The Trials of Gaia, 1st ed. 2023 Milestones in the Evolution of Earth with Reference to the Anthropocene

This books presents a documentation and resulting perspectives regarding James Lovelock's multidisciplinary evolution theory. It looks at past and current climate changes and their consequences, including detailed accounts of the global warming. The connection between climate trajectories and extreme weather events, including tropical and arctic fronts, cyclones, fire storms, tropical storms, acidification, tsunami, floods, sea level rise, are referred to in connection with recent developments. The book updates earlier accounts regarding extreme weather events and mass extinctions.

The Living Planet.- The dawn of Gaia.- The early Earth crust (4.0-2.6 Ga).- Early life.- Ica ages and atmospheric oxygenation.- The Ediacaran and Cambrian “explosion” of life.- Phanerozoic mass extinctions.- The Holocene.- The Anthropogenic catastrophe.- A burning planet.-  Paleoclimate implications.- Climate zones shifts, ice melt and stadial cooling.- Future climate projections.- The nuclear nightmare.

Dr Andrew Yoram Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate Scientist, a Visiting Scientist at the University of New South Wales, earlier of Geoscience Australia, the Research School of Earth Science, the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University,  and a member of the ANU Climate Change Institute. He graduated from the Universities of Jerusalem and Western Australia, conducted extensive geological surveys in central and western Australia, studied the evolution of the early Earth crust in several continents, investigated the effects of asteroid and comet impacts on the Earth with reference to the mass extinction of species, and studied the inter-relationships between human evolution and the climate. He has an impact crater and an asteroid named after him by Eugene Shoemaker, late head of the United States Astrogeology Branch of the US Geological Survey.