Article 19 book review
Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything
****************** (18 stars out of 19)

I finished this fabulous book on vacation. Bryson is known for his travel journals (I've never read one), but for this effort he devoted 3 years to interviewing scientists and reading science in an attempt to develop a basic understanding of the universe, Earth, and the stuff of being human. He translates that into a readable language for non-specialists (I qualify). It's brilliantly written and unbelievably fascinating. The book leaves you with a sense of life as not only highly unlikely, but also terribly fragile, and yet imbued with a steady determination to continue to be.

Perhaps even more, this book is really an entertaining history of science, recounting narratives of how we got to know what we know (or think we know), and the amazing succession of coincidence, mistake, disciplinary infighting and snobbiness, accident, luck, obsession, fad, agenda, ego, and just plain bizarre human behavior that has been the legacy of scientific inquiry.

Sorry this is a long quote, but will give you a sense...from the chapter on volcanoes, that taught me that the largest active one in the world is in fact the whole of Yellowstone National Park. (I won't scare you with what I found out about Tokyo...)

Since its first known eruption 16.5 million years ago, [Yellowstone] has blown up about a hundred times. . . . We have absolutely nothing to compare it to. The biggest blast in recent times was that of Krakatau in Indonesia in August 1883, which made a bang that reverberated around the world for nine days, and made water slosh as far away as the English Channel. But if you imagine the volume of ejected material from Krakatau as being about the size of a golf ball, then the biggest of the Yellowstone blasts would be the size of a sphere you could just about hide behind. On this scale, Mount St. Helens would be no more than a pea.

The Yellowstone eruptions of two million years ago put out enough ash to bury New York State to a depth of sixty-seven feet or California to a depth of twenty. . . . That blast occurred in what is now Idaho, but over millions of years, at a rate of about one inch a year, the Earth's crust has traveled over it, so that today it is directly under northwest Wyoming. (The hot spot itself stays in one place, like an acetylene torch aimed at a ceiling.) In its wake it leaves the sort of rich volcanic plains that are ideal for growing potatoes, as Idaho's farmers long ago discovered. In another two million years, geologists like to joke, Yellowstone will be producing French fries for McDonald's, and the people of Billings, Montana, will be stepping around geysers.

The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico)-nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. And ash, it is worth remembering, is not like a big snowfall that will melt in the Spring. If you wanted to grow crops again, you would have to find some place to put all the ash. It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas. . . .

...the cycle of Yellowstone's eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one, interestingly enough, was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due.

Luckily, experts think that evidence shows more of the magma chamber is "cooling and crystallizing" than not. It may never blow again. But the park still does swell and subside, suggesting the opposite. The striking thing about the book, putting things like this in perspective, is in portraying so much of science - especially when it comes to understanding the Earth under its surface - as being essentially in the dark and at odds with itself. We don't know exactly what causes this kind (caldera) of volcano to exist, much less what makes it explode. And they're rare enough that we don't really know what, if any, warning signs are recognizable.

Each chapter covers a different topic and for the most part they don't depend on each other, so it's an easy read to spread out. I recommend it, especially the chapters on the ocean, DNA, and cells.