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Earth Grids: The Secret Patterns of Gaia's Sacred Sites (Wooden Books)
Newman, Hugh
(Hardcover)
List Price: $14.00 Sale: $4.39
In this beautiful little book, researcher Hugh Newman explores the science and history of Earth Grids, from Ancient Chinese medicine to the invention of longitude and latitude straight through to our current electrical system. Modern research into prehistoric architecture has found a pattern of building sites that suggests that our ancestors were aligning their sacred spaces according to geometric patterns and relationships with other important monuments. These ancients used Earth grids that allowed them to locate themselves in relationship to each other and to the planet - grids that are parallel to the ones we use today.Earth Grids unravels the short history of grid research and takes another look at the distribution of sacred sites around the planet, revealing a remarkable network of surveying and megalithic engineering that supports the ancient idea of a geometric worldview, which can now be seen as a new model for Gaia.
The Weather Makers
Flannery, Tim
(Softcover)
List Price: $22.95 Sale: $6.71
Climate change is real and it will affect all of us. From desertification to rising ocean levels, from killer storms to wildlife extinction, we're already seeing the effects of human activity on the planet's ecosystem. In this extraordinary book, Tim Flannery not only describes the problem of global warming and climate change, he suggests how the world can act to solve it.
The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast
Blum, Andrew
(Hardcover)
List Price: $25.99 Sale: $9.51
The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind all these humble interactions is the largest and most elaborate piece of infrastructure human beings have ever constructed—a triumph of both science and global cooperation. But what is the weather machine, and who created it?In The Weather Machine, Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey through the people, places, and tools of forecasting, exploring how the weather went from something we simply observed to something we could actually predict. As he travels across the planet, he visits some of the oldest and most important weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of forecasters to create a supercomputer model of the atmosphere, while trying to grasp the ongoing relevance of TV weather forecasters.In the increasingly unpredictable world of climate change, correctly understanding the weather is vital. Written with the sharp wit and infectious curiosity Andrew Blum is known for, The Weather Machine pulls back the curtain on a universal part of our everyday lives, illuminating our changing relationships with technology, the planet, and our global community.
The Attacking Ocean
Fagan, Brian
(Softcover)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $4.79
The past fifteen thousand years--the entire span of human civilization--have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age, when coastlines were more than seven hundred feet below modern levels. Over the next ten millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and starts. These rapid changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because those people were able to adjust readily to new coastlines. Global sea levels stabilized about six thousand years ago, except for local adjustments that caused often significant changes to places such as the Nile Delta. The curve of inexorably rising seas flattened out as urban civilizations developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Asia. The earth's population boomed, quintupling from the time of Christ to the Industrial Revolution. The threat from the oceans increased with our crowding along shores to live, fish, and trade. Since 1860, the world has warmed significantly and the ocean's climb has accelerated. The sea level changes are cumulative and gradual; no one knows when they will end. The Attacking Ocean, from celebrated author Brian Fagan, tells a tale of the rising complexity of the relationship between humans and the sea at their doorsteps, a complexity created not by the oceans, which have changed little. What has changed is us, and the number of us on earth.
The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast
Blum, Andrew
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $5.19
The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind all these humble interactions is the largest and most elaborate piece of infrastructure human beings have ever constructed—a triumph of both science and global cooperation. But what is the weather machine, and who created it?In The Weather Machine, Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey through the people, places, and tools of forecasting, exploring how the weather went from something we simply observed to something we could actually predict. As he travels across the planet, he visits some of the oldest and most important weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of forecasters to create a supercomputer model of the atmosphere, while trying to grasp the ongoing relevance of TV weather forecasters.In the increasingly unpredictable world of climate change, correctly understanding the weather is vital. Written with the sharp wit and infectious curiosity Andrew Blum is known for, The Weather Machine pulls back the curtain on a universal part of our everyday lives, illuminating our changing relationships with technology, the planet, and our global community.
Darwin's First Theory: Exploring Darwin's Quest for a Theory of Earth
Wesson, Rob
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.95 Sale: $6.07
An acclaimed geologist leads the reader on an adventure through the landscape that absorbed and inspired Charles Darwin.Everybody knows - or thinks they know - Charles Darwin, the father of evolution and the man who altered the way we view our place in the world. But what most people do not know is that Darwin was on board the HMS Beagle as a geologist - on a mission to examine the land, not flora and fauna.Retracing Darwin’s footsteps in South America and beyond, geologist Rob Wesson treks across the Andes, cruises waters charted by the Beagle, hunts for fossils in Uruguay and Argentina, and explores sites of long vanished glaciers in Scotland and Wales. As he follows Darwin’s path - literally and intellectually - Wesson experiences the land as Darwin did, engages with his observations, and tackles the same questions Darwin had about our ever-changing Earth.Upon his return from his five-year journey aboard the Beagle, after examining the effects of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and more, Darwin conceived his theory of subsidence and uplift‚ - his first theory. These concepts and attitudes - the vastness of time; the enormous cumulative impact of almost imperceptibly slow change; change as a constant feature of the environment - underlie Darwin’s subsequent discoveries in evolution. And this peculiar way of thinking remains vitally important today as we enter the human-dominated Anthropocene age.Expertly interweaving science and adventure, Darwin’s First Theory is a riveting and revelatory journey around the world with one of the greatest scientific minds in history.
The Great Extinctions: What Causes Them and How They Shape Life
MacLeod, Norman
(Softcover)
List Price: $24.95 Sale: $7.83
For over a century, geologists have tried to identify and understand the processes responsible for the complex history of species extinction. This search has become even more important over the last decade as human populations and human technology may now rival sea-level change, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts as an extinction mechanism.The Great Extinctions explores the history of that search, its subjects, its controversies, its current conclusions and their meaning for our efforts to preserve the Earth's biodiversity. It explains what extinction is, what causes it and whether it can be prevented. Examining extinction over geological time,The Great Extinctions compares past geological extinction events and uses them to predict what it is likely to happen in the future.
Mammoths and Mastodons of the Ice Age
Lister, Adrian
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.95 Sale: $8.23
A vivid, authoritative exploration of the iconic giants of the Ice Age. Featuring stunning photographs of skeletons, casts, tusks and preserved flesh from the world-famous collections of the Natural History Museum in London and Chicago's Field Museum (home to the most complete and best preserved mammoth baby), this book reveals what life was like for these prehistoric giants whose remains invite so much modern fascination and speculation. From 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago as global temperatures cooled, colossal mammals were an imposing presence on the Pleistocene landscape, roaming alongside humans across great swaths of Europe, Asia, and much of North America. Mammoths and Mastodons of the Ice Age explains the differences between these animals, describes their habitats and behaviors, and introduces other amazing creatures from the Ice Age, such as the saber-toothed cat, giant sloth, cave bear and dire wolf. Drawing on current scientific research, including recently revealed DNA analysis that shows the real color of mammoths, Adrian Lister explores how hunters stalked the elephantine prey, why they died out and whether it's possible to clone them today. He also examines what wild elephants (their surviving cousins) tell us about their extinct ancestors and how the natural and human-caused challenges elephants face today may doom them to the same fate. Mammoths and Mastodons of the Ice Age is a tie-in with the traveling museum exhibition "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age," which opened in Chicago in 2010, and will tour through 2016. The similarly named 3D film has received rave reviews and undoubtedly will become a popular big-screen event, once the museum exhibition closes.
Meteorites: The Story of Our Solar System
Smith, Caroline
(Softcover)
List Price: $19.95 Sale: $5.88
Meteorites are natural objects that have fallen from space to the Earth's surface. Once considered bad omens, they are now recognized as a unique window onto the processes that forged the formation of the solar system 4,570 million years ago. They reveal how impacts have shaped and modified planets, asteroids and moons; and they even contain evidence of astrophysical phenomena that occurred long before our solar system was born.This book contains all the latest information on key meteorite falls and considers some of the big questions that still remain - such as whether our solar system is unusual in creating a planet that supports life, and if it is likely we will find complex life elsewhere. With a mix of photographs, diagrams and maps, Meteorites is essential reading for all those with an interest in the nature of our solar system.
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
Randall, Lisa
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $5.43
In this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times bestselling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven’s Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections between the furthest reaches of space and life here on Earth. Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of dark matter embedded in the Milky Way. In a sense, it might have been dark matter that killed the dinosaurs. Working through the background and consequences of this proposal, Randall shares with us the latest findings - established and speculative - regarding the nature and role of dark matter and the origin of the Universe, our galaxy, our Solar System, and life, along with the process by which scientists explore new concepts. In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Randall tells a breathtaking story that weaves together the cosmos’ history and our own, illuminating the deep relationships that are critical to our world and the astonishing beauty inherent in the most familiar things.
Moby-Duck
Hohn, Donovan
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.43
When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive arena of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories. Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable.
How the Earth Works: An Illustrated Guide to the Wonders of Our Planet (How Things Work)
Chartwell Books
(Hardcover)
List Price: $21.00 Sale: $6.07
How do mountains move? Why are polar bears white? How are raindrops formed in the middle of a storm? What makes a dormant volcano erupt? All of these questions and thousands more are answered and explained in How the Earth Works via amazing photography and stunning illustrations in full-color cross sections.From the comfort of your home, discover and explore the world's greatest curiosities and most fascinating spectacles. Learn how and when the planet was formed and examine some of its most interesting, beautiful , and horrifying natural wonders - from its tallest trees, highest mountains, and deepest oceans, to its earthquakes that cause devastating tsunamis. Earth awaits you!
Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future
Robinson, Mary
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $8.44
An urgent call to arms by one of the most important voices in the international fight against climate change, sharing inspiring stories and offering vital lessons for the path forward.Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people--people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal.Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change.Powerful and deeply humane, Climate Justice is a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope.
Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
Hansen, James
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $3.91
An urgent and provocative call to action from the world's leading climate scientist - speaking out here for the first time with the full story of what we need to know about humanity's last chance to get off the path to a catastrophic global meltdown, and why we don't know the half of it.
The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)
Jones, Lucy
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.95 Sale: $7.27
By the world-renowned seismologist, a riveting history of natural disasters, their impact on our culture, and new ways of thinking about the ones to come.Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes--they stem from the same forces that give our planet life. Earthquakes give us natural springs; volcanoes produce fertile soil. It is only when these forces exceed our ability to withstand them that they become disasters. Together they have shaped our cities and their architecture; elevated leaders and toppled governments; influenced the way we think, feel, fight, unite, and pray. The history of natural disasters is a history of ourselves.In The Big Ones, leading seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones offers a bracing look at some of the world's greatest natural disasters, whose reverberations we continue to feel today. At Pompeii, Jones explores how a volcanic eruption in the first century AD challenged prevailing views of religion. She examines the California floods of 1862 and the limits of human memory. And she probes more recent events--such as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the American hurricanes of 2017--to illustrate the potential for globalization to humanize and heal.With population in hazardous regions growing and temperatures around the world rising, the impacts of natural disasters are greater than ever before. The Big Ones is more than just a work of history or science; it is a call to action. Natural hazards are inevitable; human catastrophes are not. With this energizing and exhaustively researched book, Dr. Jones offers a look at our past, readying us to face down the Big Ones in our future.
The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
Fountain, Henry
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.67
At 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964, a magnitude 9.2. earthquake – the second most powerful in world history – struck the young state of Alaska. The violent shaking, followed by massive tsunamis, devastated the southern half of the state and killed more than 130 people. A day later, George Plafker, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, arrived to investigate. His fascinating scientific detective work in the months that followed helped confirm the then-controversial theory of plate tectonics.In a compelling tale about the almost unimaginable brute force of nature, New York Times science journalist Henry Fountain combines history and science to bring the quake and its aftermath to life in vivid detail. With deep, on-the-ground reporting from Alaska, often in the company of George Plafker, Fountain shows how the earthquake left its mark on the land and its people - and on science.
Lost Antarctica
McClintock, James
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $4.79
Few of us will ever get to Antarctica. The bitter cold and three months a year without sunlight makes the sixth continent virtually uninhabitable for humans. Yet marine biologist James B. McClintock has spent three decades studying the frozen land in order to understand better the world that lies beneath it.In this luminous and closely observed account, one of the world's leading experts on Antarctica introduces the reader to this fascinating world - the extraordinary wildlife that persists despite the harsh conditions and the way each of the pieces fit into the puzzle of the intricate environment: from single-celled organisms to baleen whales, with leopard seals, penguins, 50-foot algae, sea spiders, coral, and multicolored sea stars, in between. Now, as temperatures rise, the fragile ecosystem is under attack. Adelie penguins that have successfully nested on Antarctic islands for several hundred years have been nearly wiped out. King crabs that used to populate the deep seafloor are moving into shallower waters, disturbing the set order of life there. Lost Antarctica is an appeal to understand and appreciate the wondrous place at the bottom of the world that we are on the brink of losing.
The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World (Bloomsbury Sigma)
Nunn, Patrick
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $6.95
In The Edge of Memory, Patrick Nunn explores the science in folk history. He looks at ancient tales and traditions that may be rooted in scientifically verifiable fact, and can be explored via geological evidence, such as the Biblical Flood.We all know those stories that have been told in our families for generations. The ones that start "Have I ever told you about your great, great Uncle ...?" In some cultures these stories have been passed down for thousands of years, and often reveal significant information about how the surrounding environment has changed and the effect it has had on societies--from stories referring to coastal drowning to the devastation caused by meteorite falls.Take Australian folklore, for instance. People arrived in Australia more than 60,000 years ago, and the need to survive led to the development of knowledge that was captured orally in stories passed down through the generations. These stories conveyed both practical information and recorded history, and they frequently made reference to a coastline that was very different to the one we recognize today. In at least 21 different communities along the fringe of Australia, flood stories were recorded by European anthropologists, missionaries, and others. They described a lost landscape that is now under as much as 100 feet of ocean. And these folk traditions are backed up by hard science. Geologists are now starting to corroborate the tales through study of climatic data, sediments and land forms; the evidence was there in the stories, but until recently, nobody was listening.The Edge of Memory is an important book that explores the wider implications for our knowledge of how human society has developed through the millennia.
In Oceans Deep: Courage, Innovation, and Adventure Beneath the Waves
Streever, Bill
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $8.63
In an age of unprecedented exploration and innovation, our oceans remain largely unknown, and endlessly fascinating: full of mystery, danger, beauty, and inspiration. In Oceans Deep celebrates the daring pioneers who tested the limits of what the human body can endure under water: free divers able to reach 300 feet on a single breath; engineers and scientists who uncovered the secrets of decompression; teenagers who built their own diving gear from discarded boilers and garden hoses in the 1930s; saturation divers who lived under water for weeks at a time in the 1960s; and the trailblazing men who voluntarily breathed experimental gases at pressures sufficient to trigger insanity.Tracing both the little-known history and exciting future of how we travel and study the depths, Streever's captivating journey includes seventeenth-century leather-hulled submarines, their nuclear-powered descendants, a workshop where luxury submersibles are built for billionaire clients, and robots capable of roving unsupervised between continents, revolutionizing access to the ocean.In this far-flung trip to the wild, night-dark place of shipwrecks, trapped submariners, oil wells, innovative technologies, and people willing to risk their lives while challenging the deep, we discover all the adventures our seas have to offer -- and why they are in such dire need of conservation.
The Spinning Magnet: The Electromagnetic Force That Created the Modern World - and Could Destroy It
Mitchell, Alanna
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $6.07
The mystery of Earth's invisible, life-supporting powerAlanna Mitchell's globe-trotting history of the science of electromagnetism and the Earth's magnetic field--right up to the latest indications that the North and South Poles may soon reverse, with apocalyptic results--will soon change the way you think about our planet.Award-winning journalist Alanna Mitchell's science storytelling introduce intriguing characters--from the thirteenth-century French investigations into magnetism and the Victorian-era discover that electricity and magnetism emerge from the same fundamental force to the latest research. No one has ever told so eloquently how the Earth itself came to be seen as a magnet, spinning in space with two poles, and that those poles have dramatically reversed many time, often coinciding with mass extinctions. The most recent reversal was 780,000 years ago.Mitchell explores indications that the Earth's magnetic force field is decaying faster than previously thought. When the poles switch, a process that takes many years, the Earth is unprotected from solar radiation storms that would, among other disturbances, wipe out much and possible all of our electromagnetic technology. Navigation for all kinds of animals is disrupted without a stable, magnetic North Pole. But can you imagine no satellites, no Internet, no smartphones--maybe no power grids at all?Alanna Mitchell offers a beautifully crafted narrative history of surprising ideas and science, illuminating invisible parts of our own planet that are constantly changing around us.
Over the Rivers (An Aerial View of Geology)
Collier, Michael
(Hardcover)
List Price: $34.95 Sale: $11.27
Over the Rivers is the second volume in the exciting Aerial View of Geology series (the first was the highly praised Over the Mountains). As as a geologist, one of America's premier aerial photographers and a gifted science writer, Michael Collier is exceptionally well qualified to present these spectacular landscapes and stunning aerial photographs that vividly demonstrate geological processes.Vivid text and clear captions guide readers through the exciting photographs, enhancing their understanding of fundamental geological processes. Collier explores, for example:• How a 6,000-foot-deep canyon was carved out by the erosive power of a single river• How violent tectonic forces millions of years ago vaulted a river over a mountain• Why one river takes its time meandering, another suddenly drops over a cliff, and a third slowly separates into a sprawling delta.Over the Rivers inspires as it informs, and dazzles as it enlightens.
Weather 101
Sears, Kathleen
(Hardcover)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $5.43
All too often books about the study of weather are so tedious that even your favorite weatherperson would be bored to tears. Weather 101 changes all that.With an engaging, conversational tone, this easy-to-follow guide will keep you entertained - whether you're a novice meteorologist or just interested in learning more about weather patterns. From clear blue skies to hail to dust storms and featuring information on how to predict the weather; how to be ready for natural disasters; and how climate change is affecting the world, t his guide turns anyone into a weather expert.From low- and high-pressure systems to floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, Weather 101 has all the answers - even the ons you didn't know you were looking for.
Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration
Whittell, Giles
(Hardcover)
List Price: $25.00 Sale: $2.37
Brimming with interesting facts and surprising anecdotes, this scientific and cultural history opens our eyes to the wonders of one of nature’s most delicate, delightful, and deadly phenomena: SNOW! Perfect for fans of The Hidden Life of Trees and Rain.Go on an extraordinary journey across centuries and continents to experience the wonders of snow; from the prehistoric humans that trekked and even skied across it tens of thousands of years ago to the multi-billion-dollar industry behind our moving, making, and playing with snow. Blending accessible writing with fascinating science, Giles Whittell explores how snow dictates where we live, provides us with drinking water, and has influenced countless works of art and more.Whittell also uncovers compelling mysteries of this miraculous substance, such as why avalanches happen, how snow saved a British prime minister’s life, where the legend of the yeti comes from, and the terrifying truth behind the opening ceremony of the 1960 winter Olympics.Filled with in-depth research and whip-smart prose, Snow is an eye-opening and charming book that illuminates one of the most magnificent wonders of nature.
The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior
Mancuso, Stefano
(Hardcover)
List Price: $30.00 Sale: $9.32
Do plants have intelligence? Do they have memory? Are they better problem solvers than people? The Revolutionary Genius of Plants—a fascinating, paradigm-shifting work that upends everything you thought you knew about plants—makes a compelling scientific case that these and other astonishing ideas are all true.Plants make up eighty percent of the weight of all living things on earth, and yet it is easy to forget that these innocuous, beautiful organisms are responsible for not only the air that lets us survive, but for many of our modern comforts: our medicine, food supply, even our fossil fuels.On the forefront of uncovering the essential truths about plants, world-renowned scientist Stefano Mancuso reveals the surprisingly sophisticated ability of plants to innovate, to remember, and to learn, offering us creative solutions to the most vexing technological and ecological problems that face us today. Despite not having brains or central nervous systems, plants perceive their surroundings with an even greater sensitivity than animals. They efficiently explore and react promptly to potentially damaging external events thanks to their cooperative, shared systems; without any central command centers, they are able to remember prior catastrophic events and to actively adapt to new ones.Every page of The Revolutionary Genius of Plants bubbles over with Stefano Mancuso’s infectious love for plants and for the eye-opening research that makes it more and more clear how remarkable our fellow inhabitants on this planet really are. In his hands, complicated science is wonderfully accessible, and he has loaded the book with gorgeous photographs that make for an unforgettable reading experience. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants opens the doors to a new understanding of life on earth.
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