Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

    This was a totally different kind of book for me that taught me as much about geology as I had learned in my entire life before reading it. John McPhee has to be one of the best writers I've ever read, and I really enjoyed learning the history of the world. I had gotten into biological anthropology a few years ago and read some book on that and I remember thinking how dizzying it was to think of history on the scale of tens of thousands of years. Well, this was like ten steps beyond that. In the five books that independently make up the larger book, McPhee bounces around the United States, guided by masterful geologists who teach him about the rocks they're seeing. I don't think you can read this book as a lay person expecting to figure out what everything on every page means. I would have never finished if I was looking up every rock. But it's useful to look up what he's talking about and sometimes just pass it by because a lot of these rocks seem the same to me. Great book. Geology is so cool. I wrote some fast facts from each book (except for Crossing the Craton because it was so short).

Book One: Basin and Range

• Zeolite is a type of porous stone. The name means "stone that boils," because the stone contains many crevasses that are often filled with water. Apparently one zeolite crystal the size of a pinhead will have the internal surface area of a bedspread. Zeolites are used to separate one type of a molecule from another in detergents and other industrial uses.
• The mantle is not liquid, it is a solid with some pockets near the top turning into magma and spurting upward.
• Very little can live in the Salt Lake not because it is too salty, but because it swings from being extremely salty to being not nearly as salty at all when floods come in annually. 
• Salt can make rocks explode by getting into cracks and slowly expanding.
• Part of the reason people know that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old is because we can find sea creatures' fossils at the tops of mountains, and clams don't move that fast.
• The order is: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, Permian.
• Tectonic plates may be as deep as sixty miles, but that makes them really just like eggshells since they are thousands of miles long and wide
• The peak of Mount Everest is capped by marine limestone, AKA dead fish fossils.

Book Two: In Suspect Terrain

• The Wisconsinite ice sheet, the effects of which are most noticeable in Wisconsin, is also known for depositing Long Island where it is today, as well as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
• Golf courses mimic the landscape of Scotland, which is a glacial landscape that is scraped out by ice sheets.
• Taiwan will eventually join with China ... geologically. Eventually it will crash into the Chinese coast, raising mountains between Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Book Three: Rising from the Plains

• Limestone is soluble in water, so mountains weathered more in the Eastern United States, where it rains more, while it remains rugged in the West, where surrounding rock falls away.
• In the Old West, they used to have a "hanging pole" in the bunkhouse, where cowboys would hand by their hands for 5-10 minutes to relieve pressure on their ruptured spinal disks that came from too much horse-taming. Some cowboys wore eight-inch-wide leather belts to keep their kidneys in place during hard rides. 
• Lakes don't last in the geological record. The Great Lakes are less than twenty thousand years old. Some of the oldest known lakes only made it to eight million years, nothing on a geological scale. 

Book Four: Assembling California

• The highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States are both in California, only eighty miles apart.
• The Sierra Nevada mountain range is forty million years old, also somewhat recent. 
• The oldest rock humans have found so far was found east of Great Bear Lake in Canada and is 3.96 BILLION years old, just six hundred million years younger than the Earth itself.
• The oldest rock found on any seafloor in the world is only 185 MILLION years old, just one-twenty-fifth the age of the Earth. The ocean crust completely recycles itself every two hundred million years. 
• In the 1980s, there was a campaign in California where cops disguised themselves as geologists to find marijuana farms, which led to narcos actually killing some real geologists.
• Cyprus (like the country) means copper. 
• The Pacific Plate first touched North America twenty-nine million years ago, making contact at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara
• The Massif Central in France is actually a continuation of the Appalachian Mountains. So are the Atlas Mountains and the Iberian Plateau and the Pyrenees, which were enhanced as they swung around and hit France.
• Japan is moving towards North America at a rate of one centimeter per year, and may join Alaska in 800 million years. 
• South Florida used to be a part of Africa that got left behind when the atlantic opened up about 200 hundred million years ago.

Book Five: Crossing the Craton