Can you recommend any good history of geology books in English? My ideal book covers all major research areas across all the history of this discipline. And it is mostly self-contained, in the sense that it does not refer too much to other sources for related topics but provides some basic coverage.

Some time ago I posted a similar query to a mailing list, and asked some friends of mine who are geology students for advice. But no such thing apparently exists: some texts only cover US geology, others only certain research fields, etc.

Being familiar with astronomy, I find this a bit surprising. Typical histories of astronomy cover all major research areas (celestial mechanics, planetology, astrophysics, cosmology, etc.) from the beginnings of civilization to current times.


Paolo Amoroso

You might try Gabriel Gohau: History of Geology (1990), but it's a textbook so its pretty brief and a bit superficial (it was originally written in french if you happen to read that language)

Karl Zittel's History of geology and palaeontology (originally in german) is much more thorough, but was was written back around 1900, so its very dated now.

offhand I can't remember any others.

http://gsahist.org/

Might be a place to start. Geology as a discipline is actually reasonably concious of the need to address history due to the 1950s paradigm change of plate tectonics as well as the old uniformitarianism/catastrophism conflict.

Geology of the planets:
The Geology of Mars by Thomas Mutch has a new edition!

I might suggest Palmer's Earth Time, which is a popular book covering the categorization of the geologic timescale period by period, and Winchester's The Map that Changed the World. I haven't read the latter yet, but I know it's about William Smith's creation of the first geologic map of England. The former book also focuses more on English geology, but it's quite good, though it may not satisfy those with a deeper interest in the elaboration of the timescale.