Just finished reading this book. Picked it up in a bookstore after the earthquake in Italy April 2009.
Great book to get you started to know about everything you want to know about how the earth evolves over thousands, millions, billions of years. Nield describes the evolution of the earth from the beginning, about 4.7 billion years ago. How geologists and anthropologists interpret fossil, sedimentary and other evidences to see what has happened in the past. How the continents were built and evolved into different formations over millions of years. How oceans and mountains are built over thousands of years in the same processes that cause earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes.
Evidences on early life suggests that simple single-celled life started around 4.4 billion years ago, but did not evolve into complex life until about half a billion years ago. Dominant life before this time, known as the Precambrian time, were mostly algae-like forms living for about a billion years or so. But changes in the continent distribution from separated islands into one large mass called Rodinia situated in the equator changed the earth atmosphere and transformed earth into a large snowball of ice.
Here's more on this book on Amazon:
To understand continental drift and plate tectonics, the shifting and collisions that make and unmake continents, requires a long view. The Earth, after all, is 4.6 billion years old. This book extends our vision to take in the greatest geological cycle of all—one so vast that our species will probably be extinct long before the current one ends in about 250 million years. And yet this cycle, the grandest pattern in Nature, may well be the fundamental reason our species—or any complex life at all—exists.
This book explores the Supercontinent Cycle from scientists' earliest inkling of the phenomenon to the geological discoveries of today—and from the most recent fusing of all of Earth's landmasses, Pangaea, on which dinosaurs evolved, to the next. Chronicling a 500-million-year cycle, Ted Nield introduces readers to some of the most exciting science of our time. He describes how, long before plate tectonics were understood, geologists first guessed at these vanishing landmasses and came to appreciate the significance of the fusing and fragmenting of supercontinents.
He also uses the story of the supercontinents to consider how scientific ideas develop, and how they sometimes escape the confines of science. Nield takes the example of the recent Indian Ocean tsunami to explain how the whole endeavor of science is itself a supercontinent, whose usefulness in saving human lives, and life on Earth, depends crucially on a freedom to explore the unknown.
He ended the book with a description on the Indonesian earthquake 26 December 2004 that created the tsunami around the Indian ocean.
