Halka Chronic (1923–2013)
Auteur de Roadside Geology of Arizona
A propos de l'auteur
Séries
Œuvres de Halka Chronic
Pages of Stone: Geology of Western National Parks and Mounments 1 : Rocky Mountains and Western Great Plains (1984) 18 exemplaires
Pages of Stone: Geology of Western National Parks and Monuments : Sierra Nevada, Cascades and Pacific Coast (Pages of… (1986) 16 exemplaires
Pages of Stone: Geology of Western National Parks and Monuments : The Desert Southwest (1986) 16 exemplaires
Time, Rocks, and the Rockies: A Geologic Guide to Roads and Trails of Rocky Mountain National Park (1984) 7 exemplaires
Pages of Stone 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1923-02-26
- Date de décès
- 2013-04-16
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- Tucson, Arizona, USA
- Lieux de résidence
- Tucson, Arizona, USA
- Études
- University of Arizona (BA ∙ magna cum laude ∙ 1944)
Stanford University (MA ∙ 1947)
Columbia University (PhD|1949) - Professions
- geologist
university professor emeritus
Membres
Critiques
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 11
- Membres
- 986
- Popularité
- #26,111
- Évaluation
- 3.7
- Critiques
- 10
- ISBN
- 12
This book has an extremely difficult balancing act to pull off – or, really, several of them at once. It's trying to be completely accessible to people with no knowledge of geology at all, while still appealing to those with an amateur interest. It's trying to provide a sense of the general geology of the state while mostly limiting itself to features visible from the highways and discernible at highway speeds. And it has to discuss long and sometimes diverse stretches of highway in just a few pages.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn't succeed perfectly at all of this. There was a moment or two when my geologically ignorant self was a little confused by some bit of terminology that no doubt seemed extremely obvious to the author (enough so that it didn't even appear in the glossary). In some places, I found the text a bit boring or repetitive, and in others I found it interesting enough that I was frustrated that there wasn't more on a particular topic or place.
But, overall, it does pretty much what it's aiming to do: pointing out the features of the landscape that you might pass by in your car and telling you a little bit about what they're made of, how old they are, and how they formed. And it was very, very cool for me to have even a few paragraphs telling me about the place where I live and the mountain I can see outside my living room window.
It also enlightened me about some fascinating aspects of New Mexico geography as a whole. I knew there had been volcanism here – there are places where that's extremely obvious – but I had no idea it was so extensive, or that some of it was so recent. I also didn't realize that I was living on top of a rift in the continent, where the Earth's crust is trying to pull itself apart in a way that might one day result in the entire Rio Grande valley becoming an inlet for the sea. Honestly, I think this book would probably be worthwhile for me just for illuminating me about that.
One word of caution, though: this was originally published in 1987, and I've spotted a few places where I know it's out of date, e.g. a massively low underestimate for the age of the universe in the introductory chapter, and a now-resolved uncertainly about what it was that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. No doubt there are more examples that I'm unaware of, both in the science and the details of the human landscape. But at least we can be pretty confident the geology itself has changed very little in the intervening years.… (plus d'informations)