Books
The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System
by David Baker and Todd Ratcliff
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010
304 pages, $27.95
We’ve all heard of extreme sports and even extreme tourism (Chernobyl, anyone?), and we’ve all seen the adjective applied to specific phenomena and situations—extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme heights ... you name it.
Well, how about extreme places?
Have David Baker and Todd Ratcliff got a list for you. Not satisfied with our home world, they’ve put together a handbook that is part science guide and part Baedeker for the entire solar system.
And a beautiful piece of work it is: The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System combines the gorgeous, and gorgeously reproduced, illustrations and photography of a coffee-table book—225 color, 25 halftones—with text as entertaining as it is informative, all packaged in a 7-by-8-inch, 304-page volume that can easily be carried around and—what a concept!—actually read.
Baker, chairman of the physics department at Austin College, and Ratcliff, a planetary geophysicist at JPL, have walked a very fine line—successfully overall—between accessibility without wandering into oversimplification on the one hand, and meaningful substance without lapsing into jargon on the other. Their text does require a certain level of sophistication and vocabulary—on a par with Discover magazine, say, or perhaps E&S—but they provide a comprehensive glossary at the back of the book.
Still, they occasionally undercut themselves, as when they remark in regard to a solar flare’s direct hit on Earth in 1859, “... as you know, extreme things happen when magnetic fields connect.” While that seems obvious once it’s pointed out, the condescending tone is somewhat off-putting to the lay reader, at whom the book is clearly aimed.
One of the best features of the book—its spine, as it were—is the way Baker and Ratcliff keep returning to Earth. An introduction to Olympus Mons, the titanic martian volcano, provides an approach to discussing plate tectonics on Earth and the lack of them on Mars. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot provides a lead-in to a chapter about earthly hurricanes.
Indeed, several chapters are devoted to Earth, which, among other assets, has the best surfing in the solar system (save perhaps for the truly mountainous waves suspected to occur on the lakes of Titan), as well as that so-far unique phenomenon—life.
Even when they have rambled off to the farthest reaches—the realm of rings, asteroids, comets, and the Oort Cloud—Baker and Ratcliff manage to work their way back to our mother world with a chapter on how Earth’s moon was born.
The icing on the cake of this delectable work is the smorgasbord of facts at your fingertips. The chapter on martian dust devils, for example, reveals that the long lives of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers have been made possible by the periodic vacuuming of their solar panels by those swirling winds.
The chapters are in the four-to-five-page range, making this a work that can be nibbled occasionally as readily as it can be swallowed whole.
Finally, the book concludes with that increasingly rare phenomenon: an index that is genuinely useful.
Highly recommended, and worthy of a place beneath the Yule tree. —MF
