Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks

In this stimulating blend of memoir and science, Bjornerud (Geopedia), a geology professor at Lawrence University, meditates on the rock formations she’s encountered throughout her life and what they reveal about natural and human history. She recounts traveling to the Canadian Arctic to study turbidites (“distinctive, repetitively layered, sedimentary rocks” that form around the edges of continental shelves) and describes how in the 1960s, research on such rocks led to the discovery that mountains are created by continental collisions. Other chapters focus on humanity’s relationship with the land, as when Bjornerud laments how oil companies have destroyed farmland around her northwestern Wisconsin hometown by mining it for sandstone, which they use to prop open underground fissures in fracking operations. Bjornerud’s distinctive perspective encourages readers to view rocks as active protagonists in Earth’s history. She notes, for instance, that surging basalt lava flows 250 million years ago expelled huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and triggered the largest mass extinction the planet has ever experienced. Throughout, the lithe prose impresses (she writes of the sandstone-lined creeks she frequented as a child, “Great cascading icicles would form on the banks, some like stately architectural colonnades, others suggesting the fangs of monstrous creatures”). It’s a remarkably human take on the geological world. Agent: Eric Henney, Brockman, Inc. (Aug.)