This book takes an excursion through solar science, science history, and geoclimate with a husband and wife team who revealed some of our sun's most stubborn secrets.

E Walter and Annie S D Maunder's work helped in understanding our sun's chemical, electromagnetic and plasma properties. They knew the sun's sunspot migration patterns and its variable, climate-affecting, inactive and active states in short and long time frames. An inactive solar period starting in the mid-seventeenth century lasted approximately seventy years, one that E Walter Maunder worked hard to make us understand: the Maunder Minimum of c 1620-1720 (which was posthumously named for him).

With ongoing concern over global warming, and the continuing failure to identify root causes driving earth's climatic changes, the Maunders' story outlines how our cyclical sun can alter climate. The book goes on to view the sun-earth connection in terms of geomagnetic variation and climatic change; contemporary views on the sun's operating mechanisms are explored, and the effects these have on the earth over long and short time scales are pondered.

If not a call to widen earth's climate research to include the sun, this book strives to illustrate how solar causes and effects can influence earth's climate in ways we must understand in order to enhance solar system research and our well-being.

Healthy soil, with active soil life, deters long-term soil degradation and ensures that geo-physical processes are undisturbed. Is the vitality of soil under threat due to human civilization? Or is it due to contamination, intensification, and deforestation? Vital Soil aims to look at the effects society is having on soil and contains contributions from recognized experts in soil science.
* Function and value of vital soils
* Detailed information on how to prevent soil from irreversible stresses
* Articles on soil life aiming to bridge the gap between science and practice from experienced and well known contributors

Process and Form in Geomorphology marks a turning point in geomorphological research. Stoddart has brought together a team of the leading international experts to offer important new studies into the processes, theory and history of landforms, and to present a framework for taking research forward into the new millenium. Illustrated throughout, Process and Form in Geomorphology takes up the challenges of the research agenda set by Richard Chorley and offers fresh insights into his unique contribution.

The liquid phase of soil (soil solution) is a very thin, penetrating and all-embracing water layer. It has the most extensive surface among the biosphere components and interacts with all these components. Presented in this work is a new complex approach developed for soil liquid phase investigation that is based on "in situ" measurements. Investigation of the soil liquid phase can be of great significance in environmental research.

This volume sums up the vast experience of the authors' research into soil liquid phase composition in various ecosystems of Central and Eastern Europe. It describes the methodological basics of soil liquid phase research: methods of soil solution extraction, the main problems of application of ion-selective electrodes for immediate "in situ" assessment of ionic activity in soil liquid phase and redox potential, and ways to overcome those problems. Data are presented on soil liquid phase composition in natural and agricultural ecosystems, their redox, pH, carbonate and other regimes as well as the relations between the composition of the soil liquid phase and different ecological properties.

This work is devoted to the pursuit of new approaches to soil liquid phase analysis with a goal of discovering the role of soil liquid phase in the functioning of natural and agricultural ecosystems in recent soil-formation, formation of primary biological production, and in bio-geochemical turnover of elements. It includes new field investigation data as well as all data generalization carried out by means of a special complex database (developed by the authors) on soil liquid phase composition and other soil-ecological properties in various ecosystems in Central and Eastern Europe.

This book is the first English edition that integrally considers both methodological aspects and results of investigation of composition, formation, dynamics, spatial heterogeneity, and interrelations of soil liquid phase with other components of ecosystems. Soil scientists, agricultural chemists and ecologists will find this title of great interest.

""What about the twenty-first century? Will we finally accept our responsibilities as guardians of planet Earth, the biological living trust, for the beneficiaries, the children of today, tomorrow, and beyond? Or, will it too be a century of lethal, economic struggle among the polarized positions of the supremely dysfunctional among us? Are they--once again--to be allowed to determine the legacy we, as a society, as a nation, bequeath those who follow us? The choice is ours, the adults of the world. How shall we choose?""

So writes Chris Maser in this compelling study of three interactive spheres of the ecosystem: atmosphere (air), litho-hydrosphere (rock that comprises the restless continents and the water that surrounds them), and biosphere (all life sandwiched in between).

Rich in detail and insightful analogies, "Earth in Our Care" addresses key issues including land-use policies, ecological restoration, forest management, local living, and sustainability thinking. Exploring our interconnectedness with the Earth, Maser examines today's problems and, more importantly, provides solutions for the future.

This book provides a global review of the mechanisms, incidence and control measures related to the problems of soil compaction in agriculture, forestry and other cropping systems. Among the disciplines which relate to this subject are soil physics, soil mechanics, vehicle mechanics, agricultural engineering, plant physiology, agronomy, pedology, climatology and economics.

The volume will be of great value to soil scientists, agricultural engineers, and all those involved with irrigation, drainage and tillage. It will help to facilitate the exchange of information on current work throughout the world, as well as to promote scientific understanding and stimulate the development, evaluation and adoption of practical solutions to these widespread and urgent problems.

Alice Gerard has crossed the Atlantic a dozen times in the last ten years in her efforts to help solve the mystery of the controversial French site of Glozel, which has been called the "Dreyfus Affair" of archaeology. Accusations of fraud made by members of the archaeological establishment have contributed to the stormy history of the site during the last 80 years."Glozel" describes the exhaustive attempts Alice and her husband have made, working with other researchers, to understand the tombs, the tablets covered with unknown writing, the bones engraved with reindeer, and the phallic idols found at the site. In the process the Gerards made and lost good friends, became informed about a number of esoteric subjects, and finally developed a theory that might explain Glozel. The story is not finished; they hope the site will be recognized as authentic while Emile Fradin, who discovered the first artifacts in 1924, is still alive.

Before the drought of the early twenty-first century, the dry benchmark in the American plains was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But in this eye-opening work, Kevin Z. Sweeney reveals that the Dust Bowl was only one cycle in a series of droughts on the U.S. southern plains. Reinterpreting our nation's nineteenth-century history through paleoclimatological data and firsthand accounts of four dry periods in the 1800s, Prelude to the Dust Bowl demonstrates the dramatic and little-known role drought played in settlement, migration, and war on the plains. Stephen H. Long's famed military expedition coincided with the drought of the 1820s, which prompted Long to label the southern plains a ""Great American Desert"" - a destination many Anglo-Americans thought ideal for removing Southeastern Indian tribes to in the 1830s. The second dry trend, from 1854 to 1865, drove bison herds northeastward, fomenting tribal warfare, and deprived Civil War armies in Indian Territory of vital commissary. In the late 1880s and mid-1890s, two more periods of drought triggered massive outmigration from the southern plains as well as appeals from farmers and congressmen for federal famine relief, pleas quickly denied by President Grover Cleveland. Sweeney's interpretation of familiar events through the lens of drought lays the groundwork for understanding why the U.S. government's reaction to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was such a radical departure from previous federal responses. Prelude to the Dust Bowl provides new insights into pivotal moments in the settlement of the southern plains and stands as a timely reminder that drought, as part of a natural climatic cycle, will continue to figure in the unfolding history of this region.

Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp addresses the vibrant natural, cultural, and social history of a north Louisiana swamp. Kelby Ouchley grew up near Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp, and he later spent much of his professional life as a wildlife biologist and naturalist overseeing the national wildlife refuge created from much of the area. His deep personal and professional connections to the landscape give him valuable insight into the enormous changes that have struck the swamp over the last century and the reasons behind this transformation. In this fascinating narrative, Ouchley offers a kaleidoscopic view of Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp that reveals its unique past and distinctive flora, fauna, and people. Although these are stories of a particular swamp, they tell us much about issues facing other wetlands, as well as prairies, mountains, and deserts, when viewed through an ecological, social, and historical lens. Ouchley aims to foster an awareness of the environmental impacts of human decisions that encourages readers to consider ecological choices in their daily lives. The result is a work that presents an intimate and multilayered natural history of Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp that extends beyond the edges of the ever-changing Louisiana wetland, informing the environmental history of Louisiana, conservation, and ecological change.