CHALLENGING CURRENT VIEWS ON THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH Global Wrench Tectonics, an extension of the author's Our Evolving Planet, takes us on a ground-breaking tour of the most critical facets of Earth history. It was the gradual realization that the prevailing theoretical constructs on the Earth's history are riddled with paradoxes and mired in conjecture that prompted the author into a long-lasting speculation on the global dynamic system. The basic precepts of the new theory - Global Wrench Tectonics - are internal degassing in association with vertical mass transfer, instigating changes of the planet's moments of inertia. The result is a novel interlinking of the classical corpus of "first order" observational facts, presented in the form of an Evolutionary Tree, each branch being the subject of a rigorous examination in the light of the data and the author's new theory. This fascinating and engaging text, filled with vivid descriptions and plenty of explanatory surprises, will undoubtedly add new perspective to anyone interested in the implacable human urge to explore and understand the world around us. Karsten M. Storetvedt has held the chair in geomagnetism at the University of Bergen since 1973. During the late 1980's his research interests made a profound shift from smaller scale palaeomagnetic investigations towards consideration of the global dynamic system. During the last decade his new theory of the Earth has been presented in numerous guest lectures and seminars around the world. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From reviews of Our Evolving Planet (1997): "This book...offers an enormous accumulation of ontological speculation that can hardly be met in other books in geology." In: Pure and Applied Geophysics (1998) "After all, the clock has turned full circle, and this is the new revolution in the Earth sciences." In: Current Science (1998) "This holistic theory [Global Wrench Tectonics] presents interesting possibilities for professionals within global geoscience, physics and biology, as well as for hydrocarbon explorationists." In: Journal of Petroleum Geology (1999)