January 1, 2014

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Book Review: Oxygen

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By Lee Billings

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Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History
by Donald E. Canfield
Princeton University Press, 2014

The earth's present atmosphere, made up of 21 percent oxygen, in eons past had very little if any of this life-giving gas, effectively making our planet a hostile, alien world for most of its existence. In Oxygen, Canfield, a noted geoscientist, weaves personal anecdotes and cutting-edge research into two epic narratives: how the earth's initially anoxic air transformed over billions of years into the stuff we breathe today and how he and generations of other scientists have laboriously pieced together this atmospheric puzzle. The result of the earth's remarkable oxygenation over geological time is nothing less than our planet's rich biosphere of complex, multicellular life. Through a journey that takes readers from the bottom of the sea to the sunbaked deserts of the Australian outback, from life's first stirrings on the earth to its possible existence on extrasolar planets, Canfield has crafted a challenging, definitive work of scholarship and storytelling that will give readers a newfound appreciation for every breath they take.

Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight and is senior desk editor for physical science at Scientific American. He is author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science and many other publications. Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

More by Lee Billings
Scientific American Magazine Vol 310 Issue 1This article was published with the title “Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 310 No. 1 (), p. 78
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0114-78c
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