The incredible story of the creation of a continent--our continent--
from the acclaimed author of The Last Volcano and Mask of the Sun.
Now in a revised paperback edition!
"Exuberant. Dvorak is a wonderful storyteller [and] challenges the
conventional wisdom. This will enrich your everyday personal
experiences."--The Wall Street Journal
The immense scale of geologic time is difficult to comprehend. Our
lives--and the entirety of human history--are mere nanoseconds on this
timescale. Yet we hugely influenced by the land we live on. From shales
and fossil fuels, from lake beds to soil composition, from elevation to
fault lines, what could be more relevant that the history of the ground
beneath our feet?
For most of modern history, geologists could say little more about why
mountains grew than the obvious: there were forces acting inside the
Earth that caused mountains to rise. But what were those forces? And why
did they act in some places of the planet and not at others?
When the theory of plate tectonics was proposed, our concept of how the
Earth worked experienced a momentous shift. As the Andes continue to
rise, the Atlantic Ocean steadily widens, and Honolulu creeps ever
closer to Tokyo, this seemingly imperceptible creep of the Earth is
revealed in the landscape all around us.
But tectonics cannot--and do not--explain everything about the wonders
of the North American landscape. What about the Black Hills? Or the
walls of chalk that stand amongst the rolling hills of west Kansas? Or
the fact that the states of Washington and Oregon are slowly rotating
clockwise, and there a diamond mine in Arizona?
It all points to the geologic secrets hidden inside the
2-billion-year-old-continental masses. A whopping ten times older than
the rocky floors of the ocean, continents hold the clues to the long
history of our planet.
With a sprightly narrative that vividly brings this science to life,
this revised edition of John Dvorak's monumental How the Mountains
Grew will fill readers with a newfound appreciation for the wonders of
the land we live on.
