Download Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the by Donald R. Prothero PDF
By Donald R. Prothero
Donald R. Prothero's technology books mix top examine with first-person narratives of discovery, injecting heat and familiarity right into a occupation that has a lot to supply nonspecialists. Bringing his trademark sort and wit to an more and more appropriate topic of outrage, Prothero hyperlinks the weather adjustments that experience happened during the last two hundred million years to their results on crops and animals. particularly, he contrasts the extinctions that ended the Cretaceous interval, which burnt up the dinosaurs, with these of the later Eocene and Oligocene epochs.
Prothero starts with the "greenhouse of the dinosaurs," the global-warming episode that ruled the Age of Dinosaurs and the early Age of Mammals. He describes the impressive creatures that after populated the earth and attracts on his reports accumulating fossils within the significant Badlands of South Dakota to cartoon their global. Prothero then discusses the expansion of the 1st Antarctic glaciers, which marked the Eocene-Oligocene transition, and stocks his personal anecdotes of excavations and controversies between colleagues that experience formed our knowing of the modern and prehistoric world.
The quantity concludes with observations approximately Nisqually Glacier and different destinations that convey how worldwide warming is going on a lot swifter than formerly anticipated, irrevocably altering the stability of the earth's thermostat. enticing scientists and normal readers alike, Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs connects occasions throughout hundreds of thousands of millennia to clarify the human risk to normal weather swap.
Read or Download Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet PDF
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Extra info for Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet
Sample text
Foreign exploitation transformed modest subsistence but largely sustainable agriculture to cash crop systems designed exclusively for the benefit of Western cultures. Many of these schemes have led to extensive soil degradation and increased salinity. Rampant tropical rainforest logging or removal for cash crop agriculture, for example, seriously upsets biogeochemical cycling, reducing once productive biological and cultural systems to economically unsustainable agricultural systems in as little as 5 years.
Several crops of maize could be raised before nutrient depletion necessitated the abandonment of the plot and the repetition of the process elsewhere. In cases of low population density, swidden techniques are sustainable, as natural overgrowth of worked plots will occur over time, providing fresh fuel for a new round of burn-based fertilization in the future. The recovery process is not quick, however (~20 years in tropical and subtropical environments), and this means that too high a population density leads to unsustainability, because insufficient time is allowed for natural vegetative regeneration between burn and cultivation periods.
1991) Global Environmental Change: a Natural and Cultural Environmental History. Longman Scientific and Technical, London. McDowell, B. (1980, December) The Aztecs. National Geographic 158(6), 704–751. G. (1991) Earth, Air and Water: Resources and Environment in the Late 20th Century. Edward Arnold, London. G. (1996) Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment, History, 2nd edn. Blackwell, Oxford, UK. R. (1910) The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States. MacMillan, New York.