At a time when the UN admits 17 Sustainable Development Goals, VEDA – the publishing house of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, presents a 176-page publication, “The Planet we live on”, in the edition Svet vedy. This publication was written by a collective of authors coordinated by Igor Broska from the Earth Science Institute SAS.

In an accessible and popular form, Igor Broska with collective of geoscientists describe the natural processes on our Blue Planet. These processes led not only to the formation of a wide spectrum of rocks and minerals, but also to the incredible variety of life forms. If we realize that the Earth is the only home, which we have and which sustains us, we must understand properly all its processes. An intent of the authors – to make available this complicated but still attractive topic by the form of a book, comes also from the need to fill up a gap at the book market, because a similar, original, popular-science publication focused on the geological evolution of the Earth but also of Slovakia, has not been published over the past almost 50 years in our country (for the last time Zoltán Schmidt, 1967: On the ways of millions of years across Slovakia).

The human civilization is in a daily intensive interaction with the so-called inanimated nature, whereby geological processes influence our lives in a fundamental way both in the positive and the negative sense, often we are not fully aware of it.

Examination and understanding of the complicated geological past of the Earth are the main goals of earth sciences. Geoscientists not only answer the question how has our Earth developed, but also its Moon and other planets of our Solar System. They also investigate evolution and extinction of various life forms in an interaction with the development of the Earth.

The book is a result of the work of a collective of authors from the Geological Institute SAS, the Slovak National Museum – the Natural History Museum, the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Comenius University, the Geophysical Institute SAS, the Astronomical Institute SAS, the Institute of Geography SAS, the Institute of Hydrology SAS and the State Geological Institute of Dionýz Štúr. The publication is supplemented by DVD medium with animations of selected geological processes from the geological past of the Earth. With its content, the natural history curriculum of primary and secondary schools is completed and updated with new scientific knowledge. The book “The Planet we live on” was officially introduced to the public in the fair Bibliotheca in Incheba, Bratislava on November 5, 2015.

Text: J. Madarás

Translated by: M. Vďačný