Ebook Free Revolutions that Made the Earth
Ebook Free Revolutions that Made the Earth
Well, even this book is given in different with the published publication; it will certainly not allow matter. You recognize why this site has many fans? Well, all noted books include the soft file. It is provided based on the title. When you check out the website in this page, discovering the connect to get this Revolutions That Made The Earth is easy. Simply follow it and also find guide.
Revolutions that Made the Earth
Ebook Free Revolutions that Made the Earth
What's your requirement to be reviewing product in this time? Is that guide that is related to the obligations? Is that guide that can captivate you in your lonely time? Or, is that just kind of publication that you can read to go along with the spare time? Every person has different reason that they choose the certain book. It will include certain cover design, intriguing title, advised topic, required motif, and expert writers.
Why must be Revolutions That Made The Earth in this website? Get much more profits as what we have told you. You can discover the various other eases besides the previous one. Alleviate of obtaining the book Revolutions That Made The Earth as just what you really want is additionally given. Why? Our company offer you numerous kinds of guides that will not make you really feel bored. You can download them in the web link that we supply. By downloading Revolutions That Made The Earth, you have taken the right way to select the ease one, compared to the inconvenience one.
Checking out Revolutions That Made The Earth will certainly provide much more advantages that might commonly on the others or may not be discovered in others. A book turns into one that is essential in holding the rule in this life. Book will certainly give and connect you regarding what you require and satisfy. Book will also notify you regarding just what you recognize or just what you have unknowned yet really.
From the explanation over, it is clear that you need to review this publication Revolutions That Made The Earth We supply the online publication qualified Revolutions That Made The Earth right here by clicking the web link download. From shared book by on the internet, you could offer a lot more advantages for many individuals. Besides, the readers will be also conveniently to obtain the favourite e-book Revolutions That Made The Earth to review. Discover the most preferred and needed publication Revolutions That Made The Earth to check out now as well as here.
Review
"This is an up-to-date version of such integrated views of Earth history as a time series of stable environmental states, or steps, each of which is punctuated by biologically induced 'revolutions'... This work may become one of the better avenues for the intelligent undergraduate to grasp the scientific version of the Gaia hypothesis... Highly recommended." --CHOICE
Read more
About the Author
Tim Lenton is a Professor at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on understanding the behaviour of the Earth as a whole system, especially through the development and use of Earth system models. After gaining a BA in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, he investigated what regulates the nutrient balance of the ocean and the oxygen content of the atmosphere as a PhD student of Andrew Watson. He also worked closely with James Lovelock developing the Gaia theory and trying to reconcile it with evolutionary theory. Moving to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, he focused on understanding the feedbacks between the carbon cycle and the Earth's climate. Having returned to the University of East Anglia in 2004, his work identifying climate tipping points won the Times Higher Education Award for Research Projects of the Year 2008. He holds a number of other awards and fellowships.Andrew Watson holds a Royal Society Research Professorship at the University of East Anglia. His career has spanned planetary and atmospheric sciences, oceanography, and climate, giving him a strong interest in the evolution of the Earth system as a whole. After obtaining a BSc in physics from Imperial College, he investigated the history of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere as a PhD student of James Lovelock. He worked on NASA's Pioneer Venus space mission at the University of Michigan. Returning to England and the marine research laboratories in Plymouth, he developed a new method of tracing large scale water movements. He became a professor at the University of East Anglia in 1996, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, and became a Royal Society Research Professor in 2009. He holds a number of other fellowships and awards.
Read more
Product details
Paperback: 440 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; Reissue edition (May 19, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199673462
ISBN-13: 978-0199673469
Product Dimensions:
9.1 x 0.9 x 6.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.7 out of 5 stars
5 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,642,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Usually the history of the last 4.5 billion is focused on geology or the evolution of life. This book gives us a perspective on how the geology and life evolved together. Its a very difficult time to know anything about, even for the scientists who study it, so its great to have that information collected and told as a story here in Revolutions.
If ever there was a book that addressed the big issues of our time (or, indeed of any time), this is it. How did life gain a sustainable foothold on our planet? What had to happen to make this possible, and how likely or unlikely were those things, on a cosmic scale? What does this tell us about the likelihood of life on other planets elsewhere in the universe? (Less likely, it seems, than I had unwittingly assumed). If there have been a number of key 'revolutions' that have made life on earth possible and sustainable, does the huge current impact of human life on our planet represent a new revolution? Will human activity, so demanding of natural resources and so damaging to the global environment, lead to disaster or, since we are the first life form to be conscious observers of the results of our own activities, will we take action to avoid this disaster?Phew! This is an excellent book, painstakingly researched and written with both rigour and verve. It represents scientific debate at the highest level - it is absolutely not 'popular science' - but the authors have been careful to allow the interested layman to follow the plot. You may well (like me) have to skip some aspects of probability distribution with regard to the 'critical steps' needed for the evolution of advanced life forms or some of the details of electron transfer in photosynthesis (sadly, I used to be able to follow at least some of that stuff; no longer, clearly!) but you will never lose the general drift of the argument. I should add that Lenton and Watson believe that the 'critical steps' analysis of the evolution of life is too simplistic, and that the real `revolutions' that have driven the evolution of life (like 'The Oxygen Revolution') are complex series of events.The authors argue that that every 'revolution' that has enabled the increasing complexity of life on earth has been based on an increase in energy processing and the recycling of essential materials (like carbon and water) within the biosphere. Coupled with this has been the ability to transfer increasing amounts of information (via genetic materials). If the Human Revolution is real, they argue, then we should take very careful note of these facts if we want our revolution to be successful: we are processing vastly more energy than ever before (through our use of fossil fuels) and we are transmitting more information across generations than ever before (through our development of language). We are not doing so well on the recycling front (I am being flippant: read on).Each revolution has had dramatic consequences, some of which could have led to the destruction of the biosphere: we are where we are today because of a series of successful revolutions, some highly unlikely. Our own revolution will be (and clearly is) equally fraught with dangers.The authors are, in effect, proponents of James Lovelock's 'Gaia' theory (the theory that the organic and inorganic systems on planet earth are a self-regulating system). The Gaia theory is, however, dangerously self-confirming: our planetary system sustains life by means of an astoundingly complex set of interactions, but is this the almost inevitable outcome of the evolution of life ('Probable Gaia') or does planet earth just happen to have allowed the right conditions to arise by a series of fortuitous events ('Lucky Gaia')?Lenton and Watson argue that, at a relatively low level of complexity of life - the microbial level - 'life will inadvertently (but inevitably) get entangled in environmental feedback loops' most of which will be benign, with the occasional possibility of self-induced extinction. Further up the evolutionary chain, things get dicier. The authors suggest that the development of photosynthesis by cyanobacteria is the most significant (and most unlikely) event in the development of life on earth, one that allowed significant further complexity to develop.This has great consequences for the likelihood of life on other planets. There are, apparently, 250 star systems within 30 light years of our own, We can hope to find basic life forms on a very few planets in these star systems - those that exist in a habitable zone around their own star - but the authors would expect to find oxygenic photosynthesis in perhaps one in ten, or fewer, of those planets that have rudimentary life forms. Ergo: probably no advanced life forms within 30 light years' radius of the solar system. Less chance, it seems, of an alien spacecraft landing in my back yard than I might have hoped.The sheer number of factors that have to come into play to enable complex life forms to evolve are daunting: planets need to be in the habitable zone around their sun, which changes over time (our sun's habitable zone will move past us in a few more billion years, ending life on earth) and it takes billions of years for complex life forms to evolve. The authors reckon that the earth has a 5-6 billion year window in which life could potentially be sustained, and we are about 4.5 billion years into this phase. So we have 'only' 0.5 to 1.5 billion years left. Our earth has other things in its favour: a magnetic field (thanks to its iron core) that deflects the Solar Wind; a 'cold trap' that keeps water in the atmosphere; an enduring internal heat source caused by radiation; a tectonic plate system that recycles carbon and water as rocks are melted down in the earth's core and their life-supporting ingredients are returned to the atmosphere thorough volcanic eruptions.Our number will eventually be up, when the suns' habitable zone leaves us behind as it drifts further towards the edge of the solar system and we frazzle in its increasing heat, but Lenton and Watson think that we might survive for a reasonable portion of this aeon, rather than quickly bring about our own demise through our greed and recklessness. Energy, they argue, is the only problem. Our current reliance on fossil fuels is both highly polluting and ultimately, of course unsustainable; fossil fuels will very soon run out. We do indeed run the risk of 'runaway' climactic changes, where increases in global temperature trigger other results that create a positive feedback loop that result in a hostile environment in which most or even all life forms could not exist. Reassuringly, they remind us that most foreseeable consequences of our current activities do not result in a 'runaway': a runaway results only when a consequence is triggered that causes an event of greater magnitude than the initial cause, whereas, for example, the release of methane from the Arctic tundra caused by the melting of the permafrost will result in further global warming, but on a smaller scale than the warming that caused it in the first place: we would be heading towards a convergence, not a runaway - a 1.01% increase in temperature as opposed to a 1% increase in temperature, to use their hypothetical illustration.The authors are reassuringly pragmatic: most alternative thinking suggests that we should retrench, or as they put it, 'retreat', and concludes that there must be less humans on the planet, making less of an impact on the environment and gobbling up less resources. This, they argue refreshingly, is both unlikely and boring. There is little chance that people in developed economies will give up their new luxuries and excitements, or that emerging economies will not also seek these things. To do so also feels like an abandonment of progress: a deliberate retreat to a less advanced form of civilisation.But if we have the sustainable energy source - the authors consider nuclear fission, fusion and renewables - then a very large number of human beings could sustain a very high quality of life on this planet, using that energy source to recycle our essential materials (just as the biosphere had always needed to recycle its essential materials) and reducing our harmful waste products (like CO2 and the run-off of fertilisers into the ocean, which really might switch the oceans into an anoxic state in the not too distant future).But I must not end on a negative note, since the book does not: it offers the very real hope that our ingenuity and our awareness of our potential predicament will enable a solution, provided we can find the necessary energy source. And they remind us never to assume that any one individual is unable to make an impact on problems that seem so daunting. Every major development in the evolution of life begins with an individual: there is always the first individual that sparks a revolution, like the first cyanobacterium to achieve photosynthesis.
This is a fascinating book where extreme events, in Earth's History, have been triggered by rapid changes in temperature and atmosphere of planet. These crucial ecological changes were generated by an evolutionary process that against all odds brought life on Earth today.Through huge passages of time (billions of years) we are shown a number of dimensions, of geological, cosmic and micro biological events to name but few impacts that have brought the earth we know today. The authors' in this narrative have used a very reader-friendly approach; some of the more complex science is broken down in to more manageable chucks so that the lay person is not phased by the science of the material at hand.In the title of this thesis is the term `revolution' and is used to symbolize the significance of the position that we Homo sapiens have the chance to make either a positive or negative impact on the future of our planet. We are given the prospect of three out comes to the way we choose to live and thus impact the planet.1. We go on as we have been doing and see Global Warming, as well as other environmental disasters take hold.2. Live a more `simple' life as well as adopting entirely local way of live and production of food.3. Lastly to use our technology and wean ourselves off fossil fuels and adopt and draw upon the lessons from Gaia's earlier revolutions that encompasses three critical progressions: finding substitute sources of energy, recycling rare resources and augmenting the transmission of information.The last choice being more akin to the `revolutions' that planet has under gone in its geological history.There are problems with some of which they propose, if we take the change in opinion within some parts of the `green' movement who know advocate the use of nuclear power stations. The current situation in Japan and the tsunami and earthquake that wrecked a nuclear power plant there. There in is a very real challenge to us and the most advanced societies and their technologies will need to face to come up with long term workable solutions.Whether the reader believes in their position or not - this book is a motivating read and challenges our awareness of the world we live in.Can Mankind cooperate with each other or will our `selfish genes' ultimately lead us down a road of doom.If we wish to maintain Earth's ecosystem that sustains us, then at this critical phase we need to have the inclination to take effective action, and supplement our ability to predict the outcomes of not taking that action.
It baffles me that no one has reviewed this but I guess it's a little off the main track.'Revolutions' is an excellent exploration of the long time evolution of the earth and life on it, from its origin as part of a solar nebula to the present day. This passage is explored along a number of dimensions - geologic, biologic, etc. - in a style that is erudite and full of detail but which remains highly readable.There really isn't much to say here - if you are looking for a great book about the long time scale evolution of the earth this is a fantastic choice. The price tag may be a bit daunting but if you think of the time you will invest reading and the knowledge contained within I think it's actually quite reasonable.
Excellent book. Andy and Tim explain each part of the major processes that are thought to be important to the evolution of life and planet. Their discussion is comprehensive from start to finish so one can understand without prior exposure.
Revolutions that Made the Earth PDF
Revolutions that Made the Earth EPub
Revolutions that Made the Earth Doc
Revolutions that Made the Earth iBooks
Revolutions that Made the Earth rtf
Revolutions that Made the Earth Mobipocket
Revolutions that Made the Earth Kindle