Combines historical text with geomorphological and scientific evidence to chronicle the search by explorers, scientists, and academics to understand the cause and evolution of the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon: Solving Earth's Grandest Puzzle

History

Powell, James Lawrence

Americas

Pi Press

What killed the dinosaurs? For more than a century, this question has been one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science. But, in 1980, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, proposed a radical answer: 65 million years ago an asteroid or comet as big as Mt. Everest slammed into the earth, raising a dust cloud vast enough to cause mass extinction. A revolutionary idea that challenged the ice-age extinction theory, the asteroid-impact theory was scorned and derided by the science community. But after years of bitter debate and intense research, an astonishing discovery was made-an immense impact crater in the Yucatán Peninsula that was identified as Ground Zero. The Alvarezes had their proof. A dramatic scientific detective story, Night Comes to the Cretaceous is a brilliant example of science at work-in the trenches, complete with passionate struggles and occasional victories.

Night Comes to the Cretaceous: Comets, Craters, Controversy, and the Last Days of the Dinosaurs

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Harvest Books

The Moon is the most viewed object in the sky, the Sun being too bright to look at directly and the planets too far away. The Greeks deduced everything that could be learned about the Moon using only the naked eye, including that it has no light of its own but reflects that of the Sun. They understood the cause of eclipses and used the Earth's shadow on the Moon to conclude that our planet is a sphere and to calculate the size of both the Moon and the Earth. The invention of the telescope some two millennia later offered the opportunity for much greater understanding, but the early observers became sidetracked onto a dead end: First, they fooled themselves into believing that they saw evidence of life on the Moon, even the works of a civilization. Second, they became convinced that the craters of the Moon were volcanoes like those we have on the Earth. These wrong-headed beliefs took centuries to dispel. The origin of the Moon itself has proven an even more difficult question, but scientists have now closed in on the answer. They find that our placid and seemingly unchanging Moon was born in colossal violence as a planet the size of Mars crashed into the primordial Earth and flung off a blob that solidified to become our heavenly companion. Unlocking the Moon's Secrets follows these developments to show how science evolves, complete with misunderstandings, contentious arguments, difficult to relinquish assumptions, and shifting views as new facts come to light. Thanks to the work of generations of determined scientists, we understand our Moon, at last.

Unlocking the Moon's Secrets: From Galileo to Giant Impact

Astronomy & Space Science

Oxford University Press

Today, when global warming denial and vaccination denial are alarmingly prevalent, it is crucial to understand that throughout history, science denial at the state level has cost scores of millions of lives. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, Lysenko's denial of genetics led to disastrous agricultural policies, resulting in the persecution and execution of dissenting scientists and widespread famine. A similar tragedy unfolded in Mao's China, where the wholesale adoption of Lysenkoism contributed to a famine that claimed an estimated 45 million lives. In Germany starting in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler made state policy of Nazi eugenics, a twisted theory which held that some races are superior to others. This led first to the murder of disabled persons, including children, and then to the smoking chimneys of the Holocaust. President Mbeki of South Africa conducted his own internet research and rejected a virtually unanimous scientific consensus to conclude that HIV does not cause AIDS and that folk remedies are preferable to anti-retroviral drugs, costing an estimated 330,000 deaths. In this century, in Brazil and the United States, Presidents Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump rejected medical advice to downplay the danger of the COVID-19 virus and discourage protective measures, causing many unnecessary deaths. The two of them and today's Republican party reject the consensus among scientists that manmade global warming is true, thus choosing to deny and ignore the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced. Doomsday has not yet arrived, but we can see it from here and time is running out.

Faith in Fallacy: A Century of State-Sanctioned Science Denial

History & Philosophy

Mysteries of the Deep: How Seafloor Drilling Expeditions Revolutionized Our Understanding of Earth History

Earth Sciences

The MIT Press

The author of Mysteries of Terra Firma combines historical text with geomorphological and scientific evidence to chronicle the search by explorers, scientists, and academics to understand the origins and evolution of the Grand Canyon. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Plume

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West

Where will the water come from to sustain the great desert cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix? In a provocative exploration of the past, present, and future of water in the West, James Lawrence Powell begins at Lake Powell, the vast reservoir that has become an emblem of this story. At present, Lake Powell is less than half full. Bathtub rings ten stories tall encircle its blue water; boat ramps and marinas lie stranded and useless. To refill it would require surplus water―but there is no surplus: burgeoning populations and thirsty crops consume every drop of the Colorado River. Add to this picture the looming effects of global warming and drought, and the scenario becomes bleaker still. Dead Pool, featuring rarely seen historical photographs, explains why America built the dam that made Lake Powell and others like it and then allowed its citizens to become dependent on their benefits, which were always temporary. Writing for a wide audience, Powell shows us exactly why an urgent threat during the first half of the twenty-first century will come not from the rising of the seas but from the falling of the reservoirs.

University of California Press

Sports & Outdoors

Around 13,000 years ago, three things happened at once: (1) Global temperature suddenly stopped rising and plunged back to ice age-frigidity. (2) The Western Hemisphere’s largest mammals, including the horse, camel, woolly mammoth, saber-toothed cat, and dozens more, went extinct. And (3) the uniquely beautiful stonework of the early American Clovis people disappeared from the archeological record. For the past half-century, scientists have struggled to explain the three events. Were they independent of each other, or could they have had a common cause? Then in 2007, researchers reported finding minuscule ET melt droplets and nanodiamonds at the geologic layer that records the three events, evidence, they said, that the common cause was the impact of a giant comet. Opposition to the impact hypothesis was swift and severe, as opponents reported that they could not replicate the evidence and decried the hypothesis as pseudoscience, no better than UFOs, perpetual energy, and cold fusion. Yet over the last decade, scientists have replicated the original evidence and uncovered a wealth of new supporting data. One eminent geologist describes the hypothesis as possibly "the most important in the Earth Sciences since plate tectonics." In language accessible to non-scientists, Deadly Voyager tells the story of how an extraterrestrial event many thousands of years ago changed earth and human history — and how a scientific claim can be thoroughly rejected, only to re-emerge strengthened.

Deadly Voyager: The Ancient Comet Strike that Changed Earth and Human History

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Bowker

In 1980, the radical theory was proposed that a comet or meteor struck the Earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and 70 percent of all other species. "Night Comes to the Cretaceous" is the first comprehensive and objective account of how this incredible theory has changed the course of science. 35 illustrations.

Night Comes to the Cretaceous: Dinosaur Extinction and the Tranformation of Modern Geology

W.H.Freeman & Co.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Powell, James Lawrence. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Powell, James Lawrence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Powell, James Lawrence. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Grand Canyon: Solving Earth's Grandest Puzzle

Night Comes to the Cretaceous: Comets, Craters, Controversy, and the Last Days of the Dinosaurs

Unlocking the Moon's Secrets: From Galileo to Giant Impact

Faith in Fallacy: A Century of State-Sanctioned Science Denial

Mysteries of the Deep: How Seafloor Drilling Expeditions Revolutionized Our Understanding of Earth History

Grand Canyon: Solving Earth's Grandest Puzzle

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West

Deadly Voyager: The Ancient Comet Strike that Changed Earth and Human History

Night Comes to the Cretaceous: Dinosaur Extinction and the Tranformation of Modern Geology