Over the eons of its existence, the Earth has been subjected to a host of different tribulations including cosmic collisions, ice ages, earthquakes, floods and tsunamis, wildfires, and man-made pollution. Each of these is a very interesting subject in its own right and, when writing about them, I came to realize that when the material was restricted to just one perspective and unnecessary elaboration was eliminated, the text that remained was of insufficient length to justify its publication as a stand-alone book. On the other hand, the subjects were sufficiently different from one another that they could not appropriately be reformatted as chapters in a single book. My solution was to retain the original formatting of the six brief books I had written on different but closely-related subjects, and bind them into this single volume.
