Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet

Ted Nield does an excellent job of bringing a rather esoteric topic in geology to life. He discusses the geologically slow process of continental breakup and coalescence in the light of major events in the history of life: The end Permian mega extinction when Pangaea existed, for example, and the beginnings of complex life that roughly coincided with with the existence of the prior supercontinent, Rodinia. He highlights the careers of the various scientists who unraveled these geological stories and nicely fleshes out the complexities of how the validity of scientific truths usually overcome short term politics and animosities. He likens science-derived discoveries to a kind of Supercontinent of knowledge that allows human beings to reconstruct both lost and future worlds that we will never see directly. The fruits of this rather abstract knowledge, however, results in real benefits to people today--like earthquake warning networks that alert hundreds of thousands of people to tsunami dangers along the Ring of Fire. Although I'm pretty well read in paleontology and geology, I found Nield's treatment of this topic accurate and fresh. I also learned more about certain scientists--John Joly, in particular--that will lead me to further reading.

Each of us gets our three score and ten years, more or less, and as good as such a spell might be, it does not prepare us for seeing the longer picture of the past. We are used to changes in the weather, and we might even be used to earthquakes which are signs that the continents themselves are changing, but continental change comes far too slowly for us to appreciate first hand. Scientists have gradually come to understand how old the Earth is, and how active the continents are, once you take a view of hundreds of millions of years. In fact, instead of the continents we now know, 250 million years ago there was but one continent, a supercontinent called Pangaea. _Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet_ (Harvard University Press) is not, however, just about Pangaea. Author Ted Nield, the editor of _Geoscientist_, shows that although all of us may now be sitting upon "no more than Pangaea's smashed remains, the fragments of the dinner plate that dropped on the floor," Pangaea was only one in a series of supercontinents, as the land masses careened around the globe, coalesced, and split up again. They are doing the same thing now. Come back in another 250 million years, and there will again be a supercontinent (named by some "Novopangaea"). It's all dizzying, taking in this long view of things; the world is a particularly strange place in the billion year scale. Nield, however, skillfully describes the changes and relates them to our own world, and takes a good deal of the confusion out of a huge mass of data and extrapolations from it. One of the greatest problems of understanding how the continents shifted was the problem of coming to an understanding of how old the Earth is. Archbishop Ussher's adding up of the "begats" from the Old Testament to find that creation began on 23 October 4004 BC is scientifically ludicrous, but Nield gives it surprising respect as "a serious scholarly attempt, according to the beliefs of his time." Subsequent attempts, in the nineteenth century, centered on looking at how long it would take strata to be laid down or the molten earth to cool, and showed an age of millions of years. Alfred Wegener showed not only that the outlines of the Americas and of Africa and Europe on either side of the Atlantic looked a bit like separated puzzle pieces, but that also there were correlations of rocks and fossils to show that they were originally unseparated. There was enormous resistance to this idea, more from American scientists than European. Wegener died in 1930, his ideas still not adopted by a majority of geologists; now, however, they are the fundament on which geology bases its explanation of continental movement. Nield calls the supercontinent cycle "the grandest of all the patterns in nature", since each cycle takes so many millions of years and since the continents moving around affect all geology, ocean patterns, weather, and the development of life itself. The cycle not only exp

In this remarkable book, the author touches upon just about everything regarding long lost continents: how the idea of a supercontinent came about, ancient and not-so-ancient myths (Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu), why continents cannot simply sink, highlights in the lives of some of the individuals involved and, in particular, the fascinating science. After discussing how the existing continents are moving relative to each other (continental drift) and how they will likely collide in the distant future, thus forming another supercontinent, he discuses the supercontinents of the past. In so doing, the reader is treated to a history of the earth and how it works, brimming throughout with scientific facts, principles as well as theories and the evidence that supports them. The scientific processes involved and the dating techniques that are used by scientists are particularly well explained; this is not surprising given the author's credentials. The writing style is clear, elegant, authoritative, often witty and always quite engaging. As a result, this is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone, although science/geology buffs may be the ones that would savor it the most.

"Did the Earth move for you?", asks the voice beside you. Well, yes. Because that's what it does. All the time. The continent you live on used to be someplace else, and far away from where it is now. Your home ground has even been part of a greater landmass known as a "supercontinent" - and will be again. Hence, the title of this book. Ted Nield provides us with a fine account of how we came to learn about these movements. He has brought together the years of research tracking where the rocks have been and where they are likely to go. He likens the movement of continents to a dance of landforms - a "Grand Quadrille". A fine synopsis of the history of geology and its compelling figures - scholars who had to project what was known in their time back into a distant past. Earth has been a busy place for the past four billion years, and it hasn't stopped to rest. We speak of the "firmness of the Earth", but that phrase is a sham. The key figure in this story is the great supercontinent of Pangaea that began breaking up 250 million years ago. Assembled from previous continents that had once joined and also separated, Pangaea's breakup into places we live on today have been traced in exquisite detail. The matching of rocks in places separated by wide seas provided the clues. In fact, as Nield relates, it was the vast Atlantic that bears the responsibility for Pangaea's fracturing to form the basis for the continents we know today. The author explains how the continents have been engaging in a Grand Quadrille and will continue to do so - for another five billion years, at least. The progenitor of the idea of "drifting continents" was Alfred Wegener. Using maps to show how western Eurasia and Africa matched the east coasts of the Western Hemisphere, Wegener proposed they had once been joined, but had pulled apart. He couldn't provide a mechanism for the movement, and his idea was rejected - most notably by the geologic "establishment" of the United States. Rejection of the proposal was so strong there that one British geologist described it as "regarding the Declaration of Independence as retroactive to the Palaeozoic". Continents formed separately and remained so through time, it was thought. However, one US dissident, Reginald Daly of Harvard, had been in South Africa, encountering the work of Alexander du Toit, who noted similarities in rocks of the Great Karoo and South America. That discovery, enhanced by some detailed measurements in Greenland, suggested that movement was occurring. It took a war and the hunt for submarines to reveal what prompted continental movement. An Irish geophysicist, John Joly had already postulated the mechanism, heat from radioactive elements deep in the Earth required escape. That venting pushed the softer areas in the Earth's crust around. Sitting atop that stirring material, the continents track the flow patterns of the heat. In moving, the continents encounter each other, joining, fusing and

A great resource for the geological history of the planet for the interested amateur. Nield explains in easy to understand terms and analogies the complicated science that allows us today to "travel" back over 4 billion years and witness the development (and redevelopment) of the earth. He also subtly points out the difference between science and myth and why humanity must embrace reality and abandon myths that do not reflect the reality of our situation here on Earth today. He appeals for us to be reasonable and abandon our arrogance and ignorance! Powerful, educational, and ever more important in a world being pushed closer and closer to the brink (for us, the earth will abide...)