In preparation for my time out west this summer, my friend Michelle loaned me her copy of Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway, by Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll. It's a great read, and it's got me really psyched to start driving around the west, looking at geology. It also makes me wish for an informed local guide to clue me in to good outcrops.

I really liked this book. Johnson, a paleontologist with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, narrates a 5,000-mile roadtrip travelogue about zipping around the western U.S. in search of fossils. Joining Johnson is Troll, a celebrated artist who makes clever art in several media. The book is light-hearted, well-informed, funny, and relaxed. I really liked it, and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in natural history, fossils, roadtripping, or Ray Troll's art.

Coincidentally, Geotimes reviewed the book in their May issue.
...And NPR beat them to it last fall.

Labels: books, colorado, fossils, kansas, nebraska, wyoming

Last week, my friend Michelle loaned me her copy of Farewell, My Subaru, a humorous account of a year spent trying to live locally. The author, Doug Fine, buys a ranch in New Mexico, then converts it to solar power and solar heated water, and raises goats and vegetables. And, yes, he trades in his Subaru for a R.O.A.T. (Ridiculously Oversized American Truck), which runs on vegetable oil. Along the way, he has lots of mishaps (many involving the goats) and finds love, happiness, and satisfaction. In general, he has a nice reflective time of it, accumulating enough experiences and insight to warrant a book. He's also got a great sense of humor. Recommended.

Labels: books, environmental, oil

This one's a good one to assign to Historical Geology students who don't have time to read The Map That Changed The World. It's part of the series "On the Shoulders of Giants" by NASA's Earth Observatory: William Smith.

I love the way these pages are laid out: a single column of text with illustrations of different sizes and dimensions interspersed with the content. It's like a Dorling Kindersley book. NASA must have some good web designers on the payroll.

Labels: books, fossils, geologists, history, stratigraphy

Periodically I post book reviews on this blog of geology-relevant books. I haven't done too many of these since I started the blog because it's been the spring semester, and that means I've been too busy to read. But now that the summer's here, I've got a bit more time. Today's tome is Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv.

The theme of the book is "nature deficit disorder," a condition the author loosely defines as adults not caring about the natural world because they never spent any time outside as children. Setting aside the quasi-disease-sounding name (which Louv acknowledges as being iffy), it's pretty much a priori that if you don't know something, you don't value it. When children spend their time playing video games instead of romping in nature, they end up caring about the one and not about the other. Last Child gets a little tedious making this point over and over: do you really need a whole book to explain that?

In the course of that protracted treatment, however, Louv brings up some good points. For instance, natural play has been effectively "criminalized" in our (U.S.) litigious society. We care so much for our kids' safety that we prevent them from doing anything dangerous. He also makes the point that nature education has dropped off, resulting in lower knowedge about natural systems.

Some passages rang particularly true for me. On page 139, Louv describes an observation by Robert Stebbins, an old-school naturalist (and professor emeritus at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley). Stebbins has been going out to the California desert for many years studying reptiles and other critters. The rise of ATV (all-terrain vehicle) recreation in his study sites has obliterated the local wildlife. He found that 90% of invertebrate life had been destroyed in popular ATV areas. I'll quote Louv quoting Stebbins here:

What upset him most was not the destruction that had already occurred, but the devastation yet to come and the waning sense of awe -- or simple respect -- toward nture that he sensed in each successive generation. "One time I was out watching the ATVs. I saw these two little boys trudging up a dune. I went running after them. I wanted to ask why they weren't riding machines -- maybe they were looking for something else out there. They said their trail bikes were broken. I asked if they knew what was out there in the desert, if they had seen any lizards. 'Yeah,' one of them said, 'But lizards just run away.' These kids were bored, uninterested. If only they knew."

Labels: books, environmental, teaching

Over the first half of the semester, I've been reading Vaclav Smil's comprehensive book The Earth's Biosphere. It's an incredible work of scholarship, and I recommend it to anyone with a solid foundational understanding of both biology and geology who's ready for "the big picture": an overall review which will give contextual perspective on each of the details of how the living portion of our planet works. It's a remarkable book, really. It covers so much, in such a precise, well-written manner, that it makes my head spin. It has forty pages of references (in small type)! As an example of the multidisciplinary nature of the book, I offer the following graphic from page 134:

In one image, Smil integrates information about seven variables: clay varieties, latitude, biome type, depth of weathering in the crust, precipitation, temperature, and evaporation! That's an incredible accompishment graphically, but he does the same thing in just about every sentence.

I read the book originally because a potential student recommended it as providing a "balanced" look at climate change. Curious to see what that meant, I checked it out of the library here on campus, and read it. It has an excellent and comprehensive scientific discussion of climate change, with a particular focus on how the Earth's biosphere will effect it, and be effected by it.

I feel obliged to give an example of something I learned, so here's amazing fact #3546 from the book: photosynthesis is really inefficient! Plants vary in how photosynthetically efficient they are, but the values range from plants that capture 0.1% of incoming solar radiation to the really efficient ones, which max out at capturing about 2% of incoming solar radiation. That's so not efficient! I had no idea.

Of course, no book is perfect, and I'll offer two complaints about The Earth's Biosphere: (1) A general theme is woven throughout the book of examining the work of neglected Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who made critical advances to our understanding of the biosphere, but hasn't gotten enough credit. Smil goes overboard in giving Vernadsky his due: it's Vernadsky this, Vernadsky that, every couple of pages through the whole book. I got sick of reading about him, and wished Smil could stick to the (excellent, fascinating) science, divorced from the persons who wrought it. (2) Every now and again, he threw in a superflous graphic, like this one:

Is the fish really supposed to be ~16 m tall? What's the point of this graphic anyhow? To show that fish live below the ice? Seems to me you could just say so. (Plus, the graphic needs the scientific name italicized, as in the caption.) I don't mean to snipe -- most of the book is super, but stuff like this irritates me. A fly in the ointment, I guess. The book's worth reading regardless.

Labels: books, climate change, global warming

The New York Times reviewed a new book about birdwatching this weekend. If you can agree with the statement, "I can't think of any activity that more fully captures what it means to be human in the modern world than watching birds," then you might enjoy Jonathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies. The review (by Robert Sullivan, who wrote the book Rats, which has the best cover of any book ever) is astonishingly well-connected (in the Internet sense of the word): it weaves in allusions to Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac, and Theodore Roosevelt. I haven't read The Life of Skies yet, but it is now on my list.

I love running into birds. The other morning, when it was relatively warm, Casey and I went for a walk in the Zoo, and saw a pair of red-shouldered hawks (wild, not caged) building a nest in one of the big old orthern red oak trees there. It was cool to see: they were collecting sticks several feet long and doing short fly-hops through the canopy as they maneuvered into their nest site. Today, we went back and looked for them again, but there weren't there. Maybe out hunting?

In DC, the winter weather persists. It was cold and windy this weekend, and daylight savings time didn't help much. Soon, (very soon, I hope), the weather will warm and the birds will return. Right now, there's nothing to look at except rocks, cold rocks. Some of my Honors students and I got out in the field today to do measurements for their various projects, and when the sun was out, it was pretty nice. Still fleece and jeans weather, but you can sense spring is on the way.

Labels: birdies, books, nova, teaching

In preparation for this summer's rafting trip down the Grand Canyon with my father & two brothers, I checked out the book An Introduction to Grang Canyon Geology from the NOVA library. The author is L. Greer Price. It's a slim little book, in full color, with lots of little boxes inserted amid the main text. These boxes explore smaller subtopics like stromatolites or rock color. The main text emphasizes the chronological sequence of steps to create the bedrock of the Canyon, and then a detailed discussion of how rock structure and erosional effects combine to carve the land into a shape as varied as the Grand Canyon. It's a book a lot like the one I'm working on for the C&O Canal.

I've visited the Grand Canyon four times, so I've managed to get a lot of the upper stratigraphy down. I picked up this book to bulk up my understanding of the deeper gorge (where my family & I will be spending our time in June). While a lot of the book was geological boiler-plate about plate tectonics and superposition, I learned some new details. For instance, I had no idea the Cenozoic was represented at all in the Canyon, but apparently the remains ("still pungent") of a Shasta Ground Sloth were discovered in Rampart Cave (a cave in the Mauv Limestone) in the western Canyon.

The writing style is balanced. I could see how the author struggled with being technically accurate but also accessible to the wide audience he was writing for: the Mazatzal Orogeny (~1.7 Ga) is described, but it's not called the "Mazatzal Orogeny." Another example would be in describing Mesozoic subduction on the west coast, Greer swaps out the technically-correct name Farallon plate for the more recognizable "Pacific" plate, even if that's not technically correct.

The book is short (59 pages), and it's 50% pictures -- an easy read in an afternoon.

Labels: books, grand canyon

Over the winter break, I finished reading the textbook Petrology by Harvey Blatt, Robert Tracy, and Brent Owens. "Petrology" is the branch of geology that is the study of rocks. (A lot of people coming into an introductory geology class for the first time think that geology is the study of rocks, but of course it is not. Geology is the study of the planet Earth.) This is a sure sign of me being a geology geek, but I really enjoyed it. The igenous section was least enlightening, but I really enjoyed the sedimentary section and the metamorphic section. I learned a bunch of new things about limestones, bentonites, the Barrovian sequence of metamorphism, and other fun stuff. It's in the Annandale branch of the NOVA library. If you've had at least one semester of geology and want to learn more about a specific rock type, I recommend it.

Labels: books, geology

The National Academies of Science released a new book yesterday about evolution. Aimed at the layperson, it explores the molecular, organismal, and fossil evidence in favor of evolution. The book suggests that accepting this evidence does not require losing one's religious faith, but instead that the two are compatible ways of viewing the world. The book is entitled "Science, Evolution, and Creationism." A PDF brochure offering an overview of the book is here, and the book can be ordered online here. Perhaps as a sign of things to come, the entire book is also available online, and you can access it here.

Labels: books, evolution