Book Review: "A Brief History of Earth"

Brief History of the Earth Book Review
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Brief History of the Earth Book Review
The book, “A Brief History of the Earth” by Andrew H. Knoll is an interesting text that contains eight chapters covering four billion years of the earth. The chapters cover different phases of the earth’s development, including the Chemical Earth, the Physical Earth, the Biological Earth, the Oxygen Earth, the Animal Earth, the Green Earth, the Catastrophic Earth, and the Human Earth. All these chapters provide an excellent survey of the geology of the earth, which is a home to millions of organisms. It begins with a proto-planetary disk and proceeds to include the modern “Anthropocene”, a period where human activity dramatically changes the planet.
The chemical Earth
The chapter covers the chemical composition of the earth in terms of the specific molecules that comprise it. According to the text, matter in the universe was generated by the Big Bang that mainly consisted of hydrogen atoms together with some deuterium hydrogen, which is hydrogen with an added neutron and helium. These molecules came together with other elements such as lithium and formed a small mass, which the author termed at the beginning as a jot, s speck, a fleck. The astronomers studied the universe and its motions of stars and galaxies and concluded that it mainly contained gas and dust held together by gravity. Ultimately, the author noted that the main elemental composition of the earth included iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, nickel, calcium, aluminum, and everything else in varying proportions. On the contrary, organisms found on the surface of the have bodies that mainly contain oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous, and any additional materials.
The chapter provides an excellent and brief overview of the chemical composition of the earth and its components. The elements that the author highlights as forming the earth are those that are significant towards the existence of the organisms. Indeed, while it is difficult to determine where the earth began from, it is undisputable that the each contains many more chemicals that each plays a different role towards sustaining its operations.
The Physical Earth
This chapter covers the transformation of the chemical mass of the elements and compounds to form something that is physical and hence tangible to support life. He describes it as an interacting mosaic of rigid plates known as a “lithosphere” that comprises the crust and strong, solid mantle just below it. Approximately half of the plates include the contents that separate or collide as the plates that hold them continue to glide on each other. The plates slide past each other, creating different physical forms, such as mountains, hills, and valleys. The process is extremely slow that it takes several years, probably thousands or millions to form a distinguishable feature. These movements are well explained in the plate tectonics concept, which explains the ancient or modern plate movements and its associated structures that were formed from such motions.
There are several theorists who have also alluded to the ea...