TED NIELD holds a doctorate in geology and currently works for the Geological Society of London, where he is Editor of their monthly magazine Geoscientist, as well as Science and Communications Officer. He is Chair of the Association of British Science Writers and Chair of the Outreach Programme of the International Year of Planet Earth – a UN-backed venture. He is also the author of SUPERCONTINENT: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet (Granta/Harvard University Press, 2007), which reveals how science has unravelled the complex evolution of our planet's surface and provides a tantalizing glimpse of the Earth of the distant future. He lives in London.

INCOMING
Or Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Meteorite
TED NIELD

Praise for SUPERCONTINENT

Unflinching in its description of human impermanence in the face of geological progress, but also a deeply lyrical account of landmass – Naomi Booth, TELEGRAPH

This book grips from the first page... Dr Nield is not chair of the Association of British Science Writers for no good reason. He produces read-me prose, and when that's backed by informed scientific knowledge, the result, as far as I'm concerned, is quite thrilling... This is a book which is both sobering and full of wonders – Nicholas Lezard, Paperback Choice, GUARDIAN

Elegantly accessible... deserves to become the standard work... hugely enjoyable – Simon Winchester

Informative and entertaining. [Nield] has thought well outside any academic box, touching on a huge diversity of topics – Kevin Burke, SCIENCE

One of the best popularizations of geology… gives us a sense of the ancient yet powerful forces underneath us – P. D. Smith, GUARDIAN

A fascinating and eye-opening book – BBC FOCUS magazine

Examines the romance of its subject alongside its hard science... [Nield] rocks – Helen Brown, DAILY TELEGRAPH

An imaginative and dynamic account – Richard Fortey, author of EARTH: An Intimate History

Meteorites have been the stuff of legend throughout human history, and since 1980 the idea that dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite strike 65 million years ago has become one of the most widely known scientific ideas of all.

But as Ted Nield shows in INCOMING, the causes of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (of which the dinosaurs’ demise was a part) were complex, and the idea that major meteorite strikes are always bound to be bad news for life on Earth is being challenged by fresh discoveries.

New research is suggesting that 470 million years ago, a stupendous collision in the Asteroid Belt (whose debris is still falling, to this very day) bombarded Earth with meteorites of all sizes. A revolutionary idea is emerging that the resulting ecological disturbance may have been responsible not only for massive worldwide submarine landslides but also for the single greatest increase in biological diversity since the origin of complex life – the previously unexplained Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event.

Ted Nield goes on to argue that all events in history derive their meaning from the context in which they take place. He explores this broader idea through a survey of the history of meteoritics, showing how the study of falling space debris became a science in the late eighteenth century, made a spectacular comeback in the twentieth century with the advent of the atom bomb, and was given fresh urgency by the anxieties of the second Cold War.

Publisher: Granta
Pub date: Autumn 2010
Status: Manuscript
Length: 80,000–90,000 words

All rights available excluding:
World English (Granta)