6/22/2023 0 Comments Thomas halliday books![]() ![]() And so on, stepping back through 550 million years of life, passing by South American grasslands and Antarctic rainforests, a variety of lakes, rivers and shores (this because of the most favourable circumstances of fossilisation). Next we move onto Kenya 4 million years ago, where Australopithecus is starting to walk upright on the shores of vanished Lake Tomyun, while extinct bear otters chase fish. Here, horses eke out a living on what stubble they can find among wind blown sand dunes, at the edge of an ecosystem, now nearly entirely gone, reaching from Alaska to western Europe, the mammoth steppe. ![]() Halliday, after a prologue in the present, begins his journey only 20,000 years ago, in the peculiarly dry steppe of Alaska amidst the ice sheets of the last ice age. Hallliday delivers on that promise and then some in this fascinating, enlightening and ultimately urgent safari through time. ![]() One way is, as Thomas Halliday might say, “rockwise”: by considering the global changes that have happened all through Earth’s history, evidence for which can be found in the world’s rocks, “visiting extinct sites with the mindset of a traveller, a safari-goer”. How to make sense of the global environmental changes that are taking place before our eyes? The ice is melting, species are on the move or disappearing, ecosystems are on the brink of collapse. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |