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Building Planet Earth: Five Billion Years of Earth History

¹ Department of Geology, State University of New York at Cortland, Cortland, NY 13045-2000

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Building Planet Earth: Five Billion Years of Earth History, Peter J. Cattermole, 2000, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 283 p. (Hardcover $39.95) ISBN: 0-521-58278-4.

Recent years have witnessed the revision of several historical geology texts to accommodate advances in the field, as well as the changing demands of students and their professors. With these new and revised additions, one would think choosing a text to suit one's particular taste would be easy; however it is not, and the addition of Building Planet Earth by Peter Cattermole to this list will not make it any easier as it fell quite short of my initially high expectations.

This book is essentially a revision of an earlier one co-authored with Patrick Moore, entitled The Story of the Earth (also published by Cambridge). The revised text does have some welcome additions, most notably in format and in quality of many of the illustrations. The book is written as a sequential story of Earth's history and is organized into four parts: (1) Beginnings, (2) The Earth's heat engine, (3) Patterns of Earth history, and (4) Gondwanaland and more recent events.

The first part of the text, Beginnings, discusses the origin of the solar system and that of Earth, its atmosphere and oceans. It provides a very clear account of a variety of introductory topics including the nebular hypothesis, the origin of the moon, the composition . . . [Full Text of this Article]