Download or read book A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean written by David Goodrich and published by Pegasus Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the face of widespread misinformation and misunderstanding, a climate scientist ventures into the vast heart of America’s new oil country on just two wheels. Recently recovered from his epic bicycle journey that took him from the Delaware shore to the Oregon coast, distinguished climate scientist David Goodrich sets out on his bike again to traverse the Western Interior Seaway—an ancient ocean that once spread across half of North America. When the waters cleared a geologic age ago, what was left behind was vast, flat prairie, otherworldly rock formations, and oil shale deposits. As Goodrich journeys through the Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Park and across the prairies of the upper Midwest and Canada, we get a raw and ground-level view of where the tar sands and oil reserves are being opened up at an incredible and unprecedented pace. Extraordinary and unregulated, this “black goldrush” is boom and bust in every sense. In a manner reminiscent of John McPhee and Rachel Carson, combined with Goodrich’s wry self-deprecation and scientific expertise, A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean is a galvanizing and adventure-filled read that gets to the heart of drilling on our continent.

Download or read book Sea Monsters written by Joseph Nigg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-01-03 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mythic creature expert and author of Phoenix takes readers through a bestiary of sea monsters featured on the famous 16th century map Carta Marina. In the sixteenth century, sea serpents, giant man-eating lobsters, and other monsters were thought to swim the waters of Norther Europe, threatening seafarers who ventured too far from shore. Thankfully, Scandinavian mariners had Olaus Magnus, who in 1539 charted these fantastic marine animals in his influential map of the Nordic countries, the Carta Marina. In Sea Monsters, mythologist Joseph Nigg brings readers face-to-face with these creatures and other magnificent components of Magnus’s map. Nearly two meters wide in total, the map’s nine wood-block panels comprise the largest and first realistic portrayal of the region. But in addition to its important geographic significance, Magnus’s map goes beyond cartography to scenes both domestic and mystic. Close to shore, Magnus shows humans interacting with common sea life—boats struggling to stay afloat, merchants trading, children swimming, and fisherman pulling lines. But from the offshore deeps rise some of the most terrifying sea creatures imaginable—like sea swine, whales as large as islands, and the Kraken. In this book, Nigg draws on Magnus’s own text to further describe and illuminate these inventive scenes and to flesh out the stories of the monsters. Sea Monsters is a stunning tour of a world that still holds many secrets for us land dwellers, who will forever be fascinated by reports of giant squid and the real-life creatures of the deep that have proven to be as bizarre and otherworldly as we have imagined for centuries. It is a gorgeous guide for enthusiasts of maps, monsters, and the mythic. “[A] beautiful new exploration of the Carta Marina.”—Wired

Download or read book Ancient Ocean Crossings written by Stephen C. Jett and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans. More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently. Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development.

Download or read book A Daring Voyage written by William A. Andrews and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from A Daring Voyage: Across the Atlantic Ocean Gazing from the height out on to the broad Atlantic, beyond the numerous islands on the coast, one of the brothers broke a long silence by saying to the other, Let us cross the old ocean in one of these Dories, pointing down to a number of boats that lay moored almost under where they were sitting. Give me your hand, said the other, I'll go with you; and they Shook hands, agreeing to make the voyage. It was a sudden impulse, but the purpose was formed, and they kept to it. They re solved to wait till the following year, and to start in June, which was thought the best time for so great a voyage. The winter would afford leisure for preparation, and especially for perfecting such knowledge of navigation as would suffice for the under taking. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Download or read book A Hole in the Wind written by David Goodrich and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic bicycle journey across the American hinterland that explores the challenges of climate change alongside a diverse array of American voices. After a distinguished career in climate science as the Director of the UN Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, David Goodrich returned home to the United States to find a nation and a people in denial. Concerned that the American people are willfully deluded by the misinformation about climate that dominates media and politics, David thought a little straight talk could set things right. As they say in Animal House, he decided that "this calls for a stupid and futile gesture on someone's part, and I'm just the guy to do it." Starting on the beach in Delaware, David rode his bike 4,200 miles to Oregon, talking with the people he met on the ultimate road trip. Along the way he learned a great deal about why climate is a complicated issue for many Americans and even more about the country we all share. Climate change is the central environmental issue of our time. But A Hole in the Wind is also about the people Dave met and the experiences he had along the way, like the toddler's beauty pageant in Delaware, the tornado in Missouri, rust-belt towns and their relationship with fracking, and the mined-out uranium ghost town in Wyoming. As he rides, David will discuss the climate with audiences varying from laboratories to diners to elementary schools. Beautifully simple, direct, and honest, A Hole in the Wind is a fresh, refreshing ride through a difficult and controversial topic, and a rich read that makes you glad to be alive.

Download or read book Across Islands and Oceans written by James Baldwin and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Islands and Oceans is the memoir of twenty-five year-old James Baldwin and his epic two-year, solo circumnavigation in Atom, his trusty but aging twenty-eight foot sailboat. Early on and "as broke as [he] dared to be," James determined not only to sail around the world, but also to hike across every island that he visits. His inland forays are unique in the literature of circumnavigators as he finds danger, humor, friendship and romance in places most sailors will never visit. James' story unfolds in his earnest exploration of distant lands and seas, his meditations on the people whose lives he touched, and his greater voyage to explore his own private ocean of solitude. His adventure is not merely an attempt to seek thrills, nor even to tempt death, but rather a voyage of discovery as he set out in the direction of his youthful dreams to meet the life he imagined. "Go seek what you will, where you will, but be a seeker all of your life." -James Baldwin

Download or read book Voyage of Rediscovery written by Ben Finney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1985, a mostly Hawaiian crew set out aboard Hokule'a, a reconstructed ancient double canoe, to demonstrate what skeptics had steadfastly denied: that their ancestors, sailing in such canoes and navigating solely by reading stars, ocean swells, and other natural signs, could intentionally have sailed across the Pacific, exploring the vast oceanic realm of Polynesia and discovering and settling all its inhabitable islands. Their round-trip odyssey from Hawai'i to Aotearoa (New Zealand), across 12,000 nautical miles, dramatically refuted all theories declaring that—because of their unseaworthy canoes and inaccurate navigational methods—the ancient Polynesians could only have been pushed accidentally to their islands by the vagaries of wind and current. Voyage of Rediscovery is a vivid, immensely readable account of this remarkable journey through the Pacific, including tales of a curiosity attack by sperm whales and the crew's welcome to Aotearoa by Maori tribesmen, who dubbed them their sixth tribe. It describes how Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson guided the canoe over thousands of miles of open ocean without compass, sextant, charts, or any other navigational aids. In so doing, it documents the experimental voyaging approach, developed by Ben Finney, which has both transformed our ideas about Polynesian migration and voyaging and been embraced by present-day Polynesians as a way to experience and celebrate their rich ancestral heritage as premier seafarers. By sailing in the wake of their ancestors, the Hawaiians and other Polynesians who captained, navigated, and crewed Hokule'a made the journey described here a cultural as well as a scientific odyssey of exploration.

Download or read book Voyage of the Turtle written by Carl Safina and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of an ancient sea turtle and what its survival says about our future, from the award-winning writer and naturalist Though nature is indifferent to the struggles of her creatures, the human effect on them is often premeditated. The distressing decline of sea turtles in Pacific waters and their surprising recovery in the Atlantic illuminate what can go both wrong and right from our interventions, and teach us the lessons that can be applied to restore health to the world's oceans and its creatures. As Voyage of the Turtle, Carl Safina's compelling natural history adventure makes clear, the fate of the astonishing leatherback turtle, whose ancestry can be traced back 125 million years, is in our hands. Writing with verve and color, Safina describes how he and his colleagues track giant pelagic turtles across the world's oceans and onto remote beaches of every continent. As scientists apply lessons learned in the Atlantic and Caribbean to other endangered seas, Safina follows leatherback migrations, including a thrilling journey from Monterey, California, to nesting grounds on the most remote beaches of Papua, New Guinea. The only surviving species of its genus, family, and suborder, the leatherback is an evolutionary marvel: a "reptile" that behaves like a warm-blooded dinosaur, an ocean animal able to withstand colder water than most fishes and dive deeper than any whale. In his peerless prose, Safina captures the delicate interaction between these gentle giants and the humans who are finally playing a significant role in their survival. "Magnificent . . . A joyful, hopeful book. Safina gives us ample reasons to be enthralled by this astonishing ancient animal—and ample reasons to care." -- The Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Heidi Across America written by Heidi Beierle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of homecoming – Heidi Across America is a gritty story of how opening our hearts to others enables us to open our hearts to ourselves and love what we find there. In the summer of 2010, Heidi Beierle had just finished her first year of graduate studies in community and regional planning and decided to pedal her bicycle solo from her home on the west coast across rural America to the Preserving the Historic Road conference in Washington, D.C. What started as a research trip turned into an intimately physical and psychological encounter with self and nationhood. Heidi was 35 at the time and didn’t love much about herself except her ability to endure grueling physical undertakings. She viewed her journey as an opportunity to fix her failures and insufficiencies. There were also some research questions she wanted to explore: Why do people live in small towns and what do they like about it? Did a bicyclist like herself bring economic benefit to the small towns she visited? What could communities do to support or invite cyclists to stay in their towns? What could cyclists do to support the communities? Along the way, she was surprised by the kindness of strangers and the emotional pinch of traveling through Wyoming where she grew up. Her journey led her through the Plains and into the Ozarks where the heat climbed to agonizing temperatures and every pedal stroke in the heat felt one closer to death. By the time she completed the trip, Heidi discovered a newfound compassion for herself and a growing love for her country. Strangers opened their hearts to her and in turn, she opened her heart to herself. And her questions began to change and mirror things many Americans are asking themselves today: How can I be okay in my own skin? What does it mean to be enough? How do I satisfy my desire to travel without harming the planet? What does it mean to love America? For many young people, it is a rite of passage to light out on an adventure to see the world and expose themselves to new experiences, but we don’t often talk about how Americans seeing America can open us to the diversity, awe, and wonder available right here in our nation. Heidi Across America offers a journey to self-love, empathy, consideration for others, and respect for the spirit of place as pathways to find connection and home.

Download or read book The Unlikely Voyage of Jack De Crow written by A. J. Mackinnon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Odysseus in a dinghy takes you with him from the borders of north Wales to the Black Sea - 4,900 kilometers over salt and fresh water, under sail, at oars, or at the end of a tow rope - through twelve countries, 282 locks, and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates.

Download or read book On Freedom Road written by David Goodrich and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thoughtful and illuminating bicycle journey along the Underground Railroad by a climate scientist seeking to engage with American history. The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the places where they happened. He followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling South, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. As we pedal along with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. We travel to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom seekers, embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of Harpers Ferry, but his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance. On Freedom Road enables us to see familiar places—New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo—in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.

Download or read book My Ocean Liner written by Peter Mandel and published by Stemmer House Pub. This book was released on 2000 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For ages 7-12. So begins this well crafted chapter book recounting the adventures of boy Paul, travelling from New York to France on the legendary ocean liner Normandie. Unlike the tragic stories of the passengers on the ill-fated Titanic, this one is filled with the pleasures and novelties of life at sea, with friends made and several unexpected adventures for Paul to retell for the rest of his life. As he finishes his tale with nostalgia for the lost world, the reader will share his memories and know something of the look, feel and smell of the ship, and the excitement of being a passenger on a great ocean liner in its glory days. Full-colour illustrations are well-spaced throughout he book, they recreate the grand details of the liner, from its dining room to its engine room. Thoroughly researched by the Normandie, they bring the ship vividly to life.

Download or read book Beyond the Edge of the Sea written by Mauricio Obregon and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2001-03-15 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Jason and the Argonauts and Homer's tales of Ulysses' wanderings are among the greatest of the ancient epics, but they are not merely fiction. Following the clues in the classical texts, Mauricio Obregón here maps the likely routes of these adventurers and reveals the remaining traces of the things and places they describe, re-creating the geographical discovery of the ancient world. Obregón takes us with him on his reenactments of the hazardous adventures of Jason, sailing east along the coast of the Black Sea, and of Ulysses, sailing clockwise around the Mediterranean. These voyages map the two major seas of the ancient era and help us understand how the Greeks viewed their world — including the many startling deductions they were able to make about it (such as the circumference of the earth) from what today seems like limited knowledge. Obregón has also traced the voyages depicted in the Norse legends, followed adventurous Muslims on southern journeys, and emulated the Polynesians who managed to traverse the seemingly limitless Pacific. He scrutinizes every detail of sailing in ancient times, such as the mechanics of navigation: The stars, for example, which the mariners took as their guides, were not in the positions that we see them in today, a crucial fact in re-creating past voyages. This wonderful book contains more than forty drawings and photographs, including depictions of the explorers' ships based on the descriptions in the literature that has come down to us, the facts hidden in the fiction, from ancient times.

Download or read book Voyage written by E.F Knight and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: Voyage by E.F Knight

Download or read book A Pearl in the Storm written by Tori Murden McClure and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the end," writes Tori McClure, "I know I rowed across the Atlantic to find my heart, but in the beginning, I wasn't aware that it was missing." During June 1998, Tori McClure set out to row across the Atlantic Ocean by herself in a twenty-three-foot plywood boat with no motor or sail. Within days she lost all communication with shore, but nevertheless she decided to keep going. Not only did she lose the sound of a friendly voice, she lost updates on the location of the Gulf Stream and on the weather. Unfortunately for Tori, 1998 is still on record as the worst hurricane season in the North Atlantic. In deep solitude and perilous conditions, she was nonetheless determined to prove what one person with a mission can do. When she was finally brought to her knees by a series of violent storms that nearly killed her, she had to signal for help and go home in what felt like complete disgrace. Back in Kentucky, however, Tori's life began to change in unexpected ways. She fell in love. At the age of thirty-five, she embarked on a serious relationship for the first time, making her feel even more vulnerable than sitting alone in a tiny boat in the middle of the Atlantic. She went to work for Muhammad Ali, who told her that she did not want to be known as the woman who "almost" rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. And she knew that he was right. In this thrilling story of high adventure and romantic quest, Tori McClure discovers through her favorite way—the hard way—that the most important thing in life is not to prove you are superhuman but to fully to embrace your own humanity. With a wry sense of humor and a strong voice, she gives us a true memoir of an explorer who maps her world with rare emotional honesty.

Download or read book In the Wake of the Jomon written by Jon Turk and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2005-04-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thrilling account of an extraordinary journey in the tradition of Kon-Tiki In 1996 a 9,500-year-old skeleton was found beside the Columbia River, galvanizing anthropologists with the possibility that prehistoric humans reached North America from Asia by crossing the ocean in small open boats. In this compelling narrative, world-class kayaker and science writer Jon Turk relates his successful attempt to re-create this perilous migration. This story wraps an intriguing anthropological argument inside a gripping narrative about the sea, an ancient people, and the wilderness of northeast Siberia. Recounting his two-year, 3,000-mile kayak voyage from Japan's bamboo forests to the tundra of Siberia and Alaska, Turk introduces strong archeological and anthropological evidence that his expedition was not the first. He explains how the ancient Jomon people could have completed this journey 10,000 to 15,000 years ago and provides insight into the question of why they did it. Both fascinating adventure and riveting prehistory, In the Wake of the Jomon is destined to become a classic.

Download or read book The Monkey s Voyage written by Alan de Queiroz and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the world, closely related species are found on landmasses separated by wide stretches of ocean. What explains these far-flung distributions? Why are such species found where they are across the Earth? Since the discovery of plate tectonics, scientists have conjectured that plants and animals were scattered over the globe by riding pieces of ancient supercontinents as they broke up. In the past decade, however, that theory has foundered, as the genomic revolution has made reams of new data available. And the data has revealed an extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story that has sparked a scientific upheaval. In The Monkey's Voyage, biologist Alan de Queiroz describes the radical new view of how fragmented distributions came into being: frogs and mammals rode on rafts and icebergs, tiny spiders drifted on storm winds, and plant seeds were carried in the plumage of sea-going birds to create the map of life we see today. In other words, these organisms were not simply constrained by continental fate; they were the makers of their own geographic destiny. And as de Queiroz shows, the effects of oceanic dispersal have been crucial in generating the diversity of life on Earth, from monkeys and guinea pigs in South America to beech trees and kiwi birds in New Zealand. By toppling the idea that the slow process of continental drift is the main force behind the odd distributions of organisms, this theory highlights the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the history of life. In the tradition of John McPhee's Basin and Range, The Monkey's Voyage is a beautifully told narrative that strikingly reveals the importance of contingency in history and the nature of scientific discovery.