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Helen Gordon
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Notes From Deep Time Hardcover – February 18, 2021

by Helen Gordon (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 354 ratings
See all formats and editions
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'Astounding ... To call this a "history" does not do justice to Helen Gordon's ambition'
Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph

'Awe-inspiring ... She has imbued geological tales with a beauty and humanity'
Shaoni Bhattacharya-Woodward, Mail on Sunday

The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it's there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation. Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative.

Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from a state-of-the-art earthquake monitoring system in California to one of the world's most dangerous volcanic complexes in Naples. At every step, she finds that the apparently solid ground beneath our feet isn't quite as it seems.

Previous page
  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Profile Books
  4. Publication date
    February 18, 2021
  5. Dimensions
    6.38 x 1.42 x 9.37 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1788161637
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1788161633
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Profile Books (February 18, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1788161637
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1788161633
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 1.42 x 9.37 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 354 ratings

About the author

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Helen Gordon

Helen Gordon

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Helen Gordon's books include Notes from Deep Time (Profile), Landfall (Penguin) and, with Travis Elborough, Being a Writer (Frances Lincoln). She has written about nature, science, clothes and books for various newspapers and magazines including the Economist's 1843 magazine, the Guardian and Wired UK, and is a former Granta magazine editor. She lives in south London with her husband and daughter.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
354 global ratings

Top review from the United States

KNR 325
5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional, fascinating, artfully written
Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2021
Verified Purchase
Superb, well researched and structured with a perfect mix of science and human interest. Everything from the cover design to the closing paragraph is top class. Highly recommended.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

PCW
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent very readable overview of geological processes involved in creating today's world.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2023
Verified Purchase
Adopts a very human overview of the subject matter. Facts and key events are presented well to get the essential details across. All this is done in a light-hearted manner interspersed with some personal milestones in the author's life - love lost, love found, new family member, the way locals in Hollywood and Naples cope with or ignore the volatility of where they live. Excellent read.
One person found this helpful
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Mark
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not good enough
Reviewed in Germany on September 7, 2021
Verified Purchase
It's well written and well researched, but failed to grasp my attention. I much prefer bill bryson's short history, which makes science come alive - which sadly the author does not pull off for me. Too dry.
One person found this helpful
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Luca Giuzzi
4.0 out of 5 stars A pleasant book
Reviewed in Italy on April 11, 2021
Verified Purchase
I enjoyed this book: it is well written, accessible and definitely interesting. I was expecting it to be a bit more technical and perhaps to contain details (even if ultimately this is what the bibliography is for), but it was a pleasant reading and I would recommend it.
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Hedgesworld
5.0 out of 5 stars Well explained science
Reviewed in Australia on July 9, 2021
Verified Purchase
A great science book .enjoyed the read.
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J. Drew
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating history of deep time
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 31, 2021
Verified Purchase
Much of the history of man has been written down on cave walls, clay, tablets and eventually paper but if you want to know about deep time, that history is written in glaciers (snowfalls with a record of the climate falls as snow and then compacts in layers and keeps a record in the glaciers - though man causing climate change is something that could soon melt and become lost forever) as well as in rocks, fossils, and the Earth’s geology. Along with carbon dating we can also date and know about the evolution of plants, animals and fish through DNA.

I once saw a presenter describe deep time by holding out his arm to the side, and explain with a single swipe of a nail file, you would remove the entire history of mankind. The rest of the arm would signify the time that came before man walked on this planet. It’s a very long, deep history and this book explains it and how we made these discoveries. When I was young, the rock sections of museums were something I missed as they were just dull and boring but now when I often visit Bristol Museum, I have become fascinated by the section that deals in that deep time from the Precambrian area through the Silurian, Devonian, (named after Devon) and onwards through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods through to the Holocene that we now inhabit.

There have been five great extensions including the last one, 63 million years ago when a meteorite landed somewhere in the Mexican plateau and wiped out all the dinosaurs with the exception of the non-Avian dinosaurs that we call birds that are all that remain of the dinosaurs. Eventually all that will remain of man existence in the fossil records, as mentioned by Elizabeth Colbert in her book ‘the six extinction’, all that will be remains of us in deep time is a period as thick as a Rizla paper. Our time on this planet has been very short. Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years. There is a greater lapse in time between the stegosaurus walking on this planet and becoming extinct than to the time of the Tyrannosaurus rex then there has been between the time the Tyrannosaurus Rex lived and went extinct and man. Dinosaurs ruled this world for about 165 million years and Homo sapiens have only been around for 200 - 300,000 years.

It’s a fascinating history and it got some really lovely passages of writing. I loved the following passage:

“I thought about what Steffensen had said when I asked him about climate-change denial. ‘I’m constantly mesmerised by the fact that people are genetically put together in such a way that they will choose to disregard proof in order to have a simpler view of the world,’ he said. ‘For some, this world view includes a belief that religion and climate change are incompatible. I’m a good Christian in many ways, but in my mind there is space for science and Christianity and they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Science was never meant to prove or disprove the existence of God. You can look at the sky, and knowing there’s galaxies and dark matter and shit up there doesn’t take away the sense of beauty and wonder.’

As well as the following:
Our apparently stable world is in constant motion. ‘If you wait long enough, everything flows,’ says University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), geodynamics expert Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni. ‘Over very, very long time-scales even the rocks flow, just like they were water in a boiling pot.’
3 people found this helpful
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