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samuelpedro1992's review against another edition
5.0
In Suspect Terrain is book two in John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World. He continues his drive along I-80 to explore the geological forces that shaped America.
This time he is accompanied by a geologist named Anita Harris. She pioneered using conodonts, which are toothlike fossils to help determine the age of rocks, and are very useful to the petroleum industry. A large portion of the book is dedicated to her life and work. She also doesn’t believe all the hype about the new (at the time) seafloor spreading theory and shares her concerns with McPhee.
Like Basin and Range, we get explanations of how America’s geology came to be. We learn why the tallest skyscrapers in New York City are clustered in certain areas of Manhattan. There is also a fascinating summary of how diamonds are created.
Another major topic of the book is glaciers. The part of the country McPhee is exploring (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana) was largely shaped by the effects of glaciation.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. It’s not as good as Basin and Range, but it’s still good. I read both Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain in a week, which was a lot of geology to digest. I will be taking a few weeks off before I read the third book in the series.
Do I recommend it?
Like Basin and Range, you don’t have to be a geologist to appreciate this book. But it still might be an acquired taste. You should know McPhee is exceptional at writing about geology. His writing is interesting and engaging, and never dull, which can be hard to do with a work of science.
This was originally posted on my website here
This time he is accompanied by a geologist named Anita Harris. She pioneered using conodonts, which are toothlike fossils to help determine the age of rocks, and are very useful to the petroleum industry. A large portion of the book is dedicated to her life and work. She also doesn’t believe all the hype about the new (at the time) seafloor spreading theory and shares her concerns with McPhee.
Like Basin and Range, we get explanations of how America’s geology came to be. We learn why the tallest skyscrapers in New York City are clustered in certain areas of Manhattan. There is also a fascinating summary of how diamonds are created.
Another major topic of the book is glaciers. The part of the country McPhee is exploring (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana) was largely shaped by the effects of glaciation.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. It’s not as good as Basin and Range, but it’s still good. I read both Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain in a week, which was a lot of geology to digest. I will be taking a few weeks off before I read the third book in the series.
Do I recommend it?
Like Basin and Range, you don’t have to be a geologist to appreciate this book. But it still might be an acquired taste. You should know McPhee is exceptional at writing about geology. His writing is interesting and engaging, and never dull, which can be hard to do with a work of science.
This was originally posted on my website here
left_coast_justin's review against another edition
5.0
Think about diamonds for a minute. So far as we know, there are only two places these occur in nature. One is in very widely-scattered sites on Earth, and the others are little microdiamonds that are sometimes found on meteors.
I think we all realize that enormous heat and pressure are required to form a diamond. So the inside of a volcano might be a good place, right? Uhhh, no. Not nearly enough pressure. Volcanoes are essentially weak points in the Earth's crust where lava can bubble out. No, to form a diamond, you need to go towards the middle of a tectonic plate, the most stable places on Earth, and go down. Way down. Sixty or seventy miles down. The center of the tectonic plates are the only places where the crust is this thick. Any carbon that finds its way down there will be converted to diamond.
Then the problem becomes getting it to the surface. How do diamonds move sixty miles upwards through solid, stable rock? And that's not all: If the diamonds were to migrate upwards at slow to moderate speeds into regions of lower pressure and lower temperature before reaching the surface, they would quickly revert to graphite, which is the most stable form of pure carbon. (Diamonds are emphatically not forever.) So they have to emerge from down there at high speed. In fact, they have to be blown out of the ground at twice the speed of sound in order to survive the trip, where they 'freeze' in their distinctive crystal structure. For reasons that nobody quite understands, every so often a 'diamond pipe' explodes out of the surface of the most stable regions of the earth. This has never happened in human history, but, as McPhee notes, one could pop up under Kansas City next week.
I strongly recommend reading this book. It's just full of stuff like this. So many fun things to learn!
(Nov. 17, 2020)
I'm so happy to be re-reading these books! One wonderful page after another.
I think we all realize that enormous heat and pressure are required to form a diamond. So the inside of a volcano might be a good place, right? Uhhh, no. Not nearly enough pressure. Volcanoes are essentially weak points in the Earth's crust where lava can bubble out. No, to form a diamond, you need to go towards the middle of a tectonic plate, the most stable places on Earth, and go down. Way down. Sixty or seventy miles down. The center of the tectonic plates are the only places where the crust is this thick. Any carbon that finds its way down there will be converted to diamond.
Then the problem becomes getting it to the surface. How do diamonds move sixty miles upwards through solid, stable rock? And that's not all: If the diamonds were to migrate upwards at slow to moderate speeds into regions of lower pressure and lower temperature before reaching the surface, they would quickly revert to graphite, which is the most stable form of pure carbon. (Diamonds are emphatically not forever.) So they have to emerge from down there at high speed. In fact, they have to be blown out of the ground at twice the speed of sound in order to survive the trip, where they 'freeze' in their distinctive crystal structure. For reasons that nobody quite understands, every so often a 'diamond pipe' explodes out of the surface of the most stable regions of the earth. This has never happened in human history, but, as McPhee notes, one could pop up under Kansas City next week.
I strongly recommend reading this book. It's just full of stuff like this. So many fun things to learn!
(Nov. 17, 2020)
If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go way. Yucatans and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks on an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after a rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up -- his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed.
I'm so happy to be re-reading these books! One wonderful page after another.
darwin8u's review
4.0
Not my favorite McPhee by far, but still a strong work. There are parts when he gets a little lost in the weeds or conodonts of time, but still, I'm glad enough to have read it. Unfortunately for me, I started with Book 2 of the four major books that make up McPhee's pulitzer prize winning opus [b:Annals of the Former World|78|Annals of the Former World|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311987686s/78.jpg|88676]. Still to go: Book 1: [b:Basin and Range|19894|Basin and Range|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311988469s/19894.jpg|1665814]; Book 3: [b:Rising from the Plains|1400848|Rising from the Plains|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312225631s/1400848.jpg|1391039]; Book 4: [b:Assembling California|19898|Assembling California|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311987300s/19898.jpg|26821].
If you haven't read McPhee before, I'd suggest starting with [b:Coming into the Country|79|Coming into the Country|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311978766s/79.jpg|518787], [b:The Curve of Binding Energy|54968|The Curve of Binding Energy A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312043808s/54968.jpg|859045], [b:Encounters with the Archdruid|54976|Encounters with the Archdruid|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316728867s/54976.jpg|53575] or [b:A Sense of Where You Are|243707|A Sense of Where You Are Bill Bradley at Princeton|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312010018s/243707.jpg|236110] before busting into his geology books.
If you haven't read McPhee before, I'd suggest starting with [b:Coming into the Country|79|Coming into the Country|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311978766s/79.jpg|518787], [b:The Curve of Binding Energy|54968|The Curve of Binding Energy A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312043808s/54968.jpg|859045], [b:Encounters with the Archdruid|54976|Encounters with the Archdruid|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316728867s/54976.jpg|53575] or [b:A Sense of Where You Are|243707|A Sense of Where You Are Bill Bradley at Princeton|John McPhee|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312010018s/243707.jpg|236110] before busting into his geology books.
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