San Antonio College Library

"The book begins with the age of the earth, and concludes with the life cycle of stars. In between, there are atoms old and new, the ozone hole mystery and how it was solved, synthetic fertilisers and explosives, reading the climate record, the extraction of metals, the wetness of water, and how the greenhouse effect on climate really works. A chapter in praise of uncertainty leads on to the fuzziness and sharing of electrons, and from there to molecular...

"What will be the fate of humanity and our store of natural resources in the next century? Will we drown in our own garbage and destroy the diversity of the biosphere? Heinrich Holland and Ulrich Petersen examine these and other questions in an innovative earth, natural resource, and environmental sciences textbook. Moving away from the organization of traditional geology courses, their work is based on an Earth systems science approach covering the...

Over the course of the twentieth century, scientists came to accept four counterintuitive yet fundamental facts about the Earth: deep time, continental drift, meteorite impact, and global warming. When first suggested, each proposition violated scientific orthodoxy and was quickly denounced as scientific - and sometimes religious - heresy. Nevertheless, after decades of rejection, new data persuaded scientists to change their minds. The stories behind...

Rudwick tells the gripping story of the gradual realization that the Earth's history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful in utterly unexpected ways. "Earth has been witness to mammoths and dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, and comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically to the surface, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it. But how was all this discovered?...