Jan Zalasiewicz

Look back a hundred million years to the mid-Cretaceous period: how accurate a picture of that world do we have today? Well, we know quite a bit about its marine life (shallow seas, which were widespread then, are by far the best environments for the preservation of fossils), but our knowledge of the deep oceans and of life on land is a lot more patchy. Take dinosaurs as a good example: we know a decent amount about lowland species, but comparatively nothing about those of the uplands and mountains.
    Now go forwards by the same amount: what sort of picture of our world, of 21st-century Earth, would future palaeontologists have? In particular, would they even know that Homo sapiens had been here at all? Your immediate reaction might be to think of all those millions of square miles of concrete and tarmac, of all the gigantic constructions—both above and below ground: well of course they'd know we'd been here! But, in fact, it's not quite the obvious question it seems at first—the year 100,000,000 A.D. is mind-numbingly remote. In the interim there would have been both the building and eroding away of entire mountain ranges; the planet's crust would have been crumpled, faulted, melted; there may have been large-scale volcanism, major changes in sea level and encroachments of the polar ice caps. Would any traces of our civilisation really survive all this—and, if so, what exactly? What would the surviving artefacts actually look like?
    This is a super topic for a book—but The Earth After Us just doesn't get to grips with it. It begins well enough, setting the idea up: alien scientists land on Earth a hundred million years from now and, as a whole series of geological anomalies gradually comes to light, realisation dawns that something unusual may have happened here in the distant past. Unfortunately, the author then largely abandons this idea in favour of a textbook: we get overviews of stratigraphy, plate tectonics, palaeontology and so on—which would be fine (I love geology) except that that's not the book I thought I'd be reading. Even when we do return to the subject during the final couple of chapters, it's still not dealt with in anywhere near enough detail. The feeling I had while reading this book is that, while well written and factually very good, what it suffers from is a fatal lack of imagination. A frustrating read overall.

… (altro)

The authors of this book are no climate experts, but a geologist and paleobiologist, both with serious academic credentials; they thus are fully equipped to look into the deep past of our planet and to attempt to reconstruct the evolution of the climate. Obviously, this is not an easy task, and while the authors do their best to make their story as comprehensible as possible, their explanation remains quite technical, which does not always make reading easy. What charmed me most about this book is how cautious the authors remain, and how often they point out gaps in our knowledge, in the guesswork associated with certain observations, which often leads to apparent or real contradictions. All of this provides a picture of the enormous complexity of the climate system, which is understandable when you consider how many astronomical, geological, chemical and biological factors and processes are combined in it. The authors do better justice to this complexity than, for example, Lewis Dartnell in his "How the earth made us".
Despite their caution, Zalasiewicz and Williams venture to estimate what is currently going on, namely the warming of our climate due to the production of greenhouse gases. Although they remain reticent, their conclusion still is staggering, namely that our world will look very different in 30 to 50 years at the latest. If I understand them correctly, a temperature increase of 5 to 8 degrees is almost inevitable, and therefore also a noticeable rise in the ocean level, coupled with almost unpredictable drastic changes in weather phenomena (sudden, fierce cold spells in some places, other wind and sea currents, etc.), all with far-stretching consequenses. “We are vigorously rocking a boat that has shown a marked tendency to capsize.” It is not really reassuring that the authors as a great lesson from their historical overview conclude that our earth has always found a new, provisional equilibrium after a while (in 10,000 of years), which is always very different from what came before.
More on this in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2714393034… (altro)

This is a book that presents a variety of skeletons as a frame for life, including the skeletons that make up or eventually produced the general environment, as well as, the organisms that lived in that enviornment. A large number of skeletons discussed in this book are generally not considered skeletons, such as tree trunks, coral reefs, and shells. Zalasiewicz & Williams discuss internal skeletons, external skeletons (insect exoskeletons, shells), large animals, microscopic organism, the skeletons required for flight, modified skeletons, and what sort of skeletons one would expect to find on other planets. The authors excell at explaining the paleontological aspects of skeletons, but seem to lack interest/knowledge in the biological aspects of skeletons. The book is interesting and not bogged down with detail. As a result, I found the book to be rather superficial in detail and thus, a missed opportunity in terms of illustration and elucidation of the various skeletons discussed by the authors. None the less, Skeletons: The Frame of Life provides much food for thought and nuggets of interesting information.… (altro)