Spatial Modeling Principles in Earth Sciences presents fundamentals of spatial data analysis used in hydrology, geology, meteorology, atmospheric science and related fields. It examines methods for the quantitative determination of the spatial distribution patterns. This book brings together the material from the current literature in earth sciences and practical examples. It provides a sound background of philosophical, logical, rational and physical principles of spatial data and analysis, and explains how it can be modeled and applied in earth sciences projects and designs. It collects information not previously available in one source, and provides methodology for the treatment of spatial data to find the most rational and practical solution. The book is a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners of a broad range of disciplines including geology, geography, hydrology, meteorology, environment, image processing, spatial modeling and related topics.

Hailed by The New York Times for writing "with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along," nationally bestselling author Robert M. Hazen offers a radical new approach to Earth history in this intertwined tale of the planet's living and nonliving spheres. With an astrobiologist's imagination, a historian's perspective, and a naturalist's eye, Hazen calls upon twenty-first-century discoveries that have revolutionized geology and enabled scientists to envision Earth's many iterations in vivid detail-from the mile-high lava tides of its infancy to the early organisms responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties beneath our feet. Lucid, controversial, and on the cutting edge of its field, The Story of Earth is popular science of the highest order. "A sweeping rip-roaring yarn of immense scope, from the birth of the elements in the stars to meditations on the future habitability of our world." -Science "A fascinating story." -Bill McKibben

Global Change is increasingly considered a critical topic in environmental research. Remote sensing methods provide a useful tool to monitor global variables, since they provide a systematic coverage of the Earth's surface, at different spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions. This book offers an analysis of the leading missions in global Earth observation, and reviews the main fields in which remote sensing methods are providing vital data for global change studies.

This book provides an updated review and criticism of the progress of the continental, transitional and marine Quaternary deposits of Uruguay. It is primarily based on an analysis of the geological and paleontological evidences, synthesizing the time (numerical ages, biostratigraphy), environment and climatic situations involved and highlighting the most relevant paleontological content.

This series of reference books describes sciences of different elds in and around geodesy with independent chapters. Each chapter covers an individual eld and describes the history, theory, objective, technology, development, highlights of research and applications. In addition, problems as well as future directions are discussed. The subjects of this reference book include Absolute and Relative Gravimetry, Adaptively Robust Kalman Filters with Applications in Navigation, Airborne Gravity Field Determination, Analytic Orbit Theory, Deformation and Tectonics, Earth Rotation, Equivalence of GPS Algorithms and its Inference, Marine Geodesy, Satellite Laser Ranging, Superconducting Gravimetry and Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry. These are individual subjects in and around geodesy and are for the rst time combined in a unique book which may be used for teaching or for learning basic principles of many subjects related to geodesy. The material is suitable to provide a general overview of geodetic sciences for high-level geodetic researchers, educators as well as engineers and students. Some of the chapters are written to ll literature blanks of the related areas. Most chapters are written by well-known scientists throughout the world in the related areas. The chapters are ordered by their titles. Summaries of the individual chapters and introductions of their authors and co-authors are as follows. Chapter 1 "Absolute and Relative Gravimetry" provides an overview of the gravimetric methods to determine most accurately the gravity acceleration at given locations.

The purpose of this book is to get a practical understanding of the most common processing techniques in earthquake seismology. The book deals with manual methods and computer assisted methods. Each topic will be introduced with the basic theory followed by practical examples and exercises. There are manual exercises entirely based on the printed material of the book, as well as computer exercises based on public domain software. Most exercises are computer based. The software used, as well as all test data are available from http://extras.springer.com. This book is intended for everyone processing earthquake data, both in the observatory routine and in connection with research. Using the exercises, the book can also be used as a basis for university courses in earthquake processing. Since the main emphasis is on processing, the theory will only be dealt with to the extent needed to understand the processing steps, however references will be given to where more extensive explanations can be found. Includes: * Exercises * Test data * Public domain software (SEISAN) available from http://extras.springer.com

Focusing specifically on the management of karst environments, this volume draws together the world's leading karst experts to provide a vital source for the study and management of this unique physical setting. Although karst landscapes cover 12% of the Earth's terrain and provide 25% of the world's drinking water, the resource management of karst environments has only previously received indirect attention. Through a comprehensive approach, Karst Management focuses on engineering issues associated with surface karst such as quarries, dams, and agriculture, subsurface topics such as the management of groundwater, show caves, cave biota, and geo-archaeology projects. Chapters that focus on karst as an integrated system look at IUCN World Heritage sites, national parks, policy and regulation, measuring systematic disturbance, information management, and public environmental education. The text incorporates the most up-to-date research from leading karst scientists. This volume provides important perspectives for university students, educators, geoengineers, resource managers, and planners who are interested in or work with this unique physical landscape.

The contributions in this book were presented at the Fourth International Geostatistics Congress held in Troia, Portugal, in September 1992. They provide a comprehensive account of the current state of the art of geostatistics, including recent theoretical developments and new applications. In particular, readers will find descriptions and applications of the more recent methods of stochastic simulation together with data integration techniques applied to the modelling of hydrocabon reservoirs. In other fields there are stationary and non-stationary geostatistical applications to geology, climatology, pollution control, soil science, hydrology and human sciences. The papers also provide an insight into new trends in geostatistics particularly the increasing interaction with many other scientific disciplines. This book is a significant reference work for practitioners of geostatistics both in academia and industry.

A complete starting package for students and researchers of the earth science community interested in numerical modeling of microstructures. This excellent book deals with the numerical simulation of such microstructures in rocks. It starts with an introduction to existing methods and techniques for optical and electron microscopic analysis. The main part of the book contains examples of numerical modeling of processes and microstructures in rocks, using the software package "ELLE".

Land use decisions in karst terrains can have immediate and serious impacts on the local landscape and groundwater resources. The existing literature on karst and land use can be very difficult to locate in the journals of any of a half-dozen different disciplines. This book brings the interdisciplinary knowledge together in one place, in a format that academics and professionals alike will find accessible, informative and useful. Based on an examination of existing regulations, the experiences and opinions of planners and land use professionals, and quantitative analysis of publicly-available data, the book explores how human settlement patterns and urban systems in karst terrains are affected by land use regulations intended to protect karst resources. The book pays particular attention to the questions of whether these regulations will have a noticeable impact on density and on opportunities for economic growth and development in communities that choose to implement them. This analysis serves as the basis for a regulatory framework that may be used to understand the workings of land use regulations in karst terrains, and to aid in the development of such regulations in the future.

Sidescan sonar is proving to be the preeminent technique for researchers and professionals seeking knowledge about the structure and behavior of the seafloor, but its data is often difficult to interpret due to the physics of acoustic remote sensing, and to the varied geological processes at play. This book covers the fundamentals of sidescan sonar, incorporates new understanding of marine structures, and explains how to interpret sidescan sonar imagery and bathymetry.

With the new global tectonics approach in the Earth Sciences, the quan titative aspects of the dynamics of rock-forming processes came into focus: geologists are no longer satisfied knowing the pressure-tempera ture conditions of the formation of a metamorphic rock or of the emplace ment of a magmatic body, but instead would like to learn the time history of these rocks as well, i. e. , derive the temperature-pressure-time path and relate it to a tectonic process. To achieve this goal, a knowledge of both pressure-temperature-dependent equilibria and the time scales at which these equilibria may be attained are essential. However, the latter kinetic information is much more difficult to retrieve than that on equilibria: whereas equilibria are controlled by state variables, and proper laboratory experiments may be directly applied to equilibrium natural assemblages, kinetics also depends on factors other than state variables, such as grain size, dislocation density, and especially time (rate of heating, duration of annealing, rate of cooling). Extrapolation of kinetic data obtained at high temperatures on laboratory time scales to more realistic lower tempera tures and geological time scales are dangerous because, for example, of possible changes from an intrinsically controlled defect regime to an extrinsic one as temperature is lowered, or from an interface-controlled to a diffusion-controlled reaction mechanism.

This volume offers an account of the scientific outcome of a Priority Programme (Schwerpunktprogramm) which the Deutsche Forschungsgemein- schaft (DFG; German Research Society) promoted during 6 years from 1976 to 1982. In the understanding of the DFG, a Priority Programme involves the financing and coordination of research efforts of a group of investigators, possibly from several institutions, and is in- tended to concentrate on one particular topic and/or on one maJor area of interest over a period of, as a rule, 5 years. Discussions on the feasibility of a major programme on vertical move- ments started in 1971. The tentative programme was published under the title Terrestrial Vertical Movements in the DFG's planning docu- ment Grauer Plan IV: 1972-1974; p. 152. Deliberations within the Na- tional Committee for the International Geodynamics Project and in the Senate Commission for Joint Research in Earth Sciences (Geokommission) set out the scope of the project and envisaged an investigation of the Rheinische Schild, (i. e. , the Rhenish Massif east and west of the River Rhine). Seventeen geoscientists participated in a round-table dis- cussion on the subject Vertical movements and their causes as exempli- fied in the case of the Rheinische Schild, which took place at Bonn- Bad Godesberg on 8th July 1975. At this meeting the scientific objec- tives came more clearly into focus. A Programme Committee formulated the proposal to be put to the Senate of the DFG.

The chemical, physical and physicochemical processes that are at work in the depths of the Earth, both connected and unconnected with man's activities and coupled to the relevant properties and characteristics of the rocks, began to be intensively studied in the early decades of the present century. Until then little evidence had been available concerning the physical and physicochemical properties of rocks, and the data that existed were one-sided and uncoordinated. Both in this country and elsewhere an interest in investigating natural processes, the processes taking place in rocks, and the properties and characteristics of rocks arose as a result of the intensive development of oil and gas engineering, the mining of coal and ore, the construction of large projects, railroads, etc. Information on the properties of rocks was needed, in particular, to facilitate progress in engineering, technology, and geological and geophysical methods of prospecting for extracting and processing mineral deposits. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, methods involving intrinsic and induced pola rization were introduced. Moreover, little information was available concerning the petrophysical and petrochemical quantities characterizing the different contribution of various rocks to electrical processes. Electrical methods were followed by other methods of applied physics based on the novel electrical, thermal, magnetic, nuclear, elastic and other properties of rocks.

Precambrian Crustal Evolution of China integrates the theory of plate tectonics, structural geology and petrology to identify the tectonic and metamorphic environment in different stages of development of the Archaean and Proterozoic crust. Further, the evolution of the Precambrian atmosphere and hydrosphere is approached by using geochemical data and traces of life. For the first time, the results of the study of the Precambrian geology of China are made available in English to scientists and students not having access to the huge amount of Chinese literature.

Subduction is a major process that plays a first-order role in the dynamics of the Earth. The sinking of cold lithosphere into the mantle is thought by many authors to be the most important source of energy for plates driving forces. It also deeply modifies the thermal and chemical structure of the mantle, producing arc volcanism and is responsible for the release of most of the seismic energy on Earth. There has been considerable achievements done during the past decades regarding the complex interactions between the various processes acting in subduction zones. This volume contains a collection of contributions that were presented in June 2007 in Montpellier (France) during a conference that gave a state of the art panorama and discussed the perspectives about "Subduction Zone Geodynamics." The papers included in this special volume offer a unique multidisciplinary picture of the recent research on subduction zones geodynamics. They are organized into five main topics:
Subduction zone geodynamics, Seismic tomography and anisotropy, Great subduction zone earthquakes, Seismogenic zone characterization, Continental and ridge subduction processes.
Each of the 13 papers collected in the present volume is primarily concerned with one of these topics. However, it is important to highlight that papers always treat more than one topic so that all are related lighting on different aspects of the complex and fascinating subduction zones geodynamics.

Mankind is using a greater variety of metals in greater quantities than ever before. As a result there is increasing global concern over the long-term availability of secure and adequate supplies of the metals needed by society. Critical metals, which are those of growing economic importance that might be susceptible to future scarcity, are a particular worry. For many of these we have little information on how they are concentrated in the Earth s crust, how to extract them from their ores, and how to use, recycle and dispose of them effectively and safely. Published with the British Geological Survey, the Critical Metals Handbook brings together a wealth of knowledge on critical metals and provides a foundation for improving the future security and sustainability of critical metal supplies. Written by international experts, it provides a unique source of authoritative information on diverse aspects of the critical metals, including geology, deposits, processing, applications, recycling, environmental issues and markets. It is aimed at a broad non-specialist audience, including professionals and academics working in the exploration and mining sectors, in mining finance and investment, and in mineral processing and manufacturing. It will also be a valuable reference for policy makers concerned with resource management, land-use planning, eco-efficiency, recycling and related fields.

This book contains the results of a 9 year (1995-2004) investigation of the Canary Islands Exclusive Economic Zone, using state of the art technology. The coverage includes a multibeam survey demonstrating the magnitude of catastrophic failures of the Canary Islands; a comparison of the morphology of the Canary Islands with Hawaii; evaluation of hydrothermal activity associated with Mesozoic salt diapirs; and many more articles.

Fossil fuels will remain the backbone of the global energy economy for the foreseeable future. The contribution of nuclear energy to the global energy supply is also expected to increase. With the pressing need to mitigate climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the fossil energy industry is exploring the possibility of carbon dioxide disposal in geological media. Geological disposal has been studied for decades by the nuclear industry with a view to ensuring the safe containment of its wastes. Geological disposal of carbon dioxide and that of radioactive waste gives rise to many common concerns in domains ranging from geology to public acceptance. In this respect, comparative assessments reveal many similarities, ranging from the transformation of the geological environment and safety and monitoring concerns to regulatory, liability and public acceptance issues. However, there are profound differences on a broad range of issues as well, such as the quantities and hazardous features of the materials to be disposed of, the characteristics of the targeted geological media, the site engineering technologies involved and the timescales required for safe containment at the disposal location. There are ample opportunities to learn from comparisons and to derive insights that will assist policymakers responsible for national energy strategies and international climate policies.

Is the Earth the right model and the only universal key to understand habitability, the origin and maintenance of life? Are we able to detect life elsewhere in the universe by the existing techniques and by the upcoming space missions? This book tries to give answers by focusing on environmental properties, which are playing a major role in influencing planetary surfaces or the interior of planets and satellites. The book gives insights into the nature of planets or satellites and their potential to harbor life. Different scientific disciplines are searching for the clues to classify planetary bodies as a habitable object and what kind of instruments and what kind of space exploration missions are necessary to detect life. Results from model calculations, field studies and from laboratory studies in planetary simulation facilities will help to elucidate if some of the planets and satellites in our solar system as well as in extra-solar systems are potentially habitable for life.

In view of the wide range of disciplines involved in Quaternary research, this book offers a one-stop resource for the Quaternary research community, since it reviews the latest techniques and provides an approach to how mollusk shell remains are used in the reconstruction of marine environments in southern South America. Written by specialists in the field, this monograph sets the scene for multidisciplinary research involving taphonomy, paleoecology, paleobiography, morphometry, shell mineralogy analysis and sclerochronology performed on mollusk assemblages and/or selected taxa, and offers a consistent picture of spatial and temporal environmental and climatic changes.

The Olduvai Bed I archaeological sites have been at the epicenter of the debate on how early humans behaved. This book presents a new analytical approach that has produced unexpected results: the association of stone tools and faunal remains at most Olduvai Bed I sites is accidental and not related to hominid behavior. This revolutionary analysis shows that current models of reconstruction of human behavior are wrong.

MATLAB (R) is used for a wide range of applications in geosciences, such as image processing in remote sensing, the generation and processing of digital elevation models, and the analysis of time series. This book introduces methods of data analysis in geosciences using MATLAB, such as basic statistics for univariate, bivariate and multivariate datasets, jackknife and bootstrap resampling schemes, processing of digital elevation models, gridding and contouring, geostatistics and kriging, processing and georeferencing of satellite images, digitizing from the screen, linear and nonlinear time-series analysis, and the application of linear time-invariant and adaptive filters. The revised and updated Third Edition includes ten new sections and has greatly expanded on most chapters from the previous edition, including a step by step discussion of all methods before demonstrating the methods with MATLAB functions. New sections include: Data Storage and Handling, Data Structures and Classes of Objects, Generating M-Files to Regenerate Graphs, Publishing M-Files, Distribution Fitting, Nonlinear and Weighted Regression, Color-Intensity Transects of Varved Sediments, and Grain Size Analysis from Microscope Images. The text includes numerous examples demonstrating how MATLAB can be used on data sets from earth sciences. All MATLAB recipes can be easily modified in order to analyse the reader's own data sets.

This book offers new interpretations of Tennyson's major poems along-side contemporary geology, and specifically Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-3). Employing various approaches - from close readings of both the poetic and geological texts, historical contextualisation and the application of Bakhtin's concept of dialogism - the book demonstrates not only the significance of geology for Tennyson's poetry, but the vital import of Tennyson's poetics in explicating the implications of geology for the nineteenth century and beyond. Gender ideologies in The Princess (1847) are read via High Miller's geology, while the writings of Lyell and other contemporary geologist, comparative anatomists and language theorists are examined along-side In Memoriam (1851) and Maud (1855). The book argues that Tennyson's experimentation with Lyell's geology produced a remarkable 'uniformitarian' poetics that is best understood via Bakhtinian theory; a poetics that reveals the seminal role methodologies in geology played in the development of divisions between science and culture, and that also, quite profoundly, anticipates the crisis in language later associated with the linguistic turn of the twentieth century.