Download Furnace of Creation, Cradle of Destruction: A Journey to the by Roy Chester PhD PDF
By Roy Chester PhD
Over the last few years, devastating tsunamis off the coast of the Indian Ocean have killed millions of individuals. much more alarmingly, scientists are expecting that those tsunamis, in addition to a sequence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, could finally threaten Hawaii, California, and Oregon. the reason for this trinity of ordinary failures is plate tectonics. probably the best boost made within the box of earth technology, the plate-tectonics thought argues that the outside of the Earth is damaged into huge plates, which swap in measurement and place through the years. the perimeters of those plates rub opposed to one another, inflicting earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis that proceed to inflict such excessive destruction to the outside our planet. In Furnace of construction, Cradle of Destruction, well known scientist Roy Chester finds the attention-grabbing historical past of this discovery and tells the enigmatic tale of 1 of the nice mysteries of our time: how the outside of our planet was once created and the way it has advanced. From the early discoveries of Sir Francis Bacon to the beginnings of geology and the talk surrounding the idea of continental flow, this impeccably researched booklet unearths the evolution of an important scientific thought. Lucid and compelling, this e-book bargains a long-awaited rationalization of the underlying forces that form our international.
Read or Download Furnace of Creation, Cradle of Destruction: A Journey to the Birthplace of Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis PDF
Similar geology books
Stanford Geological Atlas Of Great Britain And Ireland -1907
Excerpt from Stanford's Geological Atlas of serious Britain and eire: With Plates of attribute FossilsThe scope of this paintings has been enlarged by way of the addition of a caricature of the geological beneficial properties of eire, its counties and major traces of railway; and the topic is illustrated by means of a geological map of the rustic, and through 3 illustrations borrowed from Professor E.
This quantity is a set of papers, preceded through an introductory essay, on coastal physiography. all of the authors have made major contributions to the topic. they're of other nationalities and the papers are, intentionally, no longer all contemporary ones. during this e-book emphasis has been laid totally on issues that are of basic instead of neighborhood or maybe neighborhood price.
- Archean Greenstone Belts
- Geology and vertebrate paleontology of the early Pliocene site of Kanapoi, northern Kenya
- The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?
- Tectonics and seismic sequence stratigraphy
Additional resources for Furnace of Creation, Cradle of Destruction: A Journey to the Birthplace of Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis
Example text
One problem with this theory was that if mountains were the result of the cooling and contracting of the earth’s surface, then they should all have been formed at the same stage in the cooling sequence and all be of the same age, which was clearly not true. Despite its weaknesses, the theory of the geosynclinal origin of mountains remained in vogue in various forms for many years, until it was eventually replaced by plate tectonics. Dana believed that the ocean basins and the continents were very different geologically, and that they were separated from each other in a permanent configuration.
Another attempt to predict an age for the planet on the grounds of cosmology was made by Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788). This French naturalist proposed that the planet had formed from a white-hot mass torn from the Sun and assumed he could derive an age for the earth on the basis of how long it had taken to cool—an idea first proposed by Sir Isaac Newton. To test this view experimentally, Buffon heated two large iron spheres until they were red hot and scaled up the time they took to cool down.
In a much more gentle setting, a charming New Zealand legend has Mother Earth carrying a child who causes earthquakes as he moves about in her womb. The Chinese had several myths associated with the causes of earthquakes. In one, dragons sleeping under mountains caused the earth to move as they stirred. In another, the earth was thought to rest on the back of a giant frog that sets off earthquakes when it shivers. China has a long history of earthquakes, and one of the earliest seismic events for which there are records occurred there.