(Markes) Johnson sees geology as a form of time travel, and posits that islands should be seen as worlds in microcosm. As such, his aim is to encourage the reader to view the landscape “with one eye on the present and the other trained to recognize and enter a former world preserved in intricate detail beneath the skin of the same landscape”.
Islands are the perfect means by which to ask questions about and reflect upon the vast temporal flows that have shaped our planet. We inhabit a world that is predominantly characterized by ecological time, but it is also a world which was molded by geological time; the processes of each have interacted like the flood and ebb tides that cycle back and forth across the liminal intertidal zones and reefs which surround (or once surrounded) such islands.
Each chapter is framed as an answer to a “How?” question: how an island cluster acquires its shape; how islands recall windward surf and leeward calm; how bigger islands are broken into smaller pieces; how softer islands dissolve; how islands react to big storms; how island life aligns with global currents; how volcanic islands rise, fall, and renew.
Each chapter is also a neatly packaged case study in itself, but when read in sequence simultaneously transports the reader through five hundred million years to the present, while also circumnavigating the globe from New Hampshire in the United States, through Canada, the United Kingdom, the mid-Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores, to Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Hawaii, and the coast of Baja California.
~ Tim Chamberlain (Birkbeck College, University of London)