Join Princeton Public Library and High Meadows Environmental Institute for an Earth Day event featuring two experts in earth sciences.

Odds are, where you’re standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roamed by fearsome monsters. Probably most or even all of the above.

The story of our home planet and the organisms spread across its surface is far more spectacular than any Hollywood blockbuster, filled with enough plot twists to rival a bestselling thriller. But only recently have we begun to piece together the whole mystery into a coherent narrative.

Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story. Placing twenty first-century climate change in deep context, A Brief History of Earth is an indispensable look at where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Andrew H. Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. Knoll is also the author of Life on a Young Planet, for which he received the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science.

Adam Maloof is an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. His research areas include Earth History and Paleoclimate.

This program is part of the Princeton Public Library's participation in Resilient Communities: Libraries Respond to Climate Change, a pilot program of the American Library Association

Andrew H. Knoll in conversation with Adam Maloof: "A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters"