The Pulse of the Earth

The Pulse of the Earth
Author: Adam Bobbette
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478027088

In The Pulse of the Earth Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge.

The Geology of Iberia: A Geodynamic Approach

The Geology of Iberia: A Geodynamic Approach
Author: Cecilio Quesada
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030105199

Taking a new global approach, this unique book provides an updated review of the geology of Iberia and its continental margins from a geodynamic perspective. Owing to its location close to successive plate margins, Iberia has played a pivotal role in the geodynamic evolution of the Gondwanan, Rheic, Pangea, Tethys s.l. and Eurasian plates over the last 600 Ma of Earth's history. The geological record starts with the amalgamation of Gondwana in the Neoproterozoic succeeded by the rifting and spreading of the Rheic ocean; its demise, which led to the amalgamation of Pangea in the late Paleozoic; the rifting and spreading of several arms of the Neotethys ocean in the Mesozoic Era and their ongoing closure, which was responsible for the Alpine orogeny. The significant advances in the last 20 years have attracted international research interest in the geology of the Iberian Peninsula. This volume presents the most comprehensive, careful and updated description of the variscan cycle in Iberia. This volume focuses in the different geological events since the Cambrian-Early Ordovician rift until the late variscan orocline formations including magmatic and metamorphic evolution.