Book description
For more than fifty years scientists have been concerned with the
interrelationships of Earth and life. Over the past decade, however,
geobiology, the name given to this interdisciplinary endeavour, has
emerged as an exciting and rapidly expanding field, fuelled by advances
in molecular phylogeny, a new microbial ecology made possible by the
molecular revolution, increasingly sophisticated new techniques for
imaging and determining chemical compositions of solids on nanometer
scales, the development of non-traditional stable isotope analyses,
Earth systems science and Earth system history, and accelerating
exploration of other planets within and beyond our solar system.
Geobiology has many faces: there is the microbial weathering of
minerals, bacterial and skeletal biomineralization, the roles of
autotrophic and heterotrophic metabolisms in elemental cycling, the
redox history in the oceans and its relationship to evolution and the
origin of life itself..
This book is the first to set out a coherent set of principles that
underpin geobiology, and will act as a foundational text that will
speed the dissemination of those principles. The chapters have been
carefully chosen to provide intellectually rich but concise summaries
of key topics, and each has been written by one or more of the leading
scientists in that field..
Fundamentals of Geobiology is aimed at advanced undergraduates
and graduates in the Earth and biological sciences, and to the growing
number of scientists worldwide who have an interest in this burgeoning
new discipline.
Additional resources for this book can be found at:
http://www.
wiley. com/go/knoll/geobiology.
Andrew H. Knoll
is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. A
paleontologist by training, he has worked for three decades to
understand the environmental history of Earth and, more recently, Mars.
Knoll is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.
Donald E. Canfield is Professor of Ecology at the University of
Southern Denmark and Director of the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution
(NordCEE). Canfield uses the study of modern microbes and microbial
ecosystems to understand the evolution of Earth surface chemistry and
biology through time. Canfield is a member of the U. S. National
Academy of Sciences.
Kurt O. Konhauser is a Professor of Geomicrobiology at the
University of Alberta. He is Editor-in-Chief for the journal,
Geobiology, and author of the textbook, Introduction to
Geomicrobiology. His research focuses on metal-mineral-microbe
interactions in both modern and ancient environments.
