Under a Green Sky Peter Ward, Ph.D

Peter Ward, a geologist, in Washington is a dramatic writer who loves to take a Hunter Thompson approach to his story telling (he does allude to the gonzo journalist) and as a result he takes his science details and information and surrounds them with a cloak of storytelling that is enjoyable once you catch on to his style and perspective.  

For example: “The last rocky point, made up of several dozen of these couplets, was the most difficult of all to get over, for like the huge stratal sheet with the stairway, it was tilted about 60 degrees from horizontal, too steep to climb, too steep to safely slide down, and here there was no providential stairway built by obliging Basques.  Lowering ourselves hand over hand, the last 10 feet an ignominious slide into a cold tide pool at the bottom of the stratum, a now thoroughly wet duo at last stopped to admire the grandeur of what earlier geologists had aptly named Boundary Bay.  Huge walls on three sides enclosed the large bay with a flat, rocky bench about the size of a basketball court exposed at lowest tide, in the rear of the large box canyon, a strand completely water covered  at high tide.  It was like being in a huge cathedral where the roof and one wall had been taken off, the sheer wall-like cliffs rising a hundred feet or more above the small beach, each wall brightly colored as if painted by some giant.  The rocks to the south were a deep maroon in color, those to the north a brilliant white and pink striping.  And in the center of the back wall of the bay there was a meeting of the two different units, a sudden transition from maroon beds below to pink and white beds above, starting near the sea and then rising upward from the base of this canyon as the tilt of the beds carried this K-T boundary layer, one the year before discovered to be packed with all the hallmarks of the K-T impact itself, all save the diagnostic iridium originally Mexican inhabitants that were now on permanent vacation at this beach (and at all other K-T boundary sites as well as over the entire globe.)

This is a book that traces the causes of Earth’s dramatic extinctions and then expands the text to the threat of global climate change.  It is a compelling story and the connection with the near future is no stretch of the imagination.

I loved the expansion from the Cretaceous/Tertiary border and the asteroid/comet collision with Earth to the multiple other great extinctions.  When the giant craters were discovered and the evidence was in for the KT extinction there was a rush to tie extraterrestrial causes to other extinctions, but as the book takes you around the world to various rock outcrops we soon find the evidence to discount the extraterrestrial causes and find the potential lethal cause within our oceans as the currents and flows changed over time creating toxic seas that could burp poisonous gases like the dramatic Cameroon Lake killing in 1986. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,962228,00.html

In dives in the ocean and dives in the Jellyfish Lakes of Palau the author expands beyond the observations of rocks and fossils.  The jellyfish lakes are a perfect analogy to the potential for our oceans to become toxic and the combination of ocean potential and changes in climate become the cause for the non-KT extinctions and could be the potential for the next one too.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/6474546http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/6474546

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhpaqFya2pg&feature=related