{"product_id":"2940170346639","title":"The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet","description":"\u003c!--[if !mso]\u003e \u003cstyle\u003e v\\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} x\\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} \u003c\/style\u003e \u003c![endif]--\u003e        \u003ccolgroup\u003e\n\u003ccol width=\"320\"\u003e  \u003c\/colgroup\u003e \u003c!--StartFragment--\u003e  Earth  evolves. From first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to  single cell to verdant living landscape, ours is a planet constantly in flux.  In this radical new approach to Earth's biography, senior Carnegie  Institution researcher and national bestselling author Robert M. Hazen  reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere-of rocks and  living matter-has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the  Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  With an astrobiologist's  imagination, a historian's perspective, and a naturalist's passion for the  ground beneath our feet, Hazen explains how changes on an atomic level  translate into dramatic shifts in Earth's makeup over its 4.567 billion year  existence. He calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our  planet's many iterations in vivid detail-from its fast-rotating infancy when  the Sun rose every five hours and the Moon filled 250 times more sky than it  does now, to its sea-bathed youth before the first continents arose; from the  Great Oxidation Event that turned the land red, to the globe-altering  volcanism that may have been the true killer of the dinosaurs. Through  Hazen's theory of \"co-evolution,\" we learn how reactions between organic  molecules and rock crystals may have generated Earth's first organisms, which  in turn are responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on  the planet-thousands of different kinds of crystals that could not exist in a  nonliving world.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  The Story of Earth is also the story of the  pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Listeners will meet  black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who  guarded the Apollo missions' lunar dust, and the World War II Navy officer  whose super-pressurized \"bomb\"-recycled from military hardware-first  simulated the molten rock of Earth's mantle. As a mentor to a new generation  of scientists, Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches  from Earth's harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  Celebrated by the New York Times for writing \"with wonderful clarity about  science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along,\" Hazen proves a  brilliant and entertaining guide on this grand tour of our planet inside and  out. Lucid, controversial, and intellectually bracing, The Story of Earth is  popular science of the highest order. \u003c!--EndFragment--\u003e","brand":"Instructional Systems [Aubrey J. Kline (aka Jim Kline dba Instructional Systems)]","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47104937525488,"sku":"2940170346639","price":39.98,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940170346639_p0.jpg?v=1763708302","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940170346639","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}