The Complete Earth - Tapa dura

Reproducing one of the most advanced satellite surveys of Earth in its entirety, The Complete Earth explores our planet, explaining the how and when of its mountain ranges, deserts, ice-sheets, volcanoes and oceans.

From pole to pole. The Complete Earth presents one of the most advanced portraits of our planet ever created Within these pages, data from NASA's most advanced Earth observing satellites has been combined to produce a cloud-free, digital atlas of the entire planet-a mappamundi for the Information Age.

At a scale of 53 kilometres to every centimetre (93 miles to an inch), we can trace the Amazon from Andean headwaters to Atlantic mouth, explore the trackless sand seas of the Sahara, and follow the corrugated ridges of hills and mountains that mark the front-line of India's continental collision with Eurasia. We can track the ebb and flow of seasons across the globe, watching snows fall in the North as they melt in the South and desert lands bloom and fade as rains come and go.

Combining NASA's digital portrait of the planet with high resolution satellite imagery that zooms in on noteworthy features-from volcanoes to asteroid craters, river deltas to glaciers-The Complete Earth creates an unprecedented view of our planet's face. Social and political boundaries are invisible and irrelevant, what we see instead is the landscape of the whole Earth - the mountains and deserts, seas and oceans that have shaped human history. Yet this configuration of rock and water represents a fleeting geological moment, having existed for no more than 4 million years-a mere 0.01 percent of the planet's lifetime. But look closer and a deeper past emerges. Earth's 4.5 billion year history can be reconstructed from the layered, twisted and folded rocks that adorn its surface.

To understand how to read the planet's deep history, The Complete Earth descends far beneath the continents and oceans to reveal the tectonic plates they rest on. It explains how the ceaseless jostling of these plates has sculpted Earth's ever-changing face and tracks their movements over millennia to reconstruct global views of not only the planet's past, but also its future.

Douglas Palmer is a science writer and lecturer for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. He is the author of numerous books on Earth and its fauna, including Dinosaurs, Fossils, Seven Million Years: The Story of Human Evolution and Earth Time: Exploring the Deep Past from Victorian England to the Grand Canyon. He is also a contributor to journals such as Science, New Scientist and BBC Wildlife Magazine.