‘Encyclopedia of Astrobiology’ by Muriel Gargaud (ed)
The emerging field of science concerned with the possibility of life beyond the Earth has variously been dubbed astrobiology, exobiology and bioastronomy (and xenobiology – the biology of the foreign or strange – is sometimes used as well). So as Christian de Duve remarks in his foreword to this Encyclopaedia, this field has the rare distinction of enjoying three names and as yet not a single known example of its own subject matter. But astrobiology is still a young field of science, and whilst some of it’s component fields have a long heritage and are well-matured, others...
Read More‘The Emerald Planet: How plants changed Earth’s history’ by David Beerling
David Beerling is passionate about plants and their role in shaping the Earth, and this is clearly evident in his book The Emerald Planet: How plants changed Earth’s history. The book follows in loose chronological order how the evolution of plants and their colonisation across the Earth helped facilitate the evolution of the planet; its atmosphere and geology, and also its ecology. In the beginning there were photosynthetic organisms and plants grew from these, give or take about 40 million years of evolution or so. Beerling begins his work with a chapter devoted to how plants at the...
Read More‘Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History’ by Susan M. Gaines, Geoffrey Eglinton & Jurgen Rullkotter
Echoes of Life focuses on the history and synthesis of the discipline organic chemistry, from early experiments in the ‘30s (along with many musings long before then) to current areas of active research. The book moves along in a fantastic story-book-style narrative while never straying from the fundamental science being described. The book starts off with a thorough introduction, across a few chapters, to the reasoning behind organic chemistry and the development of analytical techniques that we use routinely today. The text then moves on very nicely, introducing various cross-discipline...
Read More‘The Earth: A Very Short Introduction’ by Martin Redfern
Less than 140 pages long, this guide to the Earth offers a rapid-fire tour through our planet’s place in space and time through the last 4,560 million years. Martin Redfen presents an up to date story piecing together the different disciplines of geology, astronomy, physics and atmospheric and environmental sciences to better understand the history of the Earth. The story is well researched, and written in a style that tries to blend scientific discussion with colloquial thoughts and carefully chosen analogies. Individual subjects, ranging from explaining how geologists measure the age of...
Read More‘The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?’ by Jan Zalasiewicz
The central premise of The Earth After Us is in discussing what traces might remain 100 million years in the future of our species and the civilisation we have built if we were to fall extinct. What anthropogenic signals might extraterrestrial palaeontologists be able discover in the strata re-exposed on the Earth’s surface? In answering this question, Jan Zalasiewicz provides an engaging and broad sweep of the science of geology, different signals preserved in the rocks, and the important inferences that can be drawn from them. Much of the book is of direct importance to planetary...
Read More‘Early Life on Earth (A Practical Guide)’ by David Wacey
This book is Volume 31 in the Topics in Geobiology series edited by Neil Landman and Peter Harries, and examines the evidence for life in the Archean. Early Life on Earth attempts to answer the fundamental question of “when did life first appear on Earth and what form did it take?” The introduction by Martin Brasier puts the question into a historical context and discusses how the first pioneers (which included Charles Darwin) both helped and hindered the search for early life. Crucially, there is discussion on the formation of stromatolites and how our understanding of the “cyanosphere” has...
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