This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble as you might pick up on holiday
- on a beach in Wales say. Its history though carries us into abyssal depths of time & across the farthest reaches of space. This is a narrative of the Earth's long & dramatic history as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal realms of the Universe in the Big Bang & in supernova explosions & continues amid the construction of the Solar System. Jan Zalasiewicz shows the almost incredible complexity present in such a small & apparently mundane object. Many events in the Earth's ancient past can be deciphered from a pebble: volcanic eruptions; the lives & deaths of extinct animals & plants; the alien nature of long-vanished oceans; & transformations deep underground including the creations of fool's gold & of oil. Zalasiewicz demonstrates how geologists reach deep into the Earth's past by forensic analysis of even the tiniest amounts of mineral matter. Many stories are crammed into each & every pebble around us. It may be small & ordinary this pebble
- but it is also an eloquent part of our Earth's extraordinary never-ending story.