Comments on: Book review – A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice

By: collisteru

collisteru — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 19:14:10 +0000

This book is almost nothing but purple prose. Glassley spends far too little time with the science and far too much time reiterating his own insignificance in the face of the tundra. I rolled my eyes so many times while reading this book that my superior rectus muscles are now much stronger than they were before. I can thank Glassley at least for the exercise.

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By: Book review – Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and other Planets | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 11:23:52 +0000

[…] However it got here, the first major effect it had was kick-starting plate tectonics. The early Earth was hot, but without the lubrication provided by water, the heat-venting mechanism of plate tectonics was not in place. How did molten rock make its way to the surface? Some scientists argue that it was through simple vertical conduits, so-called heat pipes, which would have made for a radically different surface topography: “the fundamental proportions of land area and ocean area […] would have been utterly different to today’s familiar patterns” (p. 34). Though, again, this idea is contested by others. The puzzle of when plate tectonics started, possibly 3 billion years ago, relies on truly ancient rocks, 3.5 to 3.8 billion years old, of which we have precious few remaining in places such as Australia and Greenland. […]

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By: Book review – The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 16:31:32 +0000

[…] death. But also stories of raw beauty and poetic rapture at the scale and grandeur of nature. Greenland does this to you, and Gertner gratefully mines their writings for inspiring […]

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By: Book review – The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 15:01:45 +0000

[…] rapture at the scale and grandeur of nature. Greenland does this to you (see also my reviews of A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice and Underland: A Deep Time Journey), and Gertner gratefully mines their writings for inspiring […]

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By: Book review – Catching Stardust: Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 01 May 2019 14:58:40 +0000

[…] and only a few places, such as Greenland, host rocks older than 3 billion years (see my review of A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice). The beauty of nearby comets is that they are effectively 4.6 billion-year-old frozen time […]

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By: Book review – Earth History and Palaeogeography | The Inquisitive Biologist

Book review – Earth History and Palaeogeography | The Inquisitive Biologist — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 12:58:54 +0000

[…] tectonics was happening earlier in time as well, the geological story at the heart of the lyrical A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice was that we have evidence for plate tectonics as far back as approximately 2 billion years, and […]

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