In the age of climate change and space stations, it's easy to forget that the final frontier may well lie beneath our feet; that the Earth's rocks is the stuff of which oil is made. And yet we understand so little of the very thing we?re trying to protect.
Geologists John Wilson and Dr. Ron Clowes narrate the tale of earth's coming-of-age in Ghost Mountains and Vanishing Oceans: North America from Birth to Middle Age. The vast jigsaw puzzle of geological plates that drifted together to form today's continents have not done with floating just yet.
They also tell the story of Lithoprobe, created in Canada early 1980s, as part of an international program and seen as the best project in earth sciences' field. It combines multidisciplinary studies of the Canadian landmass and surrounding offshore margins to determine how the northern North American continent has formed over geological time from 4,000 million years ago to the present.
Highlighted with informative sidebars and photographs, Ghost Mountains and Vanishing Oceans will help readers gain a better appreciation of the earth sciences and the terra firma that isn?t so firm after all.

John Wilson was born in 1951 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his early growing up on the Island of Skye and in Paisley, near Glasgow. From 1969 to 1974, he attended the University of St. Andrews where he took an Honours B.Sc.. in Geology and never played golf once. He took a position with the Geological Survey of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). In his two years there, he mapped rocks, dodged land mines and watched the country sink ever deeper into civil war. Shortly before he was due to be called into the army, John retreated back to Britain on his way to the safety of Canada. He settled on Calgary where geology was booming and the only danger was freezing to death in January. In 1979, he moved to Edmonton to take up a post with the Alberta Geological Survey. In 1988 he sold a feature article to the Globe and Mail. This fueled a smouldering mid-life crisis and he took up freelance writing full-time. With some success, John mined the experiences of his travels for articles, journalism and photo essays. He even began to express himself poetically and, with a young family, began writing children's stories. He moved to Nanaimo and then Lantzville on Vancouver Island. John has been widely published by a number of Canadian presses, with his acolades including a shortlisting for the Governor General’s Award.

John Wilson's profile page

RON CLOWES is an emeritus professor in the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of British Columbia. He was director of Lithoprobe, Canada’s national geoscience research project that ran from 1984 to 2005. Dr. Clowes has won many awards including the Logan Medal from the Geological Association of Canada and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal, and he is a Member of the Order of Canada. He and his wife travel widely and live in New Westminster, British Columbia.

Ron Clowes' profile page