2012 PROSE Award, Earth Science: Honorable Mention




For more than fifty years scientists have been concerned with the
interrelationships of Earth and life. Over the past decade,
however, geobiology, the name given to this interdisciplinary
endeavour, has emerged as an exciting and rapidly expanding field,
fuelled by advances in molecular phylogeny, a new microbial ecology
made possible by the molecular revolution, increasingly
sophisticated new techniques for imaging and determining chemical
compositions of solids on nanometer scales, the development of
non-traditional stable isotope analyses, Earth systems science and
Earth system history, and accelerating exploration of other planets
within and beyond our solar system.
Geobiology has many faces: there is the microbial weathering of
minerals, bacterial and skeletal biomineralization, the roles of
autotrophic and heterotrophic metabolisms in elemental cycling, the
redox history in the oceans and its relationship to evolution and
the origin of life itself..


This book is the first to set out a coherent set of principles
that underpin geobiology, and will act as a foundational text that
will speed the dissemination of those principles. The chapters have
been carefully chosen to provide intellectually rich but concise
summaries of key topics, and each has been written by one or more
of the leading scientists in that field..


Fundamentals of Geobiology is aimed at advanced
undergraduates and graduates in the Earth and biological sciences,
and to the growing number of scientists worldwide who have an
interest in this burgeoning new discipline.


Additional resources for this book can be found at: http://www.wiley.com/go/knoll/geobiology.