Canada Rocks: The Geologic Journey

by Nick Eyles, Andrew Miall

For anyone curious about the geological history of our country, Canada Rocks is a marvelous portrait of what the authors describe as the incredible 4 billion year 'construction project' that gave shape to the continents, mountains, and oceans of planet Earth, and created the world's second largest country - Canada. Profusely illustrated throughout with full colour and black and white photographs, charts, maps, graphs and sketches, the book explores the country from north to south, and from east to west, exploring that incredible history through modern day sites and land shapes created in our distant past. Read Rocks in Point Pleasant Park in Halifax were once part of Morocco, left behind when the Atlantic Ocean came into being. Canada's Arctic regions were formerly part of what today is Siberia. Greenland was once a part of Labrador. Fossils in a road cut in Cache Creek, British Columbia once lived in a sea that covered China. The violent collisions of continents and other land masses, the growth and decay of enormous mountain ranges, the impact of meteorites, and the comings and goings of vast ice sheets are explored in fascinating detail, as is the creation of our rocky resources from coal to diamonds. An essential reference for students and anyone fascinated with the geological forces that created our country, the book includes a great many sites that can be visited for close-up study, making it an invaluable field guide for exploring our history and the world around us.

Genres: Geology, Nonfiction

512 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

Reviews

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The geology of Canada in one huge book. It started out with promise but halfway through I gave up. The early chapters provide a good primer on the origins of our planet, plate tectonics, and the basics of geology. Plenty of illustrations but this was where I started to get frustrated. The layout of the text and illustrations don’t match up. The text will refer to a chart or photo that could be several pages before or after, or even in a different chapter. You can either flip back and forth constantly, or try to read the text and illustrations as they appear, out of context with each other. And eventually I just started to get bogged down in the text, which is jam packed with technical terms that were defined many, many pages earlier.

[Jon Spencer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a tough book to get through. Think of it like working out a new muscle for the first time. Interesting, enlightening, expanded my understanding. But it needs an editorial review. Notwithstanding the glossary, which doesn't have ALL the words, the technical language suggest this is not a book meant for the general public, but is more of a textbook. Although there are parts that are in a more vernacular style, other parts feel like they were cribbed from an academic paper. Copiously illustrated, it is highly interesting and will make amateur geologists of many. Still, I feel like I want to make a surfer T shirt that says "Rheic Ocean" just to mess with people and flaunt my new knowledge.

[Yi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the textbook of Stratigraphic Approaches to Understanding Earth's History taught by Mario Coniglio at U of Waterloo.