Earth History
Stories of Our Geological Past

An introductory undergraduate textbook highlighting key events in Earth history to explain geological concepts in a concise and captivating way.

Peter Copeland (Author), Janok P. Bhattacharya (Author)

9781108724159, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 May 2025

424 pages
27.8 x 21.6 x 2.2 cm, 1.18 kg

'This is a really innovative textbook for teaching Earth history. I have decided to adopt it for spring teaching of geology majors.' Jonathan Snow, Louisiana State University

Providing a new approach to Earth history, this engaging undergraduate textbook highlights key episodes in the history of our planet and uses them to explain the most important concepts in geology. Rather than presenting exhaustive descriptions of each period of geological time, this conceptual approach shows how geologists use multiple strands of evidence to build up an understanding of the geological past, focusing on exciting events like the extinction of the dinosaurs and the formation of the Grand Canyon and the Himalaya. Beginning with an introduction to geology, tectonics, and the origin of the Universe, subsequent chapters chronicle defining moments in Earth history in an accessible narrative style. Each chapter draws on a variety of sub-disciplines, including stratigraphy, paleontology, petrology, geochemistry, and geophysics, to provide students who have little or no previous knowledge of geology with a broad understanding of our planet and its fascinating history.

Preface, Acknowledgements, 1. The Grand Canyon: reading the rocks
2. The philosophies of geology: assumptions steer interpretations
3. The origin of Earth: from the beginning of the universe to the early Earth
4.The Age of Earth: historical versus modern dating approaches
5. Plate tectonics: our unifying geological concept
6. Evolution: natural selection and the organization of life
7. The origin of life: our early atmosphere and the rise of early life
8. Snowball Earth: a Neoproterozoic frozen planet
9. An explosion of life: Ediacaran experimentation, the Cambrian explosion, and Ordovician biodiversity
10. Iapetus and Pangea: the lost ocean and the assembly of a Paleozoic supercontinent
11. Environmental change in the late Paleozoic: the greening of Earth, climate change, and the great dying
12. The age of dinosaurs: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous world
13. The Cretaceous extinction: the end of the age of dinosaurs
14. Tectonics of western North America: a dynamic Cretaceous and Cenozoic landscape
15. The Indo-Asian collision: the formation of the Himalayas
16. The Messinian crisis: the great drying of the Mediterranean Sea
17. Out of Africa: human evolution
18. Ice ages and sea level: quaternary environmental change
19. A human world: our impact in the Holocene
Glossary, Index.

Subject Areas: Earth sciences [RB]