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The Next Supercontinent: Solving the Puzzle of a Future Pangea de Ross Mitchell

The Next Supercontinent: Solving the Puzzle of a Future Pangea

Autor Ross Mitchell
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 24 mai 2023

În capitolul dedicat „Arhaicului Necunoscut”, Ross Mitchell stabilește miza centrală a volumului: înțelegerea modului în care dinamica profundă a planetei guvernează viitorul geografic al umanității. Observăm o abordare care transcende simpla descriere a derivei continentelor, autorul invitându-ne în expediții geologice în regiuni izolate pentru a identifica dovezile fizice ale unor mase continentale ancestrale precum Rodinia sau Columbia. Această perspectivă transformă The Next Supercontinent dintr-un tratat teoretic într-o narațiune de explorare științifică, unde geofizica devine un instrument de descifrare a unui puzzle global.

Structura volumului este riguros organizată pe etapele ciclului supercontinental. Primele trei capitole analizează succesiv Pangea, Rodinia și Columbia, oferind cititorului contextul istoric necesar pentru a înțelege capitolul central, „The Next Supercontinent”. Aici, Mitchell prezintă argumentele pentru formarea Amasiei, viitorul supercontinent ce va rezulta din coliziunea Americii de Nord cu Asia, proces explicat prin fluxurile termice din mantaua terestră. Lucrarea extinde cadrul propus de Supercontinent de Ted Nield cu date noi din cercetările recente asupra dinamicii mantalei și oferă o alternativă mai riguros ancorată în geofizică față de teoriile prezentate în The Vestige of a Beginning, the Prospect of an End.

Notăm cu interes modul în care Mitchell reușește să explice teoria tectonicii plăcilor fără a recurge la un limbaj excesiv de tehnic, menținând totodată precizia academică specifică University of Chicago Press. Epilogul, „Surviving Amasia”, ridică întrebări esențiale despre supraviețuirea speciilor pe o scară de timp de 200 de milioane de ani, oferind o încheiere speculativă, dar fundamentată științific, asupra destinului pe termen lung al Pământului.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226824918
ISBN-10: 0226824918
Pagini: 304
Ilustrații: 56 halftones
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press

De ce să citești această carte

Această lucrare este esențială pentru cititorii pasionați de geologie și științele pământului care doresc să înțeleagă nu doar trecutul planetei, ci și configurația sa viitoare. Ross Mitchell oferă o perspectivă clară asupra ciclului supercontinentelor, explicând cum mișcările profunde ale mantalei ne vor modela lumea. Veți câștiga o înțelegere profundă a modului în care se formează Amasia, totul printr-o scriitură ce îmbină rigoarea academică cu experiența directă de pe teren.

Despre autor

Ross Mitchell este un geofizician de renume internațional, recunoscut pentru contribuțiile sale majore în studiul paleomagnetismului și al tectonicii plăcilor. Expert în ciclul supercontinentelor, Mitchell a efectuat numeroase cercetări de teren în locații geologice strategice pentru a colecta date despre configurațiile continentale preistorice. Activitatea sa academică se concentrează pe corelarea proceselor geodinamice din interiorul Terrei cu schimbările majore de la suprafața scoarței, fiind unul dintre principalii promotori ai teoriei formării viitorului supercontinent, Amasia. Această expertiză îi permite să traducă concepte geofizice complexe într-o formă accesibilă publicului larg.

Descriere scurtă

An internationally recognized scientist shows that Earth’s separate continents, once together in Pangea, are again on a collision course.
You’ve heard of Pangea, the single landmass that broke apart some 175 million years ago to give us our current continents, but what about its predecessors, Rodinia or Columbia? These “supercontinents” from Earth’s past provide evidence that land repeatedly joins and separates. While scientists debate what that next supercontinent will look like—and what to name it—they all agree: one is coming.
In this engaging work, geophysicist Ross Mitchell invites readers to remote (and sometimes treacherous) lands for evidence of past supercontinents, delves into the phenomena that will birth the next, and presents the case for the future supercontinent of Amasia, defined by the merging of North America and Asia. Introducing readers to plate tectonic theory through fieldwork adventures and accessible scientific descriptions, Mitchell considers flows deep in the Earth’s mantle to explain Amasia’s future formation and shows how this developing theory can illuminate other planetary mysteries. He then poses the inevitable question: how can humanity survive the intervening 200 million years necessary to see Amasia?
An expert on the supercontinent cycle, Mitchell offers readers a front-row seat to a slow-motion mystery and an ongoing scientific debate.

Notă biografică

Ross Mitchell is professor at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. His supercontinent research has been covered by outlets including the New York Times, Scientific American, NPR Science Friday, and Science.

Extras

In grade school, many of us learned how the present continents, scattered around the globe, once fit snugly together. Although each continent appears to have its own particular shape, rewind the tape 200 million years and they fit together, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “Pangea,” coined by plate tectonic pioneer Alfred Wegener, means just that: “all Earth,” a time in Earth’s past when the majority of the continents assembled into a single plate. But Pangea is just the most recent iteration of what’s called a supercontinent. At least two others have come and gone over the 4.5 billion years of our planet’s existence—and scientists like me believe there will be more in the future. The next supercontinent will likely take another 200 million years to form, but the continents are undeniably on a collision course. According to one computer model, New York City will crash into Lima, Peru. Plate tectonics is certainly powerful enough to stack one city on top of the other, sending the future’s equivalent of skyscrapers into the depths of the ocean to be recycled back down into the hot mantle. Although scientists agree that another supercontinent is coming, we have vastly different opinions on how it will take shape.

In this book, I will layout the leading contenders for the geography of the next supercontinent, explore the modern mysteries that still surround plate tectonics, and explain the science behind predicting how continents move. Alas, predicting the next supercontinent is not as simple as understanding today’s movements and pressing fast-forward. Tectonic plates move slowly, at about the same speed that our fingernails grow. But GPS is now precise enough to detect this slow motion. And residents of Pompeii, San Francisco, and Fukushima can tell you that the effects of those movements are hard to perceive—until they are devastating. Volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis are evidence of plate tectonics’ power. So is geography—just look at the abrupt bend, or kink, in the chain of the Hawaiian Islands. These islands formed a straight chain of semicontinuous volcanic activity for about 30 million years, until a sudden pivot occurred over the course of a few million years or less. The bend is a record of that pivot. Why did this happen? The tectonic plates are all interconnected, so any change in the movement of one plate causes adjustments in them all. Thirty million years ago, Australia broke away from Antarctica and started its current path north across the Pacific Ocean. Whereas the Pacific plate had been moving directly north before the bend, Australia’s breakaway in the western Pacific caused the motion of the Pacific plate to deflect toward the northwest after the bend. No plate is moving alone and each plate interacts with its neighbors along their shared boundaries. Plate tectonics is the dance of all plates and the seven major continents (or eight, depending on how you define them) they carry, constituting a global choreography, with dozens of smaller plates in between.

The earliest understanding of plate movement was the sixteenth-century idea of “continental drift”—that the continents migrated like rafts slowly into their current position, floating on an imperceptible layer within the earth. But this theory was largely written off because it was not clear what sort of mysterious substratum the continental rafts would be floating on. By the beginning of the last century, we still knew very little about the interior of the earth. Eventually, as seismology— the study of inner Earth using the vibrations generated from earthquakes— developed and submarines were put to good use after World War II to map the seafloor, the hypothesis of plate tectonics changed geology forever. Breaking Earth’s seemingly rigid surface into an interlocking mosaic of different plates that pushed and pulled each other provided a unified explanation for the origin of many of Earth’s great geological features, such as mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, and oceans. But as exciting as the early plate tectonic revolution was, it didn’t have all the answers. For example, the hot interior of the earth was likely convecting, in a movement driven by temperature changes, just like the circulation of air in the atmosphere; but how these deep convective cells related to the push and pull of the plates at Earth’s surface would remain elusive for decades—and the details of this interaction are still unsolved.
 

Cuprins

Preface
Introduction
1. Pangea
2. Rodinia
3. Columbia
4. The Unknown Archean
5. The Next Supercontinent
Epilogue: Surviving Amasia
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Recenzii

"This lovely book, though, is a story of how quickly we are changing what it is we know, how we think, and how we think about how we think. And what it is we value most. None of our descendants will survive long enough to see any practical effects of tectonic change. The reshaping of the continents will not matter to our species. We will not be there. We are not an especially careful mammal. If we are lucky, maybe we have a million years to go, maybe even two. But this book is not about that. It is ultimately about science, as the new religion of our times, and how we think of eternity. It is about us, and what we are becoming."

"Although Mitchell’s destination is the distant future, don’t be fooled. His book is as much a romp through the past as it is a look ahead, complete with references unique to the present....Throughout the book, Mitchell’s clear explanations and carefully chosen images help make sense of even the most complicated concepts."

"Locked in rocks, mountains, and oceans lies evidence of an ancient, active earth. Subduction, plate tectonics, and volcanic activity continually reshape continents. . . . [Those] interested in geology and geophysics will appreciate Mitchell’s compelling vision and research."

"Ross Mitchell provides a cinematic view of Earth over billion-year timescales, showing how the slow-motion dance of the continents has a deep underlying logic that makes it possible to predict geographies of the distant future."

"Geological puzzles don’t get bigger than unravelling the choreography of continents since Earth’s childhood. It takes bold thinking, and reconciliation of hard-won field data with computer models of our planet’s interior, to figure out the lay of the land hundreds of millions of years ago. Ross Mitchell draws on his own cutting-edge research to explain how Earth’s heat engine works, and what ancient configurations of land and sea—vastly different from today’s map—meant for the atmosphere, climate and, crucially, the evolution of life. It’s a gripping story, vivaciously told, of prescient scientists, perilous fieldwork, and the amazing ways in which geology empowers us to situate humanity in the context of billions of years of Earth history, and to ground speculation of how the next billion might play out."

“Mitchell is the only person who could write this inviting and engaging book, which shares the thrill of scientific discovery.”

"The world is like a giant clock, with enormous tectonic gears of seemingly infinite complexity. That clock will keep ticking long after we humans are extinct, and Ross Mitchell, watchmaker, lets us see far into that future: an amazing Amasia."

“A clear, accessible introduction to a ‘super’ significant topic—the supercontinent cycle—and to scientific study itself.”

"An engaging insider’s story of geological discovery and insight at a grand scale—the unification and fragmentation of supercontinents over geologic time, and why such behavior is repeating, yet changing. This first-hand account reads like The Double Helix, but with mountains for molecules."