Print List Price: | $30.00 |
Kindle Price: | $13.99 Save $16.01 (53%) |
Sold by: | Random House LLC Price set by seller. |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life Kindle Edition
One of humanity’s oldest beliefs is that our world is alive. Though once ridiculed by some scientists, the idea of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. We, and all living things, are more than inhabitants of Earth—we are Earth, an outgrowth of its structure and an engine of its evolution. Life and its environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming a lump of orbiting rock into a cosmic oasis—a planet that breathes, metabolizes, and regulates its climate.
Acclaimed science writer Ferris Jabr reveals a radical new vision of Earth where lush forests spew water, pollen, and bacteria to summon rain; giant animals engineer the very landscapes they roam; microbes chew rock to shape continents; and microscopic plankton, some as glittering as carved jewels, remake the air and sea.
Humans are one of the most extreme examples of life transforming Earth. Through fossil fuel consumption, agriculture, and pollution, we have altered more layers of the planet in less time than any other species, pushing Earth into a crisis. But we are also uniquely able to understand and protect the planet’s wondrous ecology and self-stabilizing processes. Jabr introduces us to a diverse cast of fascinating people who have devoted themselves to this vital work.
Becoming Earth isan exhilarating journey through the hidden workings of our planetary symphony—its players, its instruments, and the music of life that emerges—and an invitation to reexamine our place in it. How well we play our part will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJune 25, 2024
- File size40963 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
- Deep Life: The Hunt for the Hidden Biology of Earth, Mars, and BeyondTullis C. OnstottKindle Edition
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A glorious paean to our living world.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of An Immense World
“A remarkable achievement.”—Ben Goldfarb, award-winning author of Crossings
“Astonishing.”—Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes
“Fascinating, thought-provoking . . ., inspiring.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction
“Quite simply, a work of genius.”—Robert Moor, bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration
“Mesmerizing . . . I found myself gasping at revelations on every page.”—Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
“A candy store of mind-blowing facts and fascinating anecdotes.”—Kate Marvel, climate scientist and author
“Wow. This wondrous book reveals our living planet for the miracle that it is.“—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words
“Gorgeously written and brimming with fascinating science and provocative ideas.”—Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Toms River
“A compelling argument that Earth is a living planet.”—James Kasting, professor of geosciences, Penn State University
“Beautiful and insightful.”—Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poison Squad
“Thrilling . . . More than excellent science journalism—it evokes wonder.”—Tyler Volk, Earth system scientist, New York University, and author of Gaia’s Body
”A fresh and mesmerizing meditation on what it means to be alive.”—Andrew Revkin, renowned environmental journalist and author
”A story so important and compelling that I am going to be recommending it for years.”—Hank Green, New York Times bestselling author and science communicator
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Intraterrestrials
Earth’s skin is full of pores, and every pore is a portal to an inner world. Some are large enough only for an insect; others could easily accommodate an elephant. Some lead only to minor caves or shallow crevices, whereas others extend into the unexplored recesses of Earth’s rocky interior. Any human attempting to journey toward the center of our planet requires a very particular type of passageway: one that is wide enough, yes, but also extremely deep, stable along its entire depth—and ideally equipped with an elevator.
One such portal sits in the middle of North America. About half a mile wide, the furrowed pit spirals 1,250 feet into the ground, exposing a marbled mosaic of young and ancient rock: gray bands of basalt, milky veins of quartz, pale columns of rhyolite, and shimmering constellations of gold. Beneath the pit, some 370 miles of tunnels twist through solid rock, extending more than 1.5 miles below the surface. For 126 years, this site in Lead, South Dakota, housed the biggest, deepest, and most productive gold mine in North America. By the time it ceased operations in the early 2000s, the Homestake Mine had produced more than two million pounds of gold.
In 2006, the Barrick Gold Corporation donated the mine to the state of South Dakota, which ultimately converted it into the largest subterranean laboratory in the United States, the Sanford Underground Research Facility. After mining ceased, the tunnels began to flood. Although the lowest half of the facility remains waterlogged, it is still possible to descend nearly a mile underground. Most of the scientists who do so are physicists conducting highly sensitive experiments that must be shielded from interfering cosmic rays. While the physicists slip into bunny suits and seal themselves in polished laboratories equipped with dark matter detectors, biologists who venture into the underground labyrinth tend to seek out its dankest and dirtiest corners—places where obscure creatures extrude metal and transfigure rock.
On a bitingly cold December morning, I followed three young scientists and a group of Sanford employees into “The Cage”—the bare metal elevator that would take us 4,850 feet into Earth’s crust. We wore neon vests, steel-toed boots, hard hats, and, strapped to our belts, personal respirators, which would protect us from carbon monoxide in the event of a fire or explosion. The Cage descended swiftly and surprisingly smoothly, its spare frame revealing glimpses of the mine’s many levels. Our idle chatter and laughter were just audible over the din of unspooling cables and whooshing air. After a controlled plummet of about ten minutes, we reached the bottom of the facility.
Our two guides, both former miners, directed us into a pair of small linked rail cars and drove us through a series of narrow tunnels. The cars jostled forward with a sound like the rattling of heavy metal chains as the thin beams of our headlamps illuminated curving walls of dark stone threaded with quartz and specked with silver. Beneath us, I saw flashes of old railing, shallow stands of water, and rocky debris. Although I knew we were deep underground, the tunnels acted like blinders, restricting my perspective to a narrow chute of rock. Glancing at the tunnel’s ceiling, I wondered what it would feel like to see the full extent of the planet’s crust above us—a pile of rock more than three times as tall as the Empire State Building. Would our depth become palpable the way height does when you peer over the edge of a cliff? Sensing the onset of inverse vertigo, I quickly shifted my gaze straight ahead.
Within twenty minutes, we had traded the relatively cool and well-ventilated region near The Cage for an increasingly hot and muggy corridor. Whereas the surface world was snowy and well below freezing, a mile down—much closer to Earth’s geothermal heart—it was about 90°F with nearly 100 percent humidity. Heat seemed to pulse through the rock surrounding us, the air became thick and cloying, and the smell of brimstone seeped into our nostrils. It felt as though we had entered hell’s foyer.
The rail cars stopped. We stepped out and walked a short distance to a large plastic spigot protruding from the rock. A pearly stream of water trickled from the wall near the faucet’s base, forming rivulets and pools. Hydrogen sulfide wafted from the water—the source of the chamber’s odor. Kneeling, I realized that the water was teeming with a stringy white material similar to the skin of a poached egg. Caitlin Casar, a geobiologist, explained that the white fibers were microbes in the genus Thiothrix, which join together in long filaments and store sulfur in their cells, giving them a ghostly hue. Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust—a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen—yet life was literally gushing from rock. This particular ecological hot spot had earned the nickname “Thiothrix Falls.”
As I gingerly probed the strands of microbes with a pen, biogeochemist Brittany Kruger opened one of several valves on the spigot before us and began conducting various tests on the discharged fluid. By simply dribbling some of the water into a blue handheld device, reminiscent of a Star Trek tricorder, Kruger measured its pH, temperature, and dissolved solids. She clamped filters with extremely tiny pores onto some of the valves to collect any microorganisms drifting through the water. Meanwhile, Casar and environmental engineer Fabrizio Sabba examined a series of rock-filled cartridges that had been hooked up to the spigot. Back at the lab, they would analyze the contents to see if any microbes had flowed into the tubes and survived within them, despite the complete darkness, the lack of nutrients, and the absence of a breathable atmosphere.
On a different level of the mine, we sloshed through mud and shin-high water, stepping carefully to avoid tripping on submerged rails and stray stones. Here and there, delicate white crystals ornamented the ground and walls—most likely gypsum or calcite, the scientists told me. When our headlamps caught the tunnels of pitch-black rock at the right angle, the crystals shimmered like stars. After another twenty-minute journey, this time on foot, we reached another large spigot jutting out from the rock. Only half a mile underground, and better ventilated, this alcove was much cooler than the last. The rock around the faucet was mired in what looked like wet clay, which varied in color from pale salmon to brick red. This, too, Casar explained, was the work of microbes, in this case a genus known as Gallionella, which thrives in iron-rich waters and excretes twisted metal spires. At Casar’s request, I filled a jug with fracture water from the faucet, scooped microbe-rich mud into plastic tubes, and stored them in coolers, where they would await future analysis.
Kruger and Casar have visited the former Homestake Mine at least twice a year for many years. Every time they return, they encounter enigmatic microbes that have never been successfully grown in a laboratory and species that have not yet been named. Their studies are part of a collaborative effort co-led by Magdalena Osburn, a professor at Northwestern University and a prominent member of the relatively new field known as geomicrobiology.
Osburn and her colleagues have shown that, contrary to long-held assumptions, Earth’s interior is not barren. In fact, the majority of the planet’s microbes—perhaps more than 90 percent—may live deep underground. These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, reproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxygen. And they seem capable of weathering geological cataclysms that would annihilate most creatures. Like the many tiny organisms in the ocean and atmosphere, the unique microbes within Earth’s crust do not simply inhabit their surroundings—they transform them. Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals, and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the groundwork for all other terrestrial life.
Product details
- ASIN : B0CJTLBCDX
- Publisher : Random House (June 25, 2024)
- Publication date : June 25, 2024
- Language : English
- File size : 40963 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 407 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #126,140 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #7 in Environmental Science (Kindle Store)
- #28 in Environmental Issues
- #161 in Environmental Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Ferris Jabr is the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.
He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program. His work has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
So much information
This book should be used in schools !!
"Gaya the Living Planet” hypothesis was first published in 1979 and was ridiculed at first, but since then there is more and more scientific evidence to support it. "Becoming Earth" nicely summarizes the current state of knowledge in this field, showing that our entire planet is one large interdependent ecosystem. As the author writes: "Living creatures are not simply products of inexorable evolutionary processes in their particular habitats; they are orchestrators of their environments and participants in their own evolution. We and other living creatures are more than inhabitants of Earth; we are Earth—an outgrowth of its physical structure and an engine of its global cycles. Earth and its creatures are so closely intertwined that we can think of them as one.”
I love books that make you change your perspective and see things in a new way. I had a lot of those moments while reading this book. Like in a part about plastic pollution in the ocean: "Because modern plastic is synthesized in laboratories and factories, it is often regarded as an ‘unnatural’ material. Yet the concept of the unnatural makes sense only in contraposition to the idea of the natural, which is itself dependent on the false premise that humans and human artifacts are somehow separate from nature at large."
Highly recommended to anyone interested in natural science and the fate of our planet.
Thanks to the publisher, Random House, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2024
Unfortunately, that's not the book we get. Oh, it is well written, in a way. The book has the pacing and turns of a National Geographic article -- it weaves a line from empirical facts and humanizing narrative, from the objective and the personal, and occasionally sets a hook with a nearly profound turn of phrase that both summarizes and implies some deeper understanding that's just beyond these pages. It is a comforting style, though not one that lends itself to rigorous detail or challenging argumentation. It is the kind of song one sings when singing to the choir.
The book that we don't get is the one about life creating its home. We get a book about one species destroying its home, and then hopefully using its own weapons (technology and regulation) as tools to begin repair. Yes, this is a book -- yet another -- about Climate Change And Pollution And What To Do About It. Not that climate change and environmental degradation aren't true and reversing them isn't important -- because they are, and it is. But I signed up to read something else.
What we get is a book of three sections -- 'Rock', 'Water', 'Air' -- each with three chapters. The first chapter of each section introduces the topic of the section, and this is where the material promised by the book's title is presented, though only through the lens of microorganisms, and only in very broad terms that encourage some degree of wonder but little education. The second chapter in each section purports to explain these same sorts of effects as caused by larger organisms, though each of these second chapters has a human (individual, group, or company) as chief protagonist. The third chapters are explicitly about how humans have messed up and how we might fix it; the connections of these third chapters to the preceding two of each section are largely tangential and leave the idea of an interconnected Earth pretty far behind -- they're about rock, water and air, but that's about the extent of the connection. These third chapters do get pretty bogged down in (Yet More, though I'm sure I've seen it before) data and statistics about climate change and how bad it is -- years and parts per million and temperatures at which roads buckle and human deaths and titles of Intergovernmental Panel Reports.
If the reader wants another book about climate change and what to do about it, written in a very familiar and comforting style, this would be a worthy choice. If a person wants a book that is promised by the title of this one, you may have to either wait or write it yourself.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.