Earth Story: The Shaping of Our World - Hardcover

The subtitle to Earth Story is to be taken literally. This remarkable book and the accompanying TV series set out to explain with imagination and scientific rigor The Shaping of Our World. No other planet in the solar system exhibits such frenetic geological activity. The Earth's mass is in continual flux as heat from the mantel, rising to the comparatively cool surface, stirs the tectonic plates upon which the continents ride, shuffling constantly. Lamb and Sington show how the climatic effects this shuffling engenders make life possible--but they go further. Without life, they argue, there is no temperature control mechanism on the planet's surface. Without that, there can be no oceans--Earth would, like Venus, lose its water to evaporation. And without oceans to act as a lubricant there can be no movement of tectonic plates. According to this argument only a planet which can sustain life can be geologically frenetic. The Earth's geology and biology, then, are part of a single mechanism.

Earth Story is no mere TV tie-in; its erudition is the equal of the best popular science, and its full-colour illustrations have the clarity and precision of classic school and college texts. On the other hand the photography, as one might expect from a documentary tie- in, is frequently breath- taking. If all this makes Earth Story sound like a chimera, well so it is--but as a medium for such an all-encompassing theory of geological and biological change this concatenation of popular science, college illustration and gosh-wow photography could hardly be bettered. --Simon Ings