A brilliant piece of work
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While searching for books on Natural History, the Amazon website suggested I read Snowball Earth. As an aspiring Palaeontologist myself, I decided to buy a copy. As soon as I began reading it, I immediately found it very interesting & quite amusing at times. The book is brilliantly written & was not at any time, tedious. It was quite the opposite in fact. I found it hard to put down, very fascinating & rather inspiring also. I'd suggest this book to anybody, even if they've got no particular interest in science. It's a brilliant book, one which is not always easy to find on a book shelf.
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A snowballs chance
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I was really looking forward to this book, given Ms Walkers work on New Scientist and I was intrigued by the theory, but was yet to be convinced, so this I hoped would help me make my mind up. But I am sorry to say that I found the book disappointing making me wish for another book on the subject, written in a different way. My problem is that the book goes into huge detail on the personalities, academic arguments and even the athletic activities of Paul Hoffman. Fine, but I was interested in the theory and did not want a biography of the scientist concerned as I fail to see what relevance it had to the theory. Now that would have been OK, had the book contained photographs of the rock formations, diagrams of the strata and paleo tectonic maps for example. The book contained none and in an expensive hardback science book I find this a major omission. While given my lack of expertise I may not have been able to read too much from the pictures, I would have liked at least to have had the choice. Compare this to Michael Benton's masterly work on the Permian extinction and this book, while enjoyable simply is in a lesser class. That said I would certainly look out for Ms Walker's future books.
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A Snow job or a revelation?
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Gabrielle Walker's first book portrays the struggle of a renegade scientist to establish a theory of evolution's progress. Charles Lyell's established "uniformitarianism" in geology, followed by Charles Darwin's application of it in his theory of evolution by natural selection. The concept of gradual change in life as reflected in the fossil evidence is being challenged by some scientist. Paul Hoffman's research in Namibia indicated that Earth was subjected to an intense Ice Age prior to the Cambrian, severely interrupting life's progress. Walker introduces us to Hoffman and other major contestants in this game of reading the rocks. She presents him and the arguments with dynamic style, giving the book a certain panache. Even under Walker's admiring scrutiny, Hoffman doesn't appear as an endearing figure. Yet, the very characteristics some find irritating are the same drives that kept the theory of Snowball Earth alive. Walker shows how combative science can be, with contenders sniping and quarreling like feuding families. They all have fossils, climate mechanisms and glacial processes on show. Walker attempts to give them all a hearing, but the opponents make but cameo appearances. She gathered her evidence by extensive journeys - her travel budget must have been prodigious. Walker reveals their peccadilloes and their strengths. When you are done, you feel a sense of identity, even intimacy with them. Whether you are convinced of the thesis remains problematic. Walker's own sketchy knowledge forces a pause, wondering about the validity of her presentation. Her admission of being a "Snowball Earth groupie" erodes credibility. She offers many assertions as givens, such as the asteroid dinosaur extinction thesis. Theory popularity is good journalism, but sketchy science. Her journalist role leads her to overuse of buzzwords - "Slimeworld", the habit of bacteria to form mats - achieves fatiguing redundancy. The predominant question, which Walker addresses only superficially, examines what process life underwent under these conditions. There was life before the Cambrian - clearly multi-cellular. How complex was it, and how resistant to the environmental crisis evoked by the Snowball Earth hypothesis? Ediacaran life was shallow sea bottom or surface dwelling. An ice blanket a kilometre or more thick would have been devastating to this population. Walker and her "group" are unable to form a coherent thesis of how life achieved complexity after the Snowball's meltdown, only that it must have happened - otherwise "we wouldn't be here". A valid statement, but one needing further support for how it might have occurred. Walker's personalised account makes engaging reading, presenting a new idea needing more attention. While various modifications of the Snowball Earth notion have been offered, final judgment remains deferred. This is a good, but limited, overview of the debate and the participants. At some point, someone qualified will enlighten us further. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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Very enjoyable
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This is a very enjoyable story describing the background to the Snowball Earth hypothesis. Rather than just covering the science, it gives pen portraits of the key protagonists in the development of the theory. It also includes stories about how the author researched the book. I particularly enjoyed her encounter with an angry elephant in Namibia. While these aren't strictly relevant to the topic, they make the book hugely entertaining rather than just being an informative read. By reading this book, I got a clear idea of how the Snowball Earth theory has developed, but I also learnt what geologists do in the field, what happens when controversial ideas are proposed, and how scientific theory progresses in general. There are no doubt scientific quibbles that could be made about parts of the book - surely the "slushball earth" hypothesis needs more than a couple of pages? Aren't the biological arguments that it "spawned life as we know it" rather weak? But this is not to detract from the fact that this is an excellent book aimed at entertaining and educating the general public. It succeeds admirably. (Anyone wanting just the science should read the original scientific reviews)
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The Earth on the rocks!
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The book of Gabrielle Walker is among the type of science books that I normally ignore or just do not consider worth reading. However, I must admit that I was pretty much satisfied with it. I became curious about the Snowball Earth hypothesis some time ago, so this is what drove me to buy this book in the first place. The story on the Snowball Earth hypothesis is described more like a novel frequently referring the author's involvement with the main scientist responsible for unburying this somehow forgotten hypothesis, first stated by a British geologist in the 60's. The book is sometimes very much descriptive on some personal episodes, but despite this fact the science is introduced smoothly and with rigour. I did not find any misunderstanding or serious errors when it deals with the geology and related subjects relevant for the understanding of the hypothesis. So prepare yourself to dwell into this book very softly. I believe most people will find it engaging, mostly because the Snowball Earth hypothesis is daring enough to shake some common beliefs we personally have about the world we inhabit. This is Catastrophism making another attack to the gradualistic view in the Earth Sciences. The treatment of the opponent view to the Snowball Earth hypothesis is perhaps too short, but the evidence is also too strong to easily rebut it. You should not expect also to find here a thorough description on the discovery process, as the narrative is quite linear and straightforward. If you are interested in a purely scientific view of this hypothesis, then you may try the published article of Paul Hoffman in Scientific American (as a general interested reader) or the papers available in PDF in Hoffman's home page (Princeton University) especially in Terra Nova and G-cubed (as an undergraduate or professional earth scientist). I think that there is still some room to explore this subject in a more scientific way, as the hypothesis while explaining a great deal of observations in a unified way, also puts a series of other questions, part of them currently pursued by several research groups. These aspects are only slightly touched in this book. I think is also a pity that this book does not have a single photo or illustration. These are fundamental issues in any geological description of facts, and sometimes the rock outcrops are sufficiently clear to everyone seeing what this is all about, despite the subjectivity involved.
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