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Rollinson, H. Early Earth Systems: A Geochemical Approach.

Oxford, Blackwell Publishing (2006), 285 pp. ISBN-13: 9781405122559 (paperback) £34.99.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

This is an ambitious book in the sense that it seeks to explore the extent that the Earth Systems approach can be usefully applied to the early history of the Earth. Contemporary discussion of Earth systems tends to focus on the Earth’s surface environments, and hence geologically short timescales, and yet as we consider the Earth on longer timescales we need to include the solid and the deep Earth. As the author readily admits, these are early days in the development of a systems approach for what happened more than 2.5 billion years ago, and so the book should not be assessed simply on the extent that such an approach is worthwhile given our present state of knowledge. Instead the approach offers a way to look at the available data with new eyes, and perhaps to engage people who have paid little attention to the history of the early Earth. The book is therefore refreshing, but it is wide ranging, and it may be that only individual sections are suitable for undergraduate teaching on particular courses. Instead it offers a broad canvas of many studies linked to the origin of the Earth, and what can be inferred about conditions on Earth until 2.5 Ga ago.

The book starts . . . [Full Text of this Article]