Kroonenberg takes the reader around the globe from the Caspian Sea (with its extreme changes in surface level) to the Columbian volcano Nevado del Ruiz, which spewed tons of mud over the small town of Armero in 1985, turning it into a necropolis. At the same time he produces chains of facts and correlations, which he binds together into a kind of geological Theory of Everything. He offers a surprisingly new and topical perspective by forcing the reader to look over the edge of a vast abyss of time, measured in billions of years.

Kroonenberg challenges politicians, scientists and other opinion makers to extend their models of the future, which often look ahead no more than a century, to at least the year 10,000. He wants them to measure events not only against a human scale but against that of the natural world.

This accessible, almost playful book enables the reader to take several steps back, like a painter working on a large canvas. Only then can we get a sense of the earth’s great geological cycles, such as the recurring ice ages. The author continues to surprise (if not provoke) with assertions like: why all the fuss about adding a bit more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere when we are already due for another ice age?

Professor Kroonenberg, known to his colleagues as ‘a poet among geologists’, scatters references to world literature throughout his intelligently composed marathon lecture. Far from being pretentious, this is a well considered way of raising the material above the grubbing around in the dirt which so limits many books on geology.

‘I want to show how insignificant humans are,’ Kroonenberg explains. ‘We are merely a tiny cog in the works, a factor that can be almost completely discounted.’ He achieves this aim to a truly remarkable degree. The Human Scale is a book that takes risks in its exploration of both social and scientific issues.