WALES: THE MISSING YEARS. TALES FROM AN AREA THE SIZE OF WALES - 4,567 TO 700 MILLION YEARS AGO. By John S. Mason.

2021 1st edition. Oblong 8vo (210 x 147mm). Pp157. Colour photographs, maps and illustrations, brief bibliography and references.

"The geology of Wales, whose oldest outrcropping rocks formed just 710 million years ago, is too young to preserve the evidence for the drastic changes that, one after another, went in our favour. These are Wales' missing years. But elsewhere, much older rocks are yielding up their long-guarded secrets and they tell the extraordinary tale of those critically important changes, without which we simply wouldn't be here." Chapters include: Introduction; Deep time; a late December night on Borth Beach; Star birth; Matter under the microscope; Stars and their life cycles, heavy metal factories; Big stars and big bangs; Density beyond comprehension; Meanwhile back on the beach; From interstellar dust to Planet Earth; Science in a nutshell; A space rock from the deep past; Planet birth; Meltdown!; Earth and Moon, 4,560 to 4,000 million years ago; Seas of magma; Architecture of a planet, Earth's vital magnetic field; Precambrian terraforming, 4,000 to 541 million years ago; Metamorphism; Water - an alien chemical?; A paradox solved; When and how?; Recipe for amino acid soup; The facilitator of biodiversity; Magnetic attraction; Subduction, how oceanic crust meets its fate; Making mountains; The Great Oxygen Event, what could possibly go wrong?; Earth's vitally important carbon cycles, fast and slow; Why the sea is salty; Fossilised calcifying organisms; Ocean acidification explained; The Siberian Traps; Snowball Earth, what happened?; The missing years come to an end.