Annals of the Former World by McPhee. It's a geologic history of the United States, from Precambrian time to now, as well as a history of human understanding of geology.
The intersection of billions of years of history, a scale where ice ages come and go like thunder storms, where mountains go up and down in quick succession, with the human timescale of scientific progress, really altered my perspective on a lot of things. We didn't have plate tectonics until the 1970's. My grandfather went to high school and college learning the classical theories of orogenies, and just two generations later, a blink of an eye relative to the movements of our Earth, human understanding of what shapes our world is massively advanced.
It's made me think about every human endeavor differently. Everything we do and are is so ephemeral.
The intersection of billions of years of history, a scale where ice ages come and go like thunder storms, where mountains go up and down in quick succession, with the human timescale of scientific progress, really altered my perspective on a lot of things. We didn't have plate tectonics until the 1970's. My grandfather went to high school and college learning the classical theories of orogenies, and just two generations later, a blink of an eye relative to the movements of our Earth, human understanding of what shapes our world is massively advanced.
It's made me think about every human endeavor differently. Everything we do and are is so ephemeral.