With page after page of spectacular photographs, this book pays homage to the powerful forces that shape our planet--fire, ice, water, and wind--revealing a world with extraordinary landscapes and breathtaking geological features. These images, of geysers spewing scalding water, glaciers chiseling out the mountainsides, and red-hot molten lava exploding on contact with the ocean, demonstrate how Earth's current appearance resulted from the incessant, powerful, and widespread activity of nature and climate change over the various geological eras. The portrait that emerges from this exceptional journey through vast patchwork quilts of salt deposits, colorful canyons, ripple-like sand patterns, and vibrant meltwater pools and channels, captures a living, endlessly changing, planet.