ABSTRACT
When Warren Hamilton passed away in October 2018, he left behind the manuscript for a synthesis paper that was published in Earth-Science Reviews in 2019: “Toward a myth-free geodynamic history of Earth and its neighbors.” Integrating hundreds of detailed studies across four worlds and billions of years, the paper’s outlook is heterodox, presenting alternatives to conventional wisdom in every paragraph for almost 50 pages. During the last years of his life, Hamilton had worked steadily on this paper, which he viewed as the culmination of his long career. This chapter tells the story of how Hamilton wrote his last paper, summarizes a few of the many ideas it contains, and describes how, with help from his colleagues, the paper was posthumously completed and published.
