Michael Collier's An Introduction to the Geology of Death Valley,
(Death Valley Natural History Association, LC 90-081612) does a nice job
of discussing modern ideas about the tectonics of Death Valley. There are
also some very good photographs.
GEOLOGY / MOUNTAINS
Meteorites
and Their Parent Planets by Harry Y. McSween
I decided to put this book under "Geology / Mountains" because I learned so much good, basic geology from it. From a book on meteorites, you ask? Aren't meteorites an astronomical subject? How can they teach us anything about the earth, since they come from outer space?
These are exactly the questions that McSween answers so brilliantly and engagingly in this book. Among other things, meteorites tell us how old our earth and solar system are, how they took to form, and what the earth and other planets are made of. In fact, we even have pieces of the moon, mars, and asteroids on the Earth in the form of meteorites. After reading this book, you'll really come to understand how meteorites are "the poor person's space probes".
The thing that I really want to get across about this book is what a page-turner it was for me. I found McSween's writing style to be very easy to read, and hard to put down. I swear, this book makes learning about isotope geology as gripping as a Tom Clancy novel. I kept saying "I want to see how this turns out!"
After reading Meteorites and Their
Parent Planets, I found myself half-wishing that I could do college and
grad school all over again, so that I could become a meteoriticist. I'm
not kidding! You know that a book must be good when you find yourself saying
"geez, this is so cool, I kinda wish I'd done THAT instead."
Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth S. Deffeyes
Elsewhere in my book recommendation pages I mention a history of the oil industry called The Prize. One of the arguments that I make for why The Prize is such a good book is the book's relevance. I make the claim that oil is "the real power behind the throne" of the world economy. I think that Hubbert's Peak makes a nice companion to The Prize, because it explains how we get oil.
Oil has periodically loomed large in the Western consciousness since the 1970s, although it's amazing how little most people know about how it forms, how we find it, and how we get it out of the ground. Deffeyes does a great job of explaining all of this, and the book is worth reading just for this explanation. I like to go through the story of oil geology in my classes, too, and I wish I had time to go through all of the details that Deffeyes does.
The book's title comes from a remarkable prediction made in 1956 by the geologist M. King Hubbert, who worked at the Shell research lab at the time. Looking at a graph of U.S. oil production over time, Hubbert predicted that the maximum number of barrels of oil pulled out of the ground per year in the U.S. would peak around 1970. After that, although the U.S. would still be getting oil out of the ground, there would never be as many barrels of oil flowing out of the wells. If the country wanted more oil, it would have to buy it from other countries.
Hubbert's prediction was widely scoffed at, but it came true right on schedule, and large-scale imports of foreign oil have been a backdrop to American economic activity ever since. In this book Deffeyes attempts to make a similar prediction for world oil production, and he makes a startling one: World oil production will peak sometime during the interval 2004-2008. If he's right, this means that the world will never get as much oil out of the ground per year after the peak as before. The oil supply won't run out at that time, but it will start an inevitable decline. The need to turn to other sources of energy will begin in earnest.
The big question is whether or not Deffeyes is right.
I found the explanations of his curve-fitting
techniques a little confusing, at least at first read, and I know that
these methods have been criticized by a number of reviewers. Whether or
not his methods are valid, Deffeyes has done something valuable: He has
made a testable prediction. It will be very interesting to see if he's
right. All we have to do is wait a few more years. (Heck, I'll probably
have scarcely even updated these webpages by the time the prediction interval
kicks in...)
Geology
Illustrated by John Shelton
(W.H. Freeman, 1966, Library of Congress Catalog Card # 66-16380)
John McPhee, author of the second of the "Big Two", wrote: "If by fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone". Richard Feynman once wrote something similar about the atomic theory of matter. In that spirit, I suggest the one geology book that I'd preserve if an asteroid were approaching and all of geological knowledge were to be wiped out: John Shelton's Geology Illustrated. Simply put, I don't think I've ever seen a book that communicates so much information, and trains the reader so well, while still being a joy to read.
John Shelton spent many years flying around the western U.S. and photographing geology from the air, as well as taking pictures from ground level. These photographs make up the heart of the book, as the title implies. The spirit of the book reminds me very much of my favorite classrooom exercise in grad school - my advisor's "what is it?" slides. In Greg Davis' course on advanced mapping, we used to meet one evening a week to work with maps and to train our eyes with slides. Greg did this by showing each person a slide and asking them "Why did I take this picture? What was I trying to show in this picture?". Shelton's book is the closest thing to those slides that I've ever seen, and it does a wonderful job of "eye training".
The writing is wonderful, too. In this day of miniscule attention spans, multimedia/Internet, and constant "quick cut" editing on television, Geology Illustrated is a monument to what a person can learn if they just take a few minutes to read quietly. We could all stand to speak English half as well as Shelton wrote it.
If anyone knows how I could lobby publishers to reprint the book, without any modification whatsomever, drop me a line.
Annals
of the Former World by John McPhee
(Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998, ISBN 0-374-10520-0)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
This is the book that made many people become geologists, myself included. While driving out west to start my sophomore year of college, I passed through Dinosaur National Monument and bought a copy of Basin and Range, which is now the first section of Annals of the Former World, the collected geological writings of John McPhee. By the time I got to my destination a few days later, my destiny was pretty well decided.
This may sound like an exaggeration, but it's really not. I know almost no one who hasn't enjoyed McPhee's writings about geology. A long-time contributor to the New Yorker magazine, John McPhee specializes in non-fiction. He's written books about everything from orange farming (Oranges) to a profile of Bill Bradley in his college days (A Sense of Where You Are). In the 1970's McPhee started travelling across the U.S. in the company of geologists, to learn more about the history of North America, and to assess the impact of the plate tectonic revolution. This resulted in Basin and Range (1981), which was followed by In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), and Assembling California (1993).
Readers may recognize the story of David Love, recounted in Rising from the Plains, because it was reprised on the PBS series The West (1996).
All four books were bound as one in 1998, and McPhee added a "Narrative Table of Contents", as well as a short fifth book, Crossing the Craton, which discusses the midcontinent and the Precambrian Eon.
I've enjoyed this book so much that I really don't know a simple way to recommend it. It's well-written. The subject matter, both human and geological, is fascinating. It made me become a geologist. It won the Pulitzer Prize. If you have even the slightest interest in the earth, you will be greatly enriched by reading it.
Charles Hunt's Death Valley: Geology Ecology Archaeology (Univ.
of California Press, ISBN 0-520-03103-3) is a classic general overview
of DV, although the structural geology and tectonics have been supplanted
by new ideas, which are nicely summarized in the next book (Collier).
Michael Collier's An Introduction to the Geology of Death Valley,
(Death Valley Natural History Association, LC 90-081612) does a nice job
of discussing modern ideas about the tectonics of Death Valley. There are
also some very good photographs.
Few people outside California seem to know about the Eastern Sierra - and
perhaps that's for the best. Like a giant version of the Teton Range, it's
a multi-sport outdoor paradise, thanks to large normal faults that elevate
the Sierra and White-Inyo mountains, and downdrop the floor of the Owens
Valley. I'll never tire of visiting the Eastern Sierra / Owens Valley /
Death Valley region.
The new edition of Deepest Valley: A guide to Owens Valley is
a wonderful book, chock full of information on geology, biology, climate,
and history. Edited by Putman and Smith. (Genny Smith Books / Univ. of
Nevada Press, ISBN 0-931378-14-1)
Bill Guyton's Glaciers of California (University of California Press,
ISBN 0-520-21295-9) is a nice overview of modern and ancient glaciers in
California. On hot, late summer days in the Bay Area, I enjoy the thought
that there are still a few glaciers left in the Golden State.
North
Cascades Crest: Notes and Images from America's Alps by James Martin,
Sasquatch Press, 1999 ISBN
1-57061-140-8. This is really only the second book (aside from Beckey's
guides) to ever show decent photos of the North Cascades. The first was
Tom Miller's now-legendary, hard-to-find The North Cascades. Martin's
story about looking at Miller's book during high school and idolizing the
second Ptarmigan Traverse brought back some memories! (Maybe someday I'll
actually complete the Ptarmigan
Traverse.)
Geology
of the North Cascades: A Mountain Mosaic by R. Tabor and R. Haugerud,
Mountaineers Books, 1999
ISBN 0-89886-623-5. This book has so much wonderful detail, exposition,
and illustration that it's amazing that it ever got published. It's truly
heartening that a publisher saw fit to bring such a nice regional geology
book to market. This book really helped me sort out the "terrane game"
in the North Cascades. Some of the pen-and-ink illustrations, particularly
the annotated panoramas, must have been a labor of love.