A brand new e-book reveals tales of historical life written in North America’s rocks

A brand new e-book reveals tales of historical life written in North America’s rocks

How the Mountains Grew
John Dvorak
Pegasus Books, $29.95

Think about a world the place pigeon-sized dragonflies soar above spiders with half-meter-long legs, the place 2-meter-long millipedes slither and 20-kilogram scorpions hunt. About 300 million years in the past, such surreal creatures thrived; right this moment, rocks trace at how these and different creatures within the deep previous lived. These clues enable geologist and author John Dvorak to vividly re-create historical landscapes in How the Mountains Grew: A New Geological Historical past of North America.

Removed from a dusty tome plodding by way of plate tectonics, the e-book teems with life as Dvorak establishes inextricable hyperlinks between geology and biology. Take the oversize dragonflies and millipedes now preserved as fossils. Rocks of an identical age maintain proof of an increase in atmospheric oxygen that helps clarify how these animals grew so massive.

The e-book zigzags from place to position on a chronological, continental-scale subject journey. To keep away from dizzying readers, Dvorak revisits sure websites that protect a number of threads of geologic historical past. As an illustration, at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills, he describes how, about 2 billion years in the past, molten rock rose and lodged itself into sedimentary rocks deposited on the seafloor of bygone oceans. At this time, presidents’ faces stare out from this now-solidified magma, these historical oceanic sediments sitting just under the visage of George Washington. The e-book later returns to glimpse youthful seas that got here and went, depositing sediments now replete with fossils. All these rocks, Dvorak explains, whisper tales of how this specific mountain grew.

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Dvorak additionally ponders Earth’s future, envisioning an ice sheet grinding down Mount Rushmore’s rigorously carved profiles greater than 100,000 years from now. And he considers humankind’s future, arguing that we should decide how our dependence on fossil fuels — the results of one other interaction between biology and geology — will finish.

Nevertheless it’s a distinct finish, the asteroid impression that marked the demise of the nonbird dinosaurs (SN: 6/1/20), the place Dvorak’s storytelling shines brightest. He imagines the ultimate days of the final Tyrannosaurus rex, describing its determined seek for meals someplace nicely north of Mount Rushmore. Within the hours to months after the impression, we share this behemoth’s final steps, its closing gasps.

“No diploma of evolutionary perfection may have assured survival,” Dvorak writes. As that lone T. rex dies on the web page, we are able to’t assist however understand that we, too, are temporary organic moments in geologic time.

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