Islands in Deep Time

Islands in Deep Time PDF Author: Markes E. Johnson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231559259
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hilltops surrounded by farmland in southern Wisconsin turn out to be the eroded remnants of an ancient archipelago. An island in the Yellow Sea where Korean tourists flock is the peak of a flooded mountain rising from a drowned continental shelf. From a mountaintop shrine to Genghis Khan in Inner Mongolia, the silhouette of a Silurian seascape can be spotted. On the shores of Hudson Bay, where polar bears patrol the Arctic tundra, a close look unveils what was a tropical coastline encrusted with corals nearly 450 million years ago. The geologist Markes E. Johnson invites readers on a journey through deep time to find the traces of ancient islands. He visits a dozen sites around the globe, looking above and below today’s waterlines to uncover how landscapes of the past are preserved in the present. Going back 500 million years to the Cambrian through the Pleistocene 125,000 years ago, this book reconstructs how “paleoislands” appeared under different climatic conditions and environmental constraints. Finding vestiges of prehistoric ecologies, Johnson emphasizes the complexity of island ecosystems and the importance of preserving these significant sites. Inviting and accessible, this book is a travelogue that takes readers through time as well as space. Islands in Deep Time shares the adventure of exploring striking locations across geologic eras and issues a passionate call for their conservation.

Islands in Deep Time

Islands in Deep Time PDF Author: Markes E. Johnson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231559259
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hilltops surrounded by farmland in southern Wisconsin turn out to be the eroded remnants of an ancient archipelago. An island in the Yellow Sea where Korean tourists flock is the peak of a flooded mountain rising from a drowned continental shelf. From a mountaintop shrine to Genghis Khan in Inner Mongolia, the silhouette of a Silurian seascape can be spotted. On the shores of Hudson Bay, where polar bears patrol the Arctic tundra, a close look unveils what was a tropical coastline encrusted with corals nearly 450 million years ago. The geologist Markes E. Johnson invites readers on a journey through deep time to find the traces of ancient islands. He visits a dozen sites around the globe, looking above and below today’s waterlines to uncover how landscapes of the past are preserved in the present. Going back 500 million years to the Cambrian through the Pleistocene 125,000 years ago, this book reconstructs how “paleoislands” appeared under different climatic conditions and environmental constraints. Finding vestiges of prehistoric ecologies, Johnson emphasizes the complexity of island ecosystems and the importance of preserving these significant sites. Inviting and accessible, this book is a travelogue that takes readers through time as well as space. Islands in Deep Time shares the adventure of exploring striking locations across geologic eras and issues a passionate call for their conservation.

Explorers of Deep Time

Explorers of Deep Time PDF Author: Roy Plotnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551312
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Get Book Here

Book Description
Paleontology is one of the most visible yet most misunderstood fields of science. Children dream of becoming paleontologists when they grow up. Museum visitors flock to exhibits on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. The media reports on fossil discoveries and new clues to mass extinctions. Nonetheless, misconceptions abound: paleontologists are assumed only to be interested in dinosaurs, and they are all too often imagined as bearded white men in battered cowboy hats. Roy Plotnick provides a behind-the-scenes look at paleontology as it exists today in all its complexity. He explores the field’s aims, methods, and possibilities, with an emphasis on the compelling personal stories of the scientists who have made it a career. Paleontologists study the entire history of life on Earth; they do not only use hammers and chisels to unearth fossils but are just as likely to work with cutting-edge computing technology. Plotnick presents the big questions about life’s history that drive paleontological research and shows why knowledge of Earth’s past is essential to understanding present-day environmental crises. He introduces readers to the diverse group of people of all genders, races, and international backgrounds who make up the twenty-first-century paleontology community, foregrounding their perspectives and firsthand narratives. He also frankly discusses the many challenges that face the profession, with key takeaways for aspiring scientists. Candid and comprehensive, Explorers of Deep Time is essential reading for anyone curious about the everyday work of real-life paleontologists.

An Anthropology of Deep Time

An Anthropology of Deep Time PDF Author: Richard D. G. Irvine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108869955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the face of debates about the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - and contemporary concerns about ecological crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is more important than ever to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This path-breaking book is a timely critical review of the anthropology of time, exploring our human relationship with the timescale of geological formation. Richard D. G. Irvine shows how the time-horizons of social life are a matter of crucial concern, and lays bare the ways in which human activity becomes severed from the long-term geological and ecological rhythms on which it depends.

Islands through Time

Islands through Time PDF Author: Todd J. Braje
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442278587
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can capture glimpses of California prior to modern development, the islands are often portrayed as frozen moments in history where ecosystems developed in virtual isolation for tens of thousands of years. This could not, however, be further from the truth. For at least 13,000 years, the Chumash and their ancestors occupied the Northern Channel Islands, leaving behind an archaeological record that is one of the longest and best preserved in the Americas. From ephemeral hunting and gathering camps to densely populated coastal villages and Euro-American and Chinese historical sites, archaeologists have studied the Channel Island environments and material culture records for over 100 years. They have pieced together a fascinating story of initial settlement by mobile hunter-gatherers to the development of one of the world’s most complex hunter-gatherer societies ever recorded, followed by the devastating effects of European contact and settlement. Likely arriving by boat along a “kelp highway,” Paleocoastal migrants found not four offshore islands, but a single super island, Santarosae. For millennia, the Chumash and their predecessors survived dramatic changes to their land- and seascapes, climatic fluctuations, and ever-evolving social and cultural systems. Islands Through Time is the remarkable story of the human and ecological history of California’s Northern Channel Islands. We weave the tale of how the Chumash and their ancestors shaped and were shaped by their island homes. Their story is one of adaptation to shifting land- and seascapes, growing populations, fluctuating subsistence resources, and the innovation of new technologies, subsistence strategies, and socio-political systems. Islands Through Time demonstrates that to truly understand and preserve the Channel Islands National Park today, archaeology and deep history are critically important. The lessons of history can act as a guide for building sustainable strategies into the future. The resilience of the Chumash and Channel Island ecosystems provides a story of hope for a world increasingly threatened by climate change, declining biodiversity, and geopolitical instability.

Long History, Deep Time

Long History, Deep Time PDF Author: Ann McGrath
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1925022536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book Here

Book Description
The vast shape-shifting continent of Australia enables us to take a long view of history. We consider ways to cross the great divide between the deep past and the present. Australia’s human past is not a short past, so we need to enlarge the scale and scope of history beyond 1788. In ways not so distant, these deeper times happened in the same places where we walk today. Yet, they were not the same places, having different surfaces, ecologies and peoples. Contributors to this volume show how the earth and its past peoples can wake us up to a sense of place as history – as a site of both change and continuity. This book ignites the possibilities of what the spaces and expanses of history might be. Its authors reflect upon the need for appropriate, feasible timescales for history, pointing out some of the obstacles encountered in earlier efforts to slice human time into thematic categories. Time and history are considered from the perspective of physics, archaeology, literature, western and Indigenous philosophy. Ultimately, this collection argues for imaginative new approaches to collaborative histories of deep time that are better suited to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Contributors to this volume, including many leading figures in their respective disciplines, consider history’s temporality, and ask how history might expand to accommodate a chronology of deep time. Long histories that incorporate humanities, science and Indigenous knowledge may produce deeper meanings of the worlds in which we live.

Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle

Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle PDF Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674891999
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines scientific theories pertaining to the measurement of earth's history.

The Northern Adriatic Ecosystem

The Northern Adriatic Ecosystem PDF Author: Frank Kenneth McKinney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231132428
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
The northern Adriatic Sea is transient, most recently flooded between 18,000 to 6,000 years ago following the last glacial maximum, and it will drain again with the onset of the next glacial period. Despite its youth, uniformly shallow depth, and flat sediment floor, it hosts a broad range of bottom-dwelling sea life ecologically resembling communities that have existed in the shallow sea since the Ordovician Period, some 500 million years ago. The northern Adriatic is a natural laboratory in which to test hypotheses concerning the shift from the Paleozoic prevalence of stationary suspension-feeders living on the surface of the sediment and feeding from the overlying waters to, more recently, bottom-dwelling animals living dominantly in or actively seeking temporary refuge within the sediments of the sea floor, regardless of where they feed. Across the northern Adriatic Sea there is an ecological gradient from Paleozoic-style surface-dwelling communities in the east to "modern" communities living almost exclusively within the sediments in the west. Therefore, within the relatively small area of the northern Adriatic, there is an existing gradient similar to the profound ecological change from Paleozoic to more modern marine life. During the early twentieth century, life at the bottom of the Adriatic was systematically sampled from the east to the west coasts, revealing the most common animals and their distribution. In this book Frank K. McKinney combines these findings with more recent, local studies to understand better the ecological structure of the Adriatic's floor. Specifically, he uses the predation, sediment textures and deposition rates, currents, and nutrients of northern Adriatic bottom communities to evaluate hypotheses concerning the conditions that drove surface-dwelling animals to seek long-term refuge within sea floor sediment. Though the northern Adriatic has been well studied since the advent of the marine sciences, it is not widely known by paleontologists. With this volume, McKinney illuminates what this "living laboratory" can tell us about the evolution of multicellular life on Earth.

Islands of Time

Islands of Time PDF Author: Barbara Kent Lawrence
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781934949665
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
At fourteen, Rebecca Granger falls in love with Ben Bunker. A summer girl is not allowed to love a year-round boy, son of a fisherman in Downeast Maine in 1958.

Embryos in Deep Time

Embryos in Deep Time PDF Author: Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520952308
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
How can we bring together the study of genes, embryos and fossils? Embryos in Deep Time is a critical synthesis of the study of individual development in fossils. It brings together an up-to-date review of concepts from comparative anatomy, ecology and developmental genetics, and examples of different kinds of animals from diverse geological epochs and geographic areas. Can fossil embryos demonstrate evolutionary changes in reproductive modes? How have changes in ocean chemistry in the past affected the development of marine organisms? What can the microstructure of fossil bone and teeth reveal about maturation time, longevity and changes in growth phases? This book addresses these and other issues and documents with numerous examples and illustrations how fossils provide evidence not only of adult anatomy but also of the life history of individuals at different growth stages. The central topic of Biology today—the transformations occurring during the life of an organism and the mechanisms behind them—is addressed in an integrative manner for extinct animals.

Islands of Order

Islands of Order PDF Author: J. Stephen Lansing
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192944
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Two pioneering anthropologists reveal how complexity science can help us better understand how societies change over time Over the past two decades, anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and geneticist Murray Cox have explored dozens of villages on the islands of the Malay Archipelago, combining ethnographic research with research into genetic and linguistic markers to shed light on how these societies change over time. Islands of Order draws on their pioneering fieldwork to show how the science of complexity can be used to better understand unstable dynamics in culture, language, cooperation, and the emergence of hierarchies. Complexity science has opened exciting new vistas in physics and biology, but poses challenges for social scientists. What triggers fundamental, discontinuous social change? And what brings stable patterns—islands of order—into existence? Lansing and Cox begin with an incisive and accessible introduction to models of change, from simple random drift to coupled interactions, phase transitions, co-phylogenies, and adaptive landscapes. Then they take readers on a series of journeys to the islands of the Indo-Pacific to demonstrate how social scientists can harness these powerful tools to discover out-of-equilibrium social dynamics. Lansing and Cox address empirical questions surrounding the colonization of the Pacific, the relationship of language to culture, the emergence and disappearance of male and female hierarchies, and more. Unlocking new possibilities for the social sciences, Islands of Order is accompanied by an interactive companion website that enables readers to explore the models described in the book.