Professor brings Earth history to life with new textbook that was nine years in the making

Professor Janok Bhattacharya could write the book on what it takes to co-author a textbook.

Nine years ago, Janok got a call from a former colleague at the University of Houston.

Let’s write an introductory textbook together, said geology professor Peter Copeland.

Great idea, said Janok who’d been recruited to McMaster and appointed the Susan Cunningham Research Chair in Geology.

Between them, they had decades of experience teaching geology to thousands of undergrads. Janok had also worked as a geologist in the petroleum industry before joining academia.

Geology’s a popular choice for first-year students needing to take a mandatory science elective. Janok says these “Rocks for Jocks” courses tend to focus on physical geology with textbooks that can be as dry as  sedimentary layers.

Janok and Peter set out to write a sequel that would be better than the original. Their textbook would take a new approach to Earth history, explaining key geological concepts by telling stories about pivotal episodes in our planet’s 4.56 billion year history. “Would you rather memorize definitions or read stories about an asteroid slamming into the Earth and causing the dinosaurs to go extinct or the eruption of a supervolcano in Siberia that triggered the greatest mass extinction event ever on our planet?”

In 2016, they pitched their historical geology textbook to Cambridge University Press. An outline plus sample chapters were passed around to faculty to gauge interest and generate early feedback.

Janok and Peter heard back from the publishing house three years later – their textbook was a go. They’d work on it for the next six years.

A lot of that time was devoted to research. When creating lectures, Janok says he feels confident that he already knows 90 per cent of the material. “But when I sat down to write the textbook, I knew around 10 per cent. Getting to 100 per cent took time.”

The textbook also took a lot of patience, with some chapters going through upwards of 30 rewrites. Editors requested learning objectives, key points for every chapter and bulleted summaries, which prompted wholesale revisions.  Clarity was key, along with knowing how to explain concepts to undergrads with little or no previous knowledge about geology.

Collecting, curating and creating hundreds of charts, tables, photos and images was painstaking work that gave Janok newfound appreciation for scientific illustrators.  In the end, he prepared nearly 400 figures for the textbook.

He took a number of the photos himself – going to Italy and India to visit some of the sites featured in the stories was a highlight of working on the textbook.

In the end, Janok and Peter wrestled 4.56 billion years down to 180,000 words and 436 pages. Earth History: Stories of our Geological Past will be published by Cambridge University Press in May.

“The textbook took longer than my PhD,” says Janok.

And their work’s not finished yet. The textbook is part of a teaching package which means there are lecture slides and a test-bank of multiple-choice questions to review.

Janok and Peter will also go from authors to marketers. They have an online Q&A webinar on April 15 and will begin reaching out to geology faculty at universities across North America and around the world. In 2023 Janok received the  Francis J. Pettijohn Medal for excellence in sedimentology and stratigraphy at the the annual conference of the Geological Society of America – he’ll be back at this year’s conference promoting his book.

Looking back on the past nine years, would Janok work on another textbook?

“In a heartbeat. But I might outsource the images and illustrations.”