A Scientific American, Nautilus, and New Scientist Best Book of the YearThe untold story of how environmental change throughout the cosmos shaped five hundred years of human civilization.Our solar system is a dynamic arena where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our fragile bl...

How The Solar System Shaped Human History – And May Help Save Our Planet'A stunning history of how we've come to understand environmental change on Earth...A rich, eye-opening tapestry, and beautifully told!' LEWIS DARTNELL'Masterfully shows that our understanding of some of the world's greatest threats has come from watching the stars' LUKE KEMPOur solar system is an extraordinary place where asteroids careen off c...

Dagomar Degroot offers the first detailed analysis of how a society thrived amid the Little Ice Age, a period of climatic cooling that reached its chilliest point between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The precocious economy, unusual environment, and dynamic intellectual culture of the Dutch Republic in its seventeenth-century Golden Age allowed it to thrive as neighboring societies unraveled in the face of extremes in temperature and precipitation. By tracing the occasionally cou...

Our solar system is a dynamic arena where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our fragile blue planet: Earth.In Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, Dagomar Degroot traces the surprising threads linking human endeavor to the rest of the solar system. He reveals how variability in planetary environments has shaped geopolitics, spurred scientific ...

**Brought to you by Penguin.How The Solar System Shaped Human History – And May Help Save Our Planet**Our solar system is an extraordinary place where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our own fragile blue planet.In Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, Dagomar Degroot traces the surprising threads linking humanity to the rest o...