Description
Book SynopsisRiver Planet introduces readers to the epic geological history of the world’s rivers, from the first drop of rain on the Earth to the modern environmental crisis.
The river journey begins with the first evidence of flowing water four billion years ago and continues with enormous rivers on the first supercontinents, after which terrestrial vegetation engineered new river forms in the Devonian period. The dramatic breakup of Pangea some 200 million years ago led to our familiar modern rivers as continents drifted and collided, mountains rose, and plains tilted.
Among many remarkable cases, the book explores the rapid carving of the Grand Canyon, the reversal of the Amazon, and the lost rivers of Antarctica. There are gigantic meltwater floods from the Ice Age, which may be linked to accounts of the Deluge, and river systems drowned by rising sea level as the ice melted. Early human civilizations sought to control rivers through agriculture and irrigation, leading in the nineteenth century to hydraulic mining, the rise of big dams, and the burial of rivers below cities such as London. Rivers are now endangered worldwide, and the book celebrates people who preserve rivers around the world, bringing hope to river ecosystems and communities.
River Planet is designed to be accessible for a general audience ranging from advanced high-school students to mature readers. The book will also interest professional scientists and students of geology, geography, and environmental science.
Trade Review‘River Planet is unique in providing an integrated view of rivers in the context of geologic and human history. Gibling describes rivers as endangered species. This insight grows from a geologist’s understanding of deep time, geological history, and biological evolution. Gibling also writes with a humanist scholar’s appreciation of the individual personalities offamous historical scientists and engineers. The heartfelt writing makes the text a pleasure to read and the abundant, visually appealing colour photographs and diagrams effectively illustrate concepts described in the text. Gibling also brings himself into the book, opening and closing the text with descriptions of his own experiences with rivers and deftly weaving personal narrative into technical material throughout the book. In a sense, River Planet is a personal retrospective on a successful life and a career that included rivers across the planet and from contemporary environments to those interpreted from the rock record. The later sections of the book seem less coherent in terms of a clear structure and progression of information between chapters, but I think the book succeeds as a collection of brief explorations of the diverse rivers of the world. As such, it engages both the professional scientist and the reader interested in natural history and provides a distinctive, geological perspective on the world’s rivers.’ Geoscience Canada
'The book is divided into 5 parts and 22 chapters, loosely chronologically arranged from the evidence for the first rivers in the geological record through the evolution of vegetation and the development of new river styles. Subsequent chapters evolve the story of rivers blending scientific concepts with thumbnail sketches of the scientists, past and present, who developed the ideas and theories that explain how our knowledge of rivers has played out over the world. In this respect, the book succeeds in making the science accessible to a lay audience and adds a layer of information that personalises the otherwise arcane subjects that Martin Gibling deals with (e.g. cratons or superimposition). Laced throughout this narrative are quotes and stories that help enrich the history of the development of river science. The author refers to personal experiences of certain river locations, a reality that draws the reader into the concepts being discussed rather than remaining remote – in much the same way that a lecturer can inject their own personal experience into a subject as opposed to simply reflecting with work of others… The book is divided into 5 parts and 22 chapters, loosely chronologically arranged from the evidence for the first rivers in the geological record through the evolution of vegetation and the development of new river styles. Subsequent chapters evolve the story of rivers blending scientific concepts with thumbnail sketches of the scientists, past and present, who developed the ideas and theories that explain how our knowledge of rivers has played out over the world. In this respect, the book succeeds in making the science accessible to a lay audience and adds a layer of information that personalises the otherwise arcane subjects that Martin Gibling deals with (e.g. cratons or superimposition). Laced throughout this narrative are quotes and stories that help enrich the history of the development of river science. The author refers to personal experiences of certain river locations, a reality that draws the reader into the concepts being discussed rather than remaining remote – in much the same way that a lecturer can inject their own personal experience into a subject as opposed to simply reflecting with work of others.' The Holocene
Table of ContentsCONTENTS: Sourced Illustrations. Acknowledgements. Prologue. Part 1: Rivers in Deep Time: 1. Rivers and Geological Time; 2. The First Drop of Rain on the Nascent Earth; 3. How Plants Bent and Split Rivers. Part 2: Our Modern Rivers: 4. Breaking Pangea: The Ancestral Rivers of Africa; 5. Hot and Cold: The River Histories of Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica; 6. Young and Restless: The Evolving Rivers of Asia; 7. The Conflicted Rivers of Europe; 8. The Reversing Rivers of South America; 9. Canyons and Cataracts in North America; 10. A Canadian Amazon. Part 3: How the Ice Age Changed Rivers: 11. Frozen Out: Northern Rivers Sculpted by Ice; 12. Megafloods and Noah’s Ark; 13. Rivers Drowned by the Sea. Part 4: Humans and Rivers: 14. From Stone Age Streams to River Civilizations; 15. The Lost Saraswati River of the Indian Subcontinent; 16. Confucian Engineers on the Yellow River of China. Part 5: Engineered Rivers: 17. Dead and Wounded Rivers; 18. Collapsing and Closing Dams; 19. Between the Dams: An Elegy for the Saskatchewan River; 20. Without Spoiling the Land: Rivers and Agriculture; 21. London’s Buried Rivers; 22. Restored Rivers. Epilogue. Glossary. Further Reading. Endnotes. Index.
