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| Inventing the Earth. Ideas on Landscape Development since 1740 | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | B. A. Kennedy |
| Publisher: | Blackwell Publishing |
| ISBN: | 1405101881 |
| Format: | softback |
| 160pp | |
| Price: | £19.99 |
| Review Date: | 09 February 2006 |
| Review: | This series of essays looks at how, over the last 250 years, successive generations of natural philosophers, geologists and geomorphologists came to their different views of the Earth. It explains how present day ‘truths’ have come to be accepted: the Earth is about 4600 million years old; the surface is in perpetual motion due to plate tectonics; the shape of the surface is being continually modified by the wind, rivers and glaciers; there have been endless changes in climate, etc. The story is told from the viewpoint of a changing significance of the actions of rain and river, with an emphasis on individuals – heroes and villains (Hutton, Lyell, Agassiz, Darwin, John Wesley Powell, Grove Karl Gilbert, William Morris Davis, Robert Horton, Arthur Strahler etc.) – and their original work. |