Dancing Elephants and Floating Continents
The Story of Canada Beneath Your Feet
- Publisher
- Key Porter Books
- Initial publish date
- Aug 2006
- Category
- General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781552638606
- Publish Date
- Aug 2006
- List Price
- $11.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Out of print
This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.
Description
What a story! The characters are entire continents--moving around the surface of the Earth, crashing into each other, crushing islands, raising mountain ranges and opening and closing vast oceans--and the plot is nothing less than the formation of the planet on which we live. The world's geological past is a mystery of vanished oceans, towering mountain ranges and crashing continents. How did these evolutionary changes happen? In Canada, a scientific project called Lithoprobe uses huge earth-pounding trucks known as "dancing elephants." Scientists send shockwaves deep down to the Earth's crust which bounce back once they have hit a surface below. The readings show what is going on below the earth's surface right down to the tectonic plates that underlie the land beneath our feet. With this information, scientists can now map the Earth's core and solve the mysteries of its evolution. Dancing Elephants and Floating Continents provides a fascinating and readily understandable explanation of the history of the Earth--how it has evolved and changed--and how it continues to change, shift and grow. Filled with detailed, full-colour illustrations and original lithographic prints of the Earth's core, this is a unique, educational and just plain cool view of the Earth we stand on.
About the author
John Wilson was born in 1951 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his early growing up on the Island of Skye and in Paisley, near Glasgow. From 1969 to 1974, he attended the University of St. Andrews where he took an Honours B.Sc.. in Geology and never played golf once. He took a position with the Geological Survey of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). In his two years there, he mapped rocks, dodged land mines and watched the country sink ever deeper into civil war. Shortly before he was due to be called into the army, John retreated back to Britain on his way to the safety of Canada. He settled on Calgary where geology was booming and the only danger was freezing to death in January. In 1979, he moved to Edmonton to take up a post with the Alberta Geological Survey. In 1988 he sold a feature article to the Globe and Mail. This fueled a smouldering mid-life crisis and he took up freelance writing full-time. With some success, John mined the experiences of his travels for articles, journalism and photo essays. He even began to express himself poetically and, with a young family, began writing children's stories. He moved to Nanaimo and then Lantzville on Vancouver Island. John has been widely published by a number of Canadian presses, with his acolades including a shortlisting for the Governor General’s Award.
