The Earth is our familiar home, yet the geological processes which underlie our tenure on it can seem intimidatingly vast, ancient, and sometimes even alien—certainly beyond everyday human experience. Our planet’s origins and upheavals have fascinated humans for millennia, but only recently have we developed a clear understanding of how the Earth actually works.
Many people alive today were born at a time when no one knew where Earth’s constituents came from, why continents move, how diamonds are made, what causes earthquakes, when life started, or whether geological processes occur elsewhere in the Universe. We now know a great deal about all these things, and geology is expanding at breakneck speed.Long before it had a name, geology was a crucial part of human knowledge. Even before agriculture, humans needed to know where water was wrung from the ground, where the best tool-stones could be found, and how to choose a stable, safe campsite. This knowledge expanded with the advent of farming and settlements around ten thousand years ago—working the land where minerals in the soil would make crops and beasts thrive, carving irrigation channels and trackways into the ground, and hewing stones to build the new villages and cities. <...>
