Customer Reviews

The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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While there are speculations on just how (and how many) artifacts of our technical civilization will survive through 100 million years, Zalasiewicz's book excels beyond that.

It is one of the clearest introductions to the principles of sedimentary geology this outsider to the field has encountered. The reader will have clear mental animations of turbid mudflows offshore river deltas, sea levels rising and falling relative to nearby land masses (and why), sedimentary beds thrust up via the tectonic "up-escalator", only to be sheared off at the erosional plane near sea-level. We see only the edges of an invisible (and ghostly past) world, and many of the mechanisms are explained herein.

While the title suggests that the book is a successor of sorts to Weisman's "The World Without Us" (that book being a something of meditation on the fragility of human engineering), it is really something else entirely. Highly recommend for budding geologists to provide a paradigmatic framework for the other elements of the discipline.

I purchased this book in hopes that it would be more geologically and paleontologically detailed than other books that talked about what happened after humans became extinct. There is no doubt that this book is more detailed geologically. In fact most of the book talks about geological processes. For readers who have little or no background, this is an excellent summary in layman's language of geological processes. However, the "what comes after" part is only a small part of the book and really doesn't have enough detail about what might happen and how the world would look step by step in the 100 million years after humans disappear.

This is dense, very inteligent book, by an author who obviously knows the subject very well,explaning how the geological machinery of the earth will all but eliminate the products of human civilization after the human race is extinct. This book may not be really appreciated by someone who has no previous basic knowledge of geological processes. For those who do, it provides a marvelous, fascinating and mind-expanding journey into the far future of geological time. After reading the book you realize how insignificant we humans are in the grand scheme of things. I hope this book will reach the right people to inspire ideas for a TV science documentary or maybe even a scifi film!

I wasn't sure if the science was too advanced for me. My knowledge of geology is superficial at best, though at the same time I don't want it dumbed down to something no longer specific enough to be informative. I feel he did a good job of introducing and defining the terms and elements of geology as he needed them. I found this book to be thought provoking, sobering, entertaining and informative, though a little depressing as well. I don't think the last one is entirely his fault; I suspect any honest appraisal of this subject will have that effect. The title of the review sums up my feelings nicely: thoroughly enjoyed.