Jan Zalasiewicz, profesor de paleobiología en la Universidad de Leicester, profundiza en el Antropoceno.
Jan Zalasiewicz es profesor de paleobiología en la Universidad de Leicester, Reino Unido. Al principio de su carrera, fue geólogo de campo y paleontólogo en el Servicio Geológico Británico, trabajando para descifrar los estratos del este de Inglaterra y luego las montañas del centro de Gales. Ahora, enseña geología e historia de la Tierra a estudiantes de pregrado y posgrado, y estudia ecosistemas y entornos fósiles a lo largo de más de quinientos millones de años de tiempo geológico. En los últimos años, ha estado involucrado en ayudar a desarrollar ideas sobre el Antropoceno, el concepto de que los humanos ahora impulsan gran parte de la geología en la superficie de la Tierra, y preside el Grupo de Trabajo de Antropoceno de la Comisión Internacional de Estratigrafía.
The Goldilocks planet : the four billion year story of earth's climate pdf por Jan Zalasiewicz
Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years.
Indeed, the vast history that the authors relate here is dramatic and often abrupt--with massive changes in global and regional climate, from bitterly cold to sweltering hot, from arid to humid. They introduce us to the Cryogenian period, the days of Snowball Earth seven hundred million years ago, when ice spread to cover the world, then melted abruptly amid such dramatic climatic turbulence that hurricanes raged across the Earth. We read about the Carboniferous, with tropical jungles at the equator (where Pennsylvania is now) and the Cretaceous Period, when the polar regions saw not ice but dense conifer forests of cypress and redwood, with gingkos and ferns. The authors also show how this history can be read from clues preserved in the Earth's strata. The evidence is abundant, though always incomplete--and often baffling, puzzling, infuriating, tantalizing, seemingly contradictory. Geologists, though, are becoming ever more ingenious at deciphering this evidence, and the story of the Earth's climate is now being reconstructed in ever-greater detail--maybe even providing us with clues to the future of contemporary climate change.
And through all of this, the authors conclude, the Earth has remained perfectly habitable--in stark contrast to its planetary neighbors. Not too hot, not too cold; not too dry, not too wet--"the Goldilocks planet."