Supercontinent: 10 Billion Years In The Life Of Our Planet [Kindle Edition]

Firstly, apologies for the punning title for this review! Moving on..."Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of our Planet", the ambitiously-titled book written by eminent science writer Ted Nield, is a brave attempt to cover the history of what he refers to as "The grandest of all patterns in nature".

The book is written in that conversational style so familiar to readers of Richard Dawkins - "Popular Science" or "Pop-Sci", if you will. The whole book is chock full of the sort of crackling enthusiasm and knowing wit, science writers like Mr. Nield are so good at communicating (it comes as no surprise that he is the chair of the Association of British Science Writers). Suffice to say, it was a pleasure to read.

However, as has been probably indicated by the above score, there are a number of issues I found with the book that prevent it from being THE essential book on the subject:

Tone: people who buy Pop-Sci books generally buy them for two reasons - either they are casual readers with little or no exposure to the subject and are looking for a general introduction, or they are amateur enthusiasts, looking to sate their appetite for the subject but are not quite ready for the academic-grade tomes.

As highly readable and enjoyable "Supercontinent" is, it just doesn't quite hit the right, consistent tone to completely satisfy either potential readership. On the one hand, its not quite basic enough to be an introductory text for absolute beginners: it does implicitly assume some knowledge of fundamental geological concepts (plate tectonics, the layers of the earth, the process of vulcanism, deposition and metamorphism), which could potentially leave the novice a bit at sea. At the same time, it doesn't quite have the detail, depth and focus an informed enthusiast might be looking for.

Pacing: The first chapter reads like an extended advert for the BBC series "The Future is Wild!". The middle sections are effectively a history of the concept of the Supercontinent (in the style of the seminal Pop-Sci book Chaos) and its surprisingly contentious place in the modern canon of science. I have to admit, this is the section I found least interesting. Not to say that it wasn't worthwhile including, I just wish it had been a little de-emphasised.

Perhaps a little tighter editorial control could have reined in some of the more overly-digressive passages, leaving more room for discussion of the different continental configurations. For instance, the section devoted to the origins of Lewis Carol's "Alice In Wonderland", with the rather flimsy pretext of introducing the main discussion of Pangaea, is frankly overly long and almost crosses the line into total irrelevancy.

The book is mainly saved by the last two chapters (excluding the epilogue), which cover the 'original' supercontinent Rodinia (the so-called 'cradle of life'), the "Snowball Earth" hypothesis and Rodinia's successor, Pannotia. They both go into some detail regarding how geophysicists identify the previous configurations of the continents (and the inherent difficulties in mapping it accurately) without completely bamboozling the reader with the chemistry.

Length: At just over 270 pages long, and given the huge scope of the subject, its a bit on the short side, particularly given the cost of the Hardback edition.

Diagrams: it might seem like a small point, but couldn't there have been a few more illustrations throughout? Ted does refer the reader to Chris Scotese's website, where you can find a number of excellent paleo-geographic maps of earth through the ages, however couldn't these or similar examples have been included too; given that some actual inclusions appear a little arbitrary (for instance, do we REALLY need to see the periodic Table of Elements and why on earth was it deemed important to include a photograph of Madame Blavatsky?).

Despite these slight misgivings - which are nothing a good 2nd edition revision couldn't solve - a major problem the whole genre has to deal with is perhaps the advent of Wikipedia and its ilk. It has become so easy to get almost instantaneous access to detailed information on any given subject, its difficult for a book to cover the same subjects as comprehensively. At the same time, we are looking to good science writers such as Dr. Nield to use his authority, experience and knowledge to compile and condense a subject down to the key concepts for ease of digestion by the reader. In general, he succeeds, but I feel that I am still looking for that next 'definitive' book on the subject.

One last word about the epilogue. Post-God Delusion, it seems as if every (secular) science writer feels its their duty to include an attack on religious irrationality. Its as if Ted Nield, so grateful to have opportunity to publish a mainstream book and worried that he might not get the chance again, wanted to shoehorn in a dig in the ribs of the fundamentalists, under the pretext of rebutting the denials of paleogeography by Young Earth Creationist and their loony cohort. Would this sort of thing have been included in this type of book 10-15 years ago? I suspect not.

"Did the Earth move for you?", asks the voice beside you. Well, yes. Because that's what it does. All the time. The continent you live on used to be someplace else, and far away from where it is now. Your home ground has even been part of a greater landmass known as a "supercontinent" - and will be again. Hence, the title of this book. Ted Nield provides us with a fine account of how we came to learn about these movements. He has brought together the years of research tracking where the rocks have been and where they are likely to go. He likens the movement of continents to a dance of landforms - a "Grand Quadrille". A fine synopsis of the history of geology and its compelling figures - scholars who had to project what was known in their time back into a distant past.

Earth has been a busy place for the past four billion years, and it hasn't stopped to rest. We speak of the "firmness of the Earth", but that phrase is a sham. The key figure in this story is the great supercontinent of Pangaea that began breaking up 250 million years ago. Assembled from previous continents that had once joined and also separated, Pangaea's breakup into places we live on today have been traced in exquisite detail. The matching of rocks in places separated by wide seas provided the clues. In fact, as Nield relates, it was the vast Atlantic that bears the responsibility for Pangaea's fracturing to form the basis for the continents we know today. The author explains how the continents have been engaging in a Grand Quadrille and will continue to do so - for another five billion years, at least.

The progenitor of the idea of "drifting continents" was Alfred Wegener. Using maps to show how western Eurasia and Africa matched the east coasts of the Western Hemisphere, Wegener proposed they had once been joined, but had pulled apart. He couldn't provide a mechanism for the movement, and his idea was rejected - most notably by the geologic "establishment" of the United States. Rejection of the proposal was so strong there that one British geologist described it as "regarding the Declaration of Independence as retroactive to the Palaeozoic". Continents formed separately and remained so through time, it was thought.

However, one US dissident, Reginald Daly of Harvard, had been in South Africa, encountering the work of Alexander du Toit, who noted similarities in rocks of the Great Karoo and South America. That discovery, enhanced by some detailed measurements in Greenland, suggested that movement was occurring. It took a war and the hunt for submarines to reveal what prompted continental movement. An Irish geophysicist, John Joly had already postulated the mechanism, heat from radioactive elements deep in the Earth required escape. That venting pushed the softer areas in the Earth's crust around. Sitting atop that stirring material, the continents track the flow patterns of the heat.

In moving, the continents encounter each other, joining, fusing and establishing mighty landmasses that break up again. Nield skilfully describes the mechanisms and the people who have read the rocks to understand how they work. Beyond Pangaea, for example, the author cites the work of Mark McMenamin, who proposes a yet older supercontinent, Rodinia. Rodinia's importance in the history of the Earth is that it was probably the extant landform around which complex life, after over 3 billion years, finally emerged. Nield's skill in presenting all these complex ideas and their significance never wanes throughout the book. He's achieved a fine summary of the history of modern geology, supported by a collection of portraits and some line drawings. The emphasis on Pangaea is slightly overdone, but his pointer to Chris Scotese's web page of geologic ages more than overcomes that small limitation. An excellent overview. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Not being an expert on the subject and more of a casual reader on geology, I found this book easy to read and very pleasant.
The starting chapters and the last two are very interesting. Every scientist tends to sell his field of study but the author convinces the reader of the importance of supercontinents throughout earth's history.