In Douglas Adams' novel "Hitchhiking through the Galaxy", the answer to the question about life, the universe and all the rest, calculated by a supercomputer, is: 42. The topic that geoscientist Christian Klepp addresses is hardly much smaller either: it can be roughly described as the question about the universe, the Earth and all the rest. On 350 pages he describes, starting with the Big Bang, the formation of the Earth as well as its development through all the ages of the Earth and closes his book with a description of the climate system and the current climate change.
The big bow
Klepp divides his book into eleven chapters. At the beginning there is the formation of the first atoms, followed by the aggregation of the Earth from stardust, plate tectonics and finally the influence of man on the Earth system in the Anthropocene – so he spans the very big arc. With great emphasis and enthusiasm, he describes the eventful history of our planet and illustrates the underlying processes on the basis of typical localities where they can be viewed – supplemented by professional photographs, literally from the mountains to the sea.
Thematically, Klepp's book follows a textbook of geology with a brief expansion by basic meteorological aspects. This is structurally absolutely coherent, but at the same time it means that the processes described are not fundamentally new or could not be read elsewhere - but not always as generally understandable as in the present book.
This raises the question of who is worth reading for. As a test, one can ask oneself: "When and how did the Earth and the Moon come into being?", "What drives plate tectonics?" or "What does the greenhouse effect result from?«. Those who can already answer this will probably not learn too much in Klepp's book – which does not mean that it is not quite fun to visualize the technical background again and to be infected by the author's enthusiasm. For everyone else, the book offers a very vivid insight into the fascinating history of the origin and functioning of our planet.
