Life from Above: Epic Stories of the Natural World

Pay with

About Life From Above: Epic Stories Of The Natural World

Product Description With over 200 spectacular images, including astonishing satellite photographs and stills from the PBS docuseries, Life from Above reveals our planet as you've never seen it before. Thanks to advanced satellite images, we can now see the earth's surface, its megastructures, weather patterns, and natural wonders in breathtaking detail. From the colors and patterns that make up our planet to the mass migrations and seismic changes that shape it, Life from Above sheds new light on the place we call home. It reveals the intimate stories behind the images, following herds of elephants crossing the plains of Africa and turtles traveling on ocean currents that are invisible unless seen from space.      The true colors of our planet are revealed, from the striped tulip fields of Holland to the vivid turquoise lakes in Iceland to the green swirl of a plankton super bloom attracting a marine feeding frenzy. Whether it's the world's largest beaver dam--so remote it was discovered only through satellite imagery--or newly formed islands born from volcanic eruptions, you'll discover new perspectives with every image. About the Author MICHAEL BRIGHT is the author of more than 125 books, including 100 Years of Wildlife, Wild Caribbean, and Africa: Eye to Eye with the Unknown. As a senior producer with the BBC's Natural History Unit, he produced Perfect Shark with Mike deGruy, Natural World: Ant Attack, and British Isles: A Natural History with Alan Titchmarsh. CHLOË SAROSH is a natural history writer and the series producer of Life from Above. She has worked on a wide range of wildlife and science television series, including Chris Packham's Nature's Weirdest Events and World's Weirdest Events, and Planet Earth Live for the BBC's Natural History Unit. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Observing the Earth: A Short History During the Late Stone Age, about 27,000 years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers in the Pavlov Hills, in what is now the Czech Republic, looked around the landscape in which they lived and realized that if they had some means by which they could easily find their favorite hunting grounds and the best places in which to camp, then they would have a better chance to survive. Word of mouth from one generation to the next would have been one way to stoke tribal knowledge, but these people had a new and more permanent solution: they scratched marks onto a mammoth tusk, and this would provide them with a visual representation of where they had been, where they were now, and where they could go . . . in other words, they had created a map. Those early cartographers were limited in their outlook. They had to make their observations from the tops of hills or, like later civilizations, from the masts of ships, but that did not stop them from considering the bigger picture. There was always a desire to view ourselves as the gods might see us, and in the 6th century BCE, the Babylonians had a go at depicting the entire Earth in space with their Map of the World. It is a clay tablet, in size about 5 by 3 inches, that shows our planet as a flat disk surrounded by the sea, and, according to the British Museum where the artifact is kept, it is thought to be copied from an earlier depiction made sometime after the 9th century BCE. Archaeological finds like these show how, since the mists of time, people have had an abiding curiosity about what the world looks like when seen from above. But it was not until Greek philosophers and mathematicians came along that we realized the Earth was not a flat disk, but a sphere. It was the perfect shape the gods would have preferred. By the 13th century CE, ancient mariners had drawn up navigational charts, like the portolan charts, which guided ships across the world in pursuit of silk, spices, opium, political influence, and the conquest of new lands. They were so valuable that the charts were often closely guarded state secrets, and the outlines o