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Walter Alvarez and his team made one of the most astonishing scientific discoveries of the twentieth century--that an asteroid smashed into the earth 65 million years ago, exterminating the dinosaurs. Alvarez had the first glimmer of that amazing insight when he noticed something odd in a rock outcrop in central Italy. Alvarez now returns to that rich terrain, this time to take the reader on an excavation of the earth's distant past. We encounter the volcanoes that formed the Seven Hills of Rome; majestic limestone mountains that formed millions of years ago under water; and the evidence that the Mediterranean Sea completely evaporated to a sunken desert, perhaps several times, and that continental plates once overran one another to form the Alps. In Alvarez's telling, all major geologic episodes are as dramatic as the great impact that killed the dinosaurs, even when they happen over eons and without huge creatures to witness them.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
I should say as a disclaimer that nothing in this book was new to me, apart from the specifics of the Appenines. I already knew all the field geology and tectonics, which no doubt helped. But he does provide what seemed like helpful and intuitive explanations of everything ranging from the principle of superposition to the delamination of continental lithosphere (!). It's all the usual stuff: soggy tissues for extensional/compressional fronts, and plate rollback is covered by a bathtub and blocks of wood... or something. Yeah.
But I certainly gained an appreciation of Appenine geology and tectonics, and I've copied out some references from the notes to follow up on. I longed for the days when I used to study tectonics. The book definitely suffers from author-citation syndrome, but it didn't bother me too much.
It's good and I enjoyed it very much, but general readers should be at least a little wary: the eye-catching bits about the dinosaur-killing asteroid and the giant Mediterranean salt lake form only small parts of the book -- as does snippets of medieval history and architecture. Most of the book introduces concepts from sedimentary geology and tectonics in order to explain how the Appenines and modern Italy have formed over the last 30 million years.