Includes bibliographical references and index.

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next hundred years, human life on swathes of the earth's surface will also end, in a haze of heat, drought and, again, dust. Dust is the legacy of twentieth-century progress and a profound threat to life in the twenty-first. And yet it's something we hardly ever consider - so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought. All of history is recorded in the dust we create: the pollution we make, the fires we start, the chemicals we use, the volcanoes that erupt. Now, for the first time DUST will examine this substance and reveal it's importance and the fascinating stories it has.