Tjeerd H. van Andel

Huber, B. T., MacLeod, K. G. & Wing, S. L. 1999. Warm Climates in Earth History.xviii+462 pp. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Price £70.00, US

The plate tectonics revolution has changed our outlook on the physical history of the solid Earth more than anything else since the debates of Adam Gottlob Werner and James Hutton, but it has now arrived at a state of consolidation where patiently and inconspicuously (unless you are an insider) the foundations are being laid for a, perhaps large, leap forward at some point in the future. In the meantime another revolution, slower, less audible and therefore less noticed, has been addressing equally grand but quite different aspects of the Earth. Born in the seventies of the last century, it tried its tools and wits in the eighties and began to really keep its promises in the nineties. Taking advantage of the images of the changing geography of continents and oceans furnished by its predecessor and the current explosion of interest in present and future climates of the world, it has already much increased our understanding of the working of the atmosphere, cryosphere and hydrosphere of the recent past. In so doing it has also set the stage for a new and more profound study of the surface history of the Earth and its role as the scene of the origin and evolution of life. Since its beginning, the main thrust of what Nick Shackleton has called the ‘quiet revolution’ has been directed towards the climate and the atmosphere/ocean interaction of the Quaternary as the backdrop of the accelerating change from the climate of the recent past to that of the immediate future. It has so led to a strong growth in our understanding of the dynamics of the present climate and the development of important new tools; examples are the quantification of environmental data extracted from geological and palaeontological proxy records and the use of global circulation models to synthesize …

115.00 (hard covers). ISBN 0 521 64142 X.

In the last quarter century, great advances in Quaternary palaeoclimatology that began with the CLIMAP project, the copious results of the Ocean Drilling Programme, new high-resolution geochronological and geochemical methods and a blossoming of palaeontology/palaeobiology, have greatly intensified our interest in and understanding of the surface history of the Earth. The lively integration of historical geology, stratigraphy and palaeontology that makes this a new revolution in the earth sciences, a ‘quiet revolution’ as Nick Shackleton has labelled it, admittedly resting on the realistic palaeogeography supplied by its predecessor, the plate tectonics revolution, but a revolution none the less that is fuelled by palaeoclimatology and palaeoceanography. In this revolution, the climatic and on a lesser scale stratigraphic modelling approaches introduced in the 1970s are playing an ever more dominant role, and have begun to take on to a worrisome degree a life of their own where the models of one modeller become the ‘data’ of the more sophisticated models of another modeller. Some of these efforts have proved helpful where they attempted to set limits for suggested causes, such as those that have attempted to assess the poleward heat flux …

Parrish, J. T. 1999. Interpreting Pre-Quaternary Climate from the Geologic Record.: Perspectives in Paleobiology and Earth History Series. xv + 338 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. Price US

A curious title, you may say, ‘Magnetism; what does that have to do with climate anymore than, as 19th-century quacks claimed, it had to do with human health?’ As it turns out, the book dwells rather less on the relation between earth magnetism and climate and environment than on its function as a stratigraphic and even a chronometric tool. Not a trivial subject then, and quite widely applied today, but as a separate sub-field it is not particularly well known even today. A systematic introductory treatment with examples would therefore be most welcome and, if at the right level, might well have a future as a supplementary course text. It is not to be; for those who wrote this book the desire to enlighten beginners on its subject matter takes a clear second seat behind the desire to honour a distinguished colleague in the traditional but now rare manner of a ‘festschrift’. About which more later. To me the first names that come to mind when mention is made of magnetic processes in the earth sciences are those of K. M. Creer, Allen Cox, or Keith Runcorn, but this book has quite a different perspective on magnetic studies of rocks and on what the editors call the field of the ‘environmental magnetist’. For them this began with Gustav Ising early in the 20th century and culminated late in the same century with …