Planet Earth

An Illustrated History

TIME

Edited by Kelly Knauer

Time Books, 2008, [First Edition], ISBN 9781603200325, full colour photographs throughout, illustrated endpapers, photographic title page, large hardcover, dustjacket

Near Fine Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows minor edge and shelf wear with minor rubbing and bumping to edges and corners (See photographs)

“Join the Editors of Time and the world’s most acclaimed nature photographers on a breathtaking journey of discovery to Planet Earth.  Here is a remarkable and illuminating portrait of mankind’s home planet in all its staggering diversity, beauty and mystery, form the splendour of the aurora borealis to the oddities of bizarre life-forms at home in Earth’s most extreme environments.  Here are natural wonders both in massive and minute, ranging from the vast mechanisms of plate tectonics to the intricate details of animals whose bodies are adapted to mirror their environment.
Time explores this enormous subject by following the ancient Greek division of the worlds into a series of spheres.  The grand tour begins with the atmosphere, the blue cocoon that shields the planet, gives us breath and spawns hurricanes and tornadoes.  It ranges across the ecosystems of the pedosphere, the land planet, to explore rain forests and mountain ranges, deserts and tundra.  The grand expanse of the hydrosphere, the water planet, is pictures in its dazzling variety: rays and jellyfish, hammerhead sharks and coral reefs.  Two little seen realms – the frozen polar zones of the cryosphere and thew world beneath our feet, the geosphere – are depicted in all their eerie mystery.  And the fascinating plants and animals of the biosphere, the living planet, are captured in scenes both wild and tender: courting and mating, nesting and hunting, parenting and playing...”