Carbon Dreams

At an oceanography institute in northern California, geochemist Tina Arenas studies climates of the distant geologic past. Heedless of life beyond her circle of scientists, Tina is immersed in a world of dinosaurs and shifting continents, where time is measured in ten-million-year spans but when both her research and an extracurricular love affair take off in directions she has not anticipated, she is catapulted into the late twentieth century world of people and politics.

Set in the early 1980s, when the problem of global warming had yet to garner much public concern, Carbon Dreams tells the story of one scientist's struggle to come to terms with her conflicting responsibilities to science and to society.