Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.29 (758 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 030011544X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 384 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-10-25 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Could this be explained by catastrophic changes in the climate during the ice age? Colinvaux's research takes him across South America, and his conclusions turn on its head the hypothesis endorsed by most of the scientific community, that the equatorial temperature was constant but arid, so that life could only exist in enclaves (his findings indicates a moist climate and a temperature drop of four degrees). . The narrative follows his efforts to untangle "one of the knottiest problems of ecological theory," why the is the most biodiverse region in the world, with a unique population of birds and 80,000 plant species. From Publishers Weekly Colinvaux, an ecologist at the forefront of pollen research for the past 40 years, has turned his path breaking career into a scientific detective story, from his days
R. T. Highsmith said A great scientific autobiography. I enjoy reading books by scientists who can write well and who talk about how they do their research. But I'm not just interested in the highlights and awards and accolades they've received - I like to read about the nitty gritty details of how a particular brand of science is done - whether it's in the field or in the lab (or both, as in this case), the logistical problems of field work in far flung locations, how sometimes a whole year of work ends up as a dead end.Paul Colinvaux's book gives all that in a setting of field work in the Galapagos and the Amazon. I like how he makes the topic of researchin
He recounts an adventurous tale of exploration in the days before GPS and satellite mapping, and a tale no less exhilarating of his battle to disprove a hypothesis endorsed by most of the scientific community. Colinvaux’s grand endeavor, begun in the 1960s, was to find fossil evidence of the ice-age climate and vegetation of the entire American equator, from Pacific to Atlantic. The story of how he arrived at a new understanding of the is at once an adventurous saga, an account of science as it is conducted in the field, and a cautionary tale about the temptation to treat a favored hypothesis with a reverence that subverts unbiased research. . The accomplishment of the task by the author and his colleagues involved finding unknown ancient lakes, lugging drilling equipment through uncharted jungle, operating hand drills from rubber boats in water 40 meters deep, and inventing a pollen analysis for a land with 80,000 species of plants. Colinvaux’s years of arduous travel and research ultimately disproved a hotly defended hypothesis explaining bird distribution peculiarities in the forest. In this vivid memoir of a life in science, ecologist Paul Colinvaux takes his readers from the Alaskan tundra to steamy jungles, from the Galapagos Islands (before tourists had arrived) to the high Andes and the Darien Gap in Panama