"This book is a guide to our lving, changing planet. We journey to the rim of a great meteor crater ... we travel back in time to 1930, in the icy heart of Greenland ... We journey to the outer reaches of our solar system, dive to a rock erupt from the heart of the earth to form new undersea mountains and a new ocean floor. Ulimately we will come to see this planet not as a hunk of stone in space but more like a living organism -- with its own internal dynamics, exchanging gases, healing itself, increasingly dependent on a new host creature -- man-- to shape its future."--Fly leaf.