2012 PROSE Award, Earth Science: Honorable Mention
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: href=’http://www.wiley.com/go/knoll/geobiology’>http://www.wiley.com/go/knoll/geobiology.
Sobre el autor
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 (Nord CEE). 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.