Sixty-five million years ago, a meteor six miles wide smashed into the Gulf of Mexico, ending the age of dinosaurs and devastating the North American continent. Starting with this catastrophic event, The Eternal Frontier recounts the extraordinary ecological history of North America, showing how the continent originally came into being and eventually transformed into the landscape we know today. This sweeping, multidisciplinary book is history on an epic scale. Tim Flannery, a world-renowned paleontologist, traces the postmeteor rebirth of plants, animals, climate, and landforms. He describes a time when rain forests flourished in Greenland and when giant long-necked camels and fat aquatic rhinos thrived in North America's golden age. He explores the massive changes wrought by the ice ages and shows how geological and climatic forces shaped both the autumn foliage in New England and the cacti in the Sonoran Desert. As the story moves across vast distances of time and geography, we eventually witness the impact of the human race. Flannery imagines the first humans to have immigrated 14,000 years ago, after the recession of the last ice age, and he explains how the pioneering Clovis hunters exterminated an ice-age fauna, including enormous mammoths and mastodons and half-ton lions. The story continues right up to the present, covering the deforestation of the Northeast, the decimation of the buffalo, and other facets of the impact of frontier settlement and the development of modern industry and commerce. The Eternal Frontier is science writing at its best, combining an enormous wealth of fascinating information with engaging prose that will be accessible to readers of any background.
