About the Book
Table of Contents:
Chapter 01 World-building'In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos:'
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, 1674
A whirling cloud of gas and dust was the cradle of our planet and its companions. The story of Earth begins with the scattered particles of hundreds of destroyed stars, moulded by the gravity and heat of the forming Sun.
Chapter 02: Long, long ago'The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.'
James Hutton, 1788
Just how old is Earth?
Chapter 3: Earth, air and water
'Where once was solid land, Seas have I seene;
And solid land, where once deepe Seas have beene.'
Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, 1632, Book XV
In its earliest days, Earth was a spinning mass of red-hot semi-molten rock and metal. As it cooled, it hardened, eventually developing a solid outer crust with oceans of liquid water. In its first half billion years or so, it gained an atmosphere, oceans, a rocky surface - and probably life. It was a busy time.
4: Rocks of ages'We felt necessarily carried back to a time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of the supercontinent ocean... The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time.'
John Playfair, 1788
The rocks of Earth seem eternal and unchanging. Yet rocks do grow, crumble and morph, changing both mechanically and chemically. The rocky crust of Earth is as thin as the skin of an apple, relative to the planet's size, yet it is here that the rest of the story of Earth has played out.
5: Active Earth'Water, Fire; Fire, Water; mutually, as it were, cherish one another; and by a certain unanimous consent, conspire to the Conservation of the Geocosm, or Terrestrial World.'
Athanasius Kircher,1665
The cycle of rock formation unpicked by Hutton and later geologists relates only to the top surface of Earth - its crust. The changes we see are symptoms of something larger: the eternal turmoil within the planet.
6: Life changes everythingOrganic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature, 1802
Unlike other planets in the solar system, Earth is home to abundant and diverse forms of life.
7: Living land'Fossils have long been studied as great curiosities, collected with great pains, treasured with great care ... and this has been done by thousands who have never paid the least regard to that wonderful order and regularity with which Nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its peculiar stratum.'
William Smith, 1796
For around three billion years, almost everything that lived, lived in the sea. Then, just a moment ago in geological time, pioneers crawled from the oceans and began to shape the world in new ways.
8: Days of the dead'The Dodo used to walk around,
And take the sun and air.
The sun yet warms his native ground-
The Dodo is not there!'
Hilaire Belloc, "The Dodo", The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, 1896
With life comes death. The inhabitation of Earth fell into a pattern of diversification followed by extinction, followed by diversification in new directions. The cycle is an intricate interweaving of geology, meteorology and biology.
9: Into the Anthropocene 'Bacteria... have been here for three and a half billion years, and without them we have no chance whatsoever of survival. Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer.'
James Lovelock, 1990
The rise (and potential fall) of humankind is just a part of the story of evolution and of the story of Earth, but for us it is an important part. Yet we have been here for but the twinkling of an eye in geological time, and will likely be gone again just as quickly. We will leave our scars, just as the first cyanobacteria have left theirs.
About the Author :
Anne Rooney is an award-winning author who has written several bestselling books on history, philosophy and science. She was longlisted for the prestigious Aventis Science Prize in 2004, was shortlisted for the ALCS Educational Writers' Award in 2015 and won the School Library Association Information Book Award in 2018. She has a degree and a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge and has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her books have been translated into 22 languages.
