii
A Brief Word on Timep. xvii
Primordial Climatep. 1
Earth as a Snowballp. 21
Between Greenhouse and Icehousep. 53
The Last Greenhouse Worldp. 85
The Ice Returnsp. 107
The Last of the Warmthp. 133
Into the Icehousep. 157
The Glacial Worldp. 169
Birth and Death of the Holocenep. 199
The Anthropocene Beginsp. 229
Notesp. 269
Further readingp. 279
Referencesp. 281
Indexp. 297
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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