The scientific achievements of the European Geotraverse Committee (EGT) are presented in this unique study of the tectonic evolution of the continent of Europe and the first comprehensive cross section of the continental lithosphere.

*Best Books of 2014* New Zealand Listener Imagine a typical continent with seemingly endless land in all directions. There are broad valleys and uplands, wide-open vistas across undulating plains, and upstanding mountain ranges far in the distance. There may be prominent features that command attention and draw the eye, such as odd-shaped hills, peaks, pinnacles, mesas and volcanoes. And there may be canyons, valleys, gorges, large depressions and basins. Now imagine this same continent under the sea, and largely drowned. Welcome to Zealandia. Continents are some of Planet Earth's most striking geographic and geological features. To have a continental identity is to be important, significant, recognised. This book makes a compelling claim for Zealandia to take its place alongside Eurasia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Antarctica. Zealandia is a continent almost entirely submerged. With New Zealand as its largest inhabited land mass, it stretches north to incorporate New Caledonia, south beyond Auckland and Campbell islands, west beyond Australia's Lord Howe Island and east past the Chathams. Its ancestry reaches back more than half a billion years - a long, complex and dramatic story of growth, stretching, break-up, submergence, immersion and collision. The story of its cargo of plant and animal life is also one of change - of extinction, adaption and migration. A big book full of big ideas, and brought to you by renowned GNS scientists Hamish Campbell (co-author of In Search of Ancient New Zealand) and Nick Mortimer, Zealandia: Our Continent Revealed is in every respect a landmark publication - thought-provoking, visually stunning and eminently readable. 'I couldn't resist this superbly illustrated and persuasively written voyage through the distant past. It's fascinating stuff that will undoubtedly generate considerable debate.' - Christopher Moore, New Zealand Listener

Sixty thousand years ago, Earth had two more continents than it does today, each larger than what we now know as Australia. Why are they no longer there? One of these additional continents, Atlantis, was located in the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Africa. The other, Lemuria, was located in the Pacific Ocean. In this book, you’ll learn all about these huge continents and the great civilizations who called them home. What did they look like? What was daily life like for them? What happened to them? Tom asks these intriguing questions and many more. The answers revealed on the pages within dig into the mysteries surrounding the continents of Atlantis and Lemuria and their eventual destructions.

“Have we really come so far, when a tour of the Continent is so desirable a thing? We’ve traded our swords for treaties, our daggers for promises—but our thirst for violence has never been quelled. And that’s the crux of it—it can’t be quelled. It’s human nature.” For her sixteenth birthday, Vaela Sun receives the most coveted gift in all the Spire—a trip to the Continent. It seems an unlikely destination for a holiday: a cold, desolate land where two nations remain perpetually locked in combat. Most citizens lucky enough to tour the Continent do so to observe the spectacle and violence of battle, a thing long vanished in the peaceful realm of the Spire. For Vaela, the war holds little interest. As a talented apprentice cartographer and a descendant of the Continent herself, she sees the journey as a dream come true: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve upon the maps she’s drawn of this vast, frozen land. But Vaela’s dream all too quickly turns to nightmare as the journey brings her face-to-face with the brutal reality of a war she’s only read about. Observing from the safety of a heli-plane, Vaela is forever changed by the sight of the bloody battle being waged far beneath her. And when a tragic accident leaves her stranded on the Continent, Vaela finds herself much closer to danger than she’d ever imagined—and with an entirely new perspective as to what war truly means. Starving, alone and lost in the middle of a war zone, Vaela must try to find a way home—but first, she must survive.

Nan Madol is probably the most mysterious ancient city in the world. Despite being more than 1.5 km long, the ruins of this city are located on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Where is the rest of the country? Inexplicably, some of its walls begin at the bottom of the sea. How is that possible? Thousands of kilometres away, in the northern Sahara, a Japanese satellite identified the remains of a gigantic river, now dried up, which cut through a whole chunk of Morocco, turning it into a quasi-island. That island is exactly where Plato said Atlantis was. What is the connection between Nan Madol, "the island" in the Sahara near the Strait of Gibraltar, and Atlantis? In this book we give you the answer.

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

“For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start” (Reuters). Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. And so she crossed sub-Saharan Africa to document how ordinary people deal with their daily challenges. She found what cable news ignores: a continent of ambitious reformers and young social entrepreneurs driven by kanju—creativity born of African difficulty. It’s a trait found in pioneers like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned cheap VHS tapes into the multimillion-dollar film industry Nollywood. Or Ushahidi, a technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief. A shining counterpoint to conventional wisdom, The Bright Continent rewrites Africa’s challenges as opportunities to innovate, and celebrates a history of doing more with less as a powerful model for the rest of the world. “[An] upbeat study of development in Africa . . . The book is written more in wonder at African ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension.” —The New Yorker “A hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise.” —The New York Times Book Review

"Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea and introduced the distinctive stone tools of the Clovis culture. Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge that narrative. Their hypothesis places the technological antecedents of Clovis technology in Europe, with the culture of Solutrean people in France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago, and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought."--Back cover.