‘Reading the Rocks: An Autobiography of the Earth’ by Marcia Bjornerud
I was initially disappointed with Reading the Rocks, but that’s because I have a tendency to take book titles too literally, I suppose. This was subtitled ‘autobiography’ of the earth, so as with all biographies I expected the narrative to begin at ‘birth,’ and proceed in a linear fashion to the present day, with explanations of “how do we know this” provided for every step along the journey.
However, Reading The Rocks is not a full scale biography, but rather a series of introductions to the various ways and means that scientists ‘read’ the autobiography of the earth – which is written all around us.
Why should the average person learn about geology? Well, the main reason is that learning any subject is fun and expands enjoyment of other facets of your life, but also, geology is important to us today more than ever, as Bjornerud explains in her final chapter, “Strength and Weakness”, in which she deals not only with the history of man’s study of our only home but with our growing environmental problems due to over-population, over-development, pollution, etc.
But she begins with the stones.
“Stone has an undeserved reputation for being uncommunicative.” she writes. “The expressions stone deaf, stone cold, stony silence and simply, stoned, reveal much about the relationship most people have to the rocks beneath their feet. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated texts, telling gothic tales of scorching heat, violent tempests, endurance, cataclysm, and reincarnation. Over more than 4 billion years, in beach sand, volcanic ash, granites, and garnet schists, the planet has unintentionally kept a rich and ideosyncratic journal of its past.”
In Reading the Rocks, Bjornerud explains in a breezy, fast-paced narrative, not only how we know what the rocks are telling us but why it is so important that we understand the planet we live on.
“The three main types of rocks are like different literary genres…sedimentary rocks are the best reference works to consult if you are interested in past conditions at the surface of the earth…igneous rocks chronicle the long-term chemical evolution of the Earth and provide glimpses into processes that occur at inaccessible depths. Metamorphic rocks, born in one setting (sedimentary or igneous) and transformed as they encounter new environments, are the travel writers of the rock world, chronicling their astounding journeys through the crust. So it is important to know which questions are appropriate to ask which rock, and how to phrase the query.”
This is a book written for the erudite – in the space of three pages she uses the words “palimpsest”, “quotidian”, “equipoise”, “schadenfreude” and “Malthusian premise” – but it is written so well that even the average reader won’t mind sitting down with a dictionary close at hand. I, personally, never like to breeze past words and believe that I understand them because of the context in which they appear, I always like to check the dictionary and make sure the word means what I think it means. And for all that Bjornerud does use polysyllabic words and literary allusions, she explains the concepts of geology quite clearly and simply.
More common in books for children, but welcome here, is the fact that Bjornerud puts technical and scientific terms in bold, which indicates that the word is defined in the glossary.
There is no such thing as a boring subject, only boring writers, and Bjornerud certainly isn’t that. This book is an enjoyable read as well as a fascinating history of our planet, mother Earth.
Table of contents:
Currently accepted Geologic Timescale
Prologue: Stone Crazy
No place with no past
The accidental diarist
1. The Tao of the Earth
The Department of Redundancy Department: Inertia and spare parts
Equals and opposites
Going home to Mother Earth
Everything old is new again
The Earth fugue
2. Reading Rocks: A Primer
Meeting rocks on common ground
A rock by any other name
Grammar and syntax of the three rock languages
Mind the gap: What rocks don’t tell us
Putting everything in order
Getting a date
Peering into the primordial mists
3. The Great and the Small
Geo-metry: Sizing up the Earth
A sense of scale
The importance of being erroneous
Making retroactive measurements
Tiny bubbles
Stretchy coastlines and imperial microbes
Lawmakers or outlaws?
Measure for measure
4. Mixing and Sorting
Stars of rock and heavy metal
Density is destiny
Whither the water
Mixed drink and metaphors
The mantle of power
Waste management
Mal de mer
Only connect
5. Innovation and Conservation
You say you want a revolution
The paradox of oxygen
Coming out of the cold
Swimming with the (not-yet-evolved) sharks
An arthropod-eat-arthropod world
The many legs of the arms race
Communes and junkyards
Something old, something new, everything borrowed
6. Strength and Weakness
Earth before geology
Naming names and making maps
A mechanical Earth
The incredible shrinking Earth
Earth unbound
7. Epilogue
The Once and Future Earth
