The Earth: An intimate history by Richard Fortey, HarperCollins, £25, ISBN 0002570114
BOOKS with a title this ambitious generally do not live up to their billing. This one does. It is the tale of breakthroughs in our knowledge of the Earth no less significant than those that revolutionised our understanding of physics or genetics in recent decades. For the science it covers, the human stories and the leisurely style in which it conveys vast amounts of information, The Earth deserves to be a bestseller.
The unifying theory that makes this book possible is plate tectonics. The fact that a heat engine inside Earth moves continents, causes earthquakes and volcanoes, and creates oceans is familiar enough. But Richard Fortey shows that it makes sense of every rock, fossil and landscape on the planet.
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As Fortey’s hero, Arthur Holmes, admitted, geology is a passport to spending one’s working life in terrific surroundings. Fortey has made the most of the opportunity. He takes us from Hawaii to Italy via the Arctic and the Grand Canyon. His skill as a tour guide is highly developed. Many pages of local colour, with a strong emphasis on food, pass by with no mention of rocks. But despite the easy pace, this book contains little waste. Faulting and folding, sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks, and the formation and destruction of mountains and oceans all receive substantial chapters, built round evidence from specific locations.
The book ends with a spectacular verbal panorama of the surface of the planet. Mountain ranges, islands and coral reefs are explained rather as a guide might take visitors around an ancient monument, explaining when, how and why each part was built or met its end.
This tour de force alone is worth the price of the book, if only because it would not have been possible until a few years ago. But by the time the reader gets there, they will have gained a proper understanding of how the picture emerged, and encountered the people who devoted their lives to making that happen.
Some saw the planet as a single structure when it was unfashionable to see the big picture. Among them were Holmes, who worked out how to discern the age of ancient rocks, and Alfred Wegener, the originator of continental drift. Others – perhaps Fortey’s favourites – have devoted themselves to unpicking fantastically complex details. The persistence that has shown us how colliding continents make mountains, how rock formed deep inside the Earth comes to light and how ancient oceans open and close is all here.
Fortey’s writing is so powerful that The Earth will entice many general readers. But seasoned earth scientists should enjoy it just as much.