Earth evolves. From first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to single cell to verdant living landscape, ours is a planet constantly in flux. In this radical new approach to Earth�s biography, senior Carnegie Institution researcher and national bestselling author Robert M. Hazen reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere�of rocks and living matter�has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.With an astrobiologist�s imagination, a historian�s perspective, and a naturalist�s passion for the ground beneath our feet, Hazen explains how changes on an atomic level translate into dramatic shifts in Earth�s makeup over its 4.567 billion year existence. He calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our planet�s many iterations in vivid detail�from its fast-rotating infancy when the Sun rose every five hours and the Moon filled 250 times more sky than it does now, to its sea-bathed youth before the first continents arose; from the Great Oxidation Event that turned the land red, to the globe-altering volcanism that may have been the true killer of the dinosaurs. Through Hazen�s theory of �co-evolution,� we learn how reactions between organic molecules and rock crystals may have generated Earth�s first organisms, which in turn are responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on the planet�thousands of different kinds of crystals that could not exist in a nonliving world.The Story of Earth is also the story of the pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Readers will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions� lunar dust, and the World War II Navy officer whose super-pressurized �bomb��recycled from military hardware�first simulated the molten rock of Earth�s mantle. As a mentor to a new generation of scientists, Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earth�s harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.Celebrated by the New York Times for writing �with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along,� Hazen proves a brilliant and entertaining guide on this grand tour of our planet inside and out. Lucid, controversial, and intellectually bracing, The Story of Earth is popular science of the highest order.