You can download Nature Guide Rocks and Minerals ebook here.
- Title: Nature Guide Rocks and Minerals
- Author: Ronald Louis Bonewitz
- Publisher: DK Publisher
- Pages: 354
Rocks, like airplane flight recorders, store in their interior very useful happened in the past. Stones, found in mountains, folds, lakes, and oceans, hold clues to the past. By studying rocks, we can reconstruct the history of the Earth. Rocks, existing since the universe’s start, share stories from various times. They were part of the cloud of dust and gases that revolved around the Sun over four billion years ago.
Rocks have been silent witnesses to the cataclysms our planet has experienced. They know the cold of the glacial era, the intense heat of the Earth’s interior, and the fury of the oceans. They store much information about how external agents, such as wind, rain, ice, and temperature changes, have been altering the planet’s surface for millions of years.
For ancient civilizations, stones symbolized eternity. This idea has persisted throughout time because stones endure, but they are recycled time and again. Fifty million years from now, nothing will be as we now know it—not the Andes, nor the Himalayas, nor the ice of Antarctica, nor the Sahara Desert. Weathering and erosion, though slow, will never stop. This should free us from any illusion of the immortality of the Earth’s features. What will everything be like in the future? We don’t know.
The only sure thing is that there will be rocks. Only stones will remain, and their chemical composition, shape, and texture will provide clues about previous geological events and about what the Earth’s surface was like in the past. In the pages of this book, illustrated with stunning images, you will find invaluable information about the language of rocks and natural forces in general. You will also learn to identify the most important minerals, know their physical and chemical properties, and discover the environments in which they form.