The Mystery Of The Earth S Mantle

Boiling liquid magma or super hard matter? Inconceivably high temperatures or cold neighboring on absolute zero? What are the depths of the Earth like? What mysteries does its mantle conceal? Science cannot as yet give the exact answers to these questions, though myriads of different hypotheses have been put forth.This is a fascinating book about the romance of prospecting, about the pertinacious investigations of geologists studying the inside of our planet. The author, Professor Anatoly Malakhov, D.Sc. (Geology and Mineralogy) was well known to the Soviet reading public for his previous popular-science books A Hundred Professions of a Geologist and Stories about Stones.

The term mantle has inspired philosophers, geographers, and theologians and shaped artists’ and mapmakers’ visual vocabularies for thousands of years. According to Veronica della Dora, mantle is the “metaphor par excellence, for it unfolds between the seen and the unseen as a threshold and as a point of tension.” Featuring numerous illustrations, The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor is an intellectual history of the term mantle and its metaphorical representation in art and literature, geography and cartography. Through the history of this metaphor from antiquity to the modern day, we learn about shifting perceptions and representations of global space, about our planetary condition, and about the nature of geography itself.

Authoritative review of composition, structure and evolution of the mantle for researchers and graduate students.