Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Earth Sciences

Syukuro Manabe is perhaps the leading pioneer of modern climate modeling. Beyond Global Warming is his compelling firsthand account of how the scientific community came to understand the human causes of climate change, and how numerical models using the world's most powerful computers have been instrumental to these vital discoveries.

Are you worried about the effects of climate change on our environment? Want to help but don't know where to start? Environmental activist Natalie Fee's new handbook to green living will help you to make small lifestyle changes that will make a big difference to our planet.

Fire is rarely out of the headlines, from large natural wildfires raging across the Australian or Californian countrysides to the burning of buildings such as the disasters of Grenfell tower and Notre Dame. Fire on these scales can represent a serious risk to human life and property. But the advent of fire made and controlled by humans also represented a crucial point in our evolution, allowing us to cook our food, forge our weapons, and warm our homes.

A herd of bison standing in the snow. Layered bluffs of multicolored sandstone. A silver Airstream trailer on a mountain highway. These are familiar sights for Neil Mathison and his wife, Susan. Newly retired, their son in college, they embark upon a great American road trip "uncoupled from the tyranny of calendars or a specific journey."

Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid as large as Mt. Everest hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula at a speed ten times faster than the fastest rifle bullet. Debris from the impact blew into space, re-entered the atmosphere as a swarm of shooting stars that burned the global forests and grasslands, leaving behind a thin global layer containing rock from the asteroid and from Mexico, and smoke from the fires. This layer marks one of the greatest extinctions in Earth history including not just dinosaurs, but also fish, plankton, ammonites, and plants making up about 75% of the known species.

The growing concern about global environmental change and human impacts on the planet has led to the emergence of a broad field of study on the 'sustainability' of human societies. The term's common usage can be traced back to the advent of the Earth Summit in 1992 when 'sustainable development' was broadly embraced by the international community as an ostensibly win-win proposition for economic development, social inclusion, and ecological conservation. Yet both the natural science underpinnings and the social implications of a quest for sustainability have been diffuse.

You've heard of Pangea, the single landmass that broke apart some 175 million years ago to give us our current continents, but what about its predecessors, Rodinia or Columbia? These "supercontinents" from Earth's past provide evidence that land repeatedly joins and separates. While scientists debate what that next supercontinent will look like—and what to name it—they all agree: one is coming.

Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline—and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future.

Own the room with this hilarious collection of fact-tastic myth-busters and jaw-dropping trivia exploring science, history, sport and lesser-known facts from across the universe. Did you know that the Moon has a Bishop? That ostriches DON'T bury their heads in the sand? And that powdered rice was used as cement in the Great Wall of China? What do souls weigh? What can't 60% of the human population smell? And what on earth is rhinotillexomania? And the big one . . . are farts actually invisible? The answers to these questions are all here.

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future.

The world's oceans are changing at a drastic pace. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest.

Earth stands at a tipping point. As we fail to curtail emissions fast enough, our planet stares down a cascade of imminent, catastrophic, and irreversible disaster triggered by climate change. Yet a potent technology already exists to buy us more time: solar geoengineering. Through methods such as atmospheric aerosols, human-generated cirrus clouds, and solar sails, we humans can—at least in the short term—slow the Earth's warming. Should we?