Book Review: The Earth (Richard Fortey)

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Richard Fortey

THE EARTH

An Intimate History

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Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright © Anthony Campbell (2004).
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Mention geology to many people and the reaction is often one of
indifference and lack of interest. This is odd, given that its subject
is literally the base of our existence. Richard Fortey is a
palaeontologist who has already given us several other excellent popular
science books so he is well placed to tackle this perhaps rather
daunting theme for a general audience.

A principal method he adopts is to link his descriptions to specific
sites, such as the Hawaiian islands, the Alps, or Newfoundland. For each
of these areas he looks at how our knowledge of their origin and
structure has evolved since the mid-nineteenth century, when Charles
Lyell's Principles of Geology brought about a radical change in people's
understanding of the age of our planet and greatly influenced the young
Charles Darwin. Later, in the twentieth century, another great
intellectual earthquake occurred when it was recognized that Alfred
Wegener's theory of continental drift, initially dismissed as cranky,
was actually correct.

This is a long book as befits its theme, and it needs to be taken
slowly. Fortey's writing is always lively, with nice touches of humour
and personal reminiscence, but even so it is perhaps less gripping than
his earlier books, especially the magnificent Trilobite!. Partly,
perhaps, this is inevitable, given the remoteness of geology from our
everyday concerns (unless you happen to be caught up in an earthquake or
a volcanic eruption), but it is also related to the vocabulary, and this
might have been made easier for the reader. The succession of geological
terms for the different kinds of rock eventually becomes bewildering:
unfamiliar names such as apophyllite, gneiss, charnockite, and sial tend
to blur in the mind. The publishers would have been well advised to
include a glossary; as it is, one has to keep referring to the index to
sort things out. There is however an endpaper which illustrates the main
geological eras, with their (to me) wonderfully evocative and poetic
names: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian and the rest.

This criticism aside, the book is a fine achievement. Fortey succeeds,
as well as anyone can, in conveying a sense of the huge scale of
geological time, as it unfolds "vaster than empires, and more slow". We
see continents coming together into a single land mass and then breaking
up, not just once but repeatedly; and (perhaps most astonishingly) the
Atlantic ocean forming, closing up, and then opening again. A constantly
recurring leitmotif in the book is the insignificance of human life in
this vast drama. "Mankind is no more than a parasitic tick gorging
himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and the climate
comparatively clement. But the present arrangement will change, and with
it our brief supremacy." There is nothing like geology for making us
aware of our true place in the grand scheme of things.

27 May 2004
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%T The Earth
%S An Intimate History
%A Richard Fortey
%I HarperCollins
%C London
%D 2004
%G ISBN 0-00257011-4
%P x + 501 pp
%K palaeontology, geology
%O illustrated
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