Chaucer’s In-Store Book Event

  Chaucer’s Books (3321 State Street) will host UCSB Distinguished Professor Emeritus and local author Bruce Luyendyk for an in-store book signing on Wednesday, June 7 at 6 p.m.

Description

What does it take to prevail in Antarctica?

Four geologists and two mountain guides face the brutal beauty of West Antarctica eight hundred miles from the US main base. Their search reaches far into the treacherous mountains of Marie Byrd Land. Over six weeks of living in tents and traveling by snowmobile, the team endures endless cold and furious blizzards. They cross ice fields and hidden crevasses, which one of the team learns about the hard way.

What keeps them going in spite of these dangers? Will the mountains give up their secrets? Can these scientists find evidence of the formation of the ranges many millions of years ago as the giant continent of Gondwana began to break apart? Was a new continent, now known as Zealandia, created by this event?

Mighty Bad Land, told firsthand by Bruce Luyendyk, a former professor of geology, reveals his inner battles and challenges: he’s almost fifty, asthmatic, and fights chronic pain. Through deft storytelling, readers are invited into a land of emptiness, beauty, constant daylight, and unseen menace.

About the Author

Bruce Luyendyk, Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On his first expedition to West Antarctica in 1989, Luyendyk and his geology team found evidence that a large submarine plateau, a fragment from the Gondwana breakup, comprises a sunken continent beneath New Zealand. This eighth continent was named Zealandia by Luyendyk.

In 2016, the US Board on Geographic Names honored the author by naming a summit in Antarctica Mount Luyendyk. Luyendyk is a graduate of San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego. His prior research in marine geophysics included the exploration of deep-sea black smokers, i.e., hydrothermal vents, using the deep submersible ALVIN off western Mexico. For this, he and colleagues shared the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.