From Stone to Star: A View of Modern Geology - Tapa blanda

Highly readable and deeply informative...An excellent introduction to the exciting geohistorical discoveries made in recent decades...it will serve alike the needs of the geologist and the general reader. -- Gordon L. Herries Davies Nature Allegre takes the reader on a fascinating voyage of discovery through the simple layered sedimentary strata of the top few kilometers of the Earth to the depths of its core and then out to the farthest limits of space...A book like this, which aims to place the Earth (and the Earth sciences) in a cosmological context, has been long overdue; From Stone to Star deserves a wide readership. -- Martin Whitehouse Times Higher Education Supplement In twenty-two years of reading Earth science books, I have encountered many superlatives of writing. A few names that pop to mind are John McPhee, Isaac Asimov, and Stephen Gould. To these established authors I would like to add Claude Allegre--literate, lucid, fun to read, exciting, and a great scientist...From Stone to Star is an intelligent, informative, wonderful book. -- William C. Philips Science Teacher

From Stone to Star chronicles one of the great scientific adventures of our time. Written by the eminent geochemist Claude Allegre, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the sophisticated isotopic detective work that has established a geologic chronology of the earth and transformed our understanding of its genesis and history. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe geologists exploring the earth's surface collected fossils and hotly debated the origin of the layered and folded rocks in which they were embedded. The development of seismology, the study of earthquakes, in this century shifted the focus from the terrestrial crust to the earth's deep interior. But our knowledge of the chemistry of the earth and of the solar system has been revolutionized by advances in modern laboratory technology and analysis of meteorites and lunar rocks. High resolution mass spectrometry has allowed scientists to explore the very hearts of atoms. The Apollo mission brought back our first samples of the lunar surface, and unmanned space probes have gathered detailed photographs of distant planets. From Stone to Star provides an engaging account of this exciting new chapter in scientific discovery. Scientists can now measure the isotopic composition of atoms with extreme precision. As miraculous as it may seem, a minute quantity of meteorite yields more information about the structure of the earth and the primitive history of the solar system than years of fieldwork on the earth's surface. Allegre, who was a project scientist during the interplanetary space missions, scrupulously avoids technical jargon. His lucid prose and abiding passion for his subject succeed in creating a superbly readable introduction to the history, methods, and theories of modern geology.