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Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Physical geography > General
The 'Grossglockner', Austria's highest mountain at 3,789m, is one of the most important summits of the Eastern Alps - and not only because it is so important for alpine tourism. At the end of the 18th Century, it had been explored and nobody less than Arch Bishop Salm-Reiffenscheidt-Krautheim was the first to ascend in 1800. Today, with more than 5000 ascents per year, it is a very popular destination for climbers. But even for those who do not want to climb, the fascination of this mountain is hard to escape. There is no better way to investigate than from the 'Grossglockner' High Alpine roads. The road leads across both mountain passes Fuscher Toerl and Hochtor, crossing the main Alpes from Salzburg to Carinthia, with turnoffs to the Edelweiss peak and the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-height. The road as an adventure trip and its 12% ascent has to be well managed. Who would be more capable to report about all this than Stefan Bogner, the master of the automobile photo books? With fuel in his blood and a sensitive feel for history, but also with accelerator and brake, he provides a portrait of one of the most exciting and most visited Alpine roads. Text in English and German.
Who would have guessed that a small province could hold so many falls? Overall, New Brunswick is home to more than 1,000 waterfalls -- some remote, and some surprisingly accessible. Spilling over an incredible range of ancient geological terrain, each of the fifty-five waterfalls photographed for this richly illustrated volume is complemented by descriptoins, directions, and background information on each site. Guitard's photographs are composed with an eye to the diversity and particular beauty and geological situation of each watercourse. A map locates each waterfall. Spanning all five regions of New Brunswick (Acadian Coastal, Appalachian Range, River Valley Scenic, Fundy Coastal, and Miramichi River), there's something for everyone -- you may even want to strap on your backpack and head out to experience them yourself.
How have our interactions with animals shaped Calgary? What can we do to ensure that humans and animals in the city continue to co-exist, and even flourish together? This wide-ranging book explores the ways that animals inhabit our city, our lives and our imaginations. Essays from animal historians, wildlife specialists, artists and writers address key issues such as human-wildlife interactions, livestock in the city, and animal performers at the Calgary Stampede. Contributions from some of Calgary's iconic arts institutions, including One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, and the Glenbow Museum, demonstrate how animals continue to be a source of inspiration and exploration for fashion, art, dance, and theatre. The full-colour volume is beautifully illustrated throughout with archival images, wildlife photography, documentary and production stills, and original artwork.
An interdisciplinary work that comparatively studies rule of law practices and the relationship between the rule of law and regional integration, a topic largely explored in European integration. By looking at the function of the rule of law in ASEAN rather than what it 'means' measured on normative conception, the book situates the rule of law in broader institutional and political processes in the member states and in regional relations to show the motivations of member states in adopting a peculiar type of regional architecture. It asks whether forging the rule of law in the region can help build it internally for member states. The book revisits discourses on the 'spill-over' of economic integration, the impact of globalization in reshaping the state and generating new tools of the rule of law. It makes a comprehensive comparison - the European Union, Africa Union and MERCOSUR - showing the uneven pathways to rule of law in various contexts.
The Tornado gives account of one of the world's most terrifying natural disasters. Twisters have left their wake of freakish consequences throughout the United States and the world, and The Tornado vividly describes some of the most bizarre from around the country--houseboats sailing through the air; cars flown to a landing half a cornfield away; an entire house lifted and demolished, leaving only a divan holding the uninjured family. The most detailed description of a tornado and the violence it can bring comes from the author's focus on the tragedy of one American town in 1953. John Edward Weems was an eyewitness reporter of a funnel that hit Waco, Texas, on May 11 of that year. In gripping narrative, he portrays the events of that day: a man clinging to a guard rail while a mailbox, plate glass, bricks, and assorted debris whizzed past his head; automobiles rolling end on end down the street; buildings falling like blocks knocked down by an angry child; a movie theater crumbling on the terrified patrons. When the storm had passed, 114 people were dead and hundreds injured; property damage ran in the tens of millions of dollars. Research in news reports, government weather documents, and books flesh out this account, which Pulitzer-prize winner Annie Dillard called "wonderfully exciting. It is full of people, and the thousands of details that make up their lives--and deaths. [It is] a story of enormous power." John Banta, writing in the Waco Tribune-Herald, described it as "a gripping story of human drama and tragedy." Kirkus Reviews said, ". . . the events still chill face to face with a power that defies reason." Royalties from the sale of The Tornado will benefit the book fund of the Waco-McLennan County Public Library.
The book at hand covers many of the different classes of topography/profilometry, and will give the reader an overview of different aspects of current profilometric methods. The intent is to show the possibilities, the state-of-the-art and some recent advances in the field by bringing together a non-exhaustive but diverse selection of profilometric methods. Some methods are fresh and unique like the one pixel profilometer or the sampling moire method. Others are more consolidated, like Fourier transform profilometry but now in real-time, and even commercially available, like the newest time-of-flight cameras for 3D vision. The techniques in this book range from projection moire to binary dithering pattern projection to areal surface mapping. They include an endoscopic implementation to an omnidirectional vision system and techniques using Fourier analysis to time-of-flight principles. Also, techniques applicable in biomedicine to engineering applications. Even from atomic force microscopy to optical coherence tomography, which both used as topographical means. Finally, some in-depth specialist reviews are included of new profilometric methods or new commercial profilometric devices. The book contains 12 chapters from selected authors from all over the world considered authorities in their field. The individual chapters are written to give a thorough introduction to each respective topographic method, and include a lot of background and abundant references, so that the book serves as a good introduction or reference.
In Going to Extremes writer, presenter and Oxford geography don Nick Middleton visits Oymyakon in Siberia, where the average winter temperature is -47 degrees and 40% of the population have lost their fingers to frostbite while changing the car wheel. Next he travels to Arica Chile where there have been fourteen consecutive years without a drop of rain and so fog is people's only source of water. Going from the driest to the wettest, he visits Mawsynram in India which annually competes for the title with its neighbour Cherrapunji. However, Nick discovers even here, that during the dry season, there is water shortage and one entrepreneur has started selling it bottled. Finally his journey takes him to Dalol in Ethiopia known as the 'hell hole of creation' where the temperature remains at 94 degrees year round. Here Nick will join miners who work all day with no shade, limited water and no protective clothing. The book and series consider how and why people lives in these harsh environments. How does Nick's body react to these contrasting extremes? He looks at the geographical and meteorological conditions. He meets local characters and discovers the history of these settlements to find out how they ever became populated. He looks at the way both the population, and the flora and fauna, have adapted physically to the climate, and also considers the psychological impact of living under such conditions.
This is the third edition of well-received upper-level text by a leading soils geologist. The text discusses field applications such as the use of soils in recognizing climate change, estimating the age of geological deposits, and dealing with environmental problems such as acid rain. In this third revision Birkeland incorporates the considerable amount of new research that has taken place since the last edition in 1984, expands the sections on applications and paleosols, and adds new "how to" appendices on soil descriptions.
This text provides an overview of the physical and biological processes that shape California's rivers and watersheds. It introduces relevant basic principles of hydrology and geomorphology and applies them to an understanding of the differences in character of the state's many rivers. It then builds on this foundation by evaluating the impact on waterways of different land use practices-logging, mining, agriculture, flood control, urbanization, and water supply development. Water may be one of California's most valuable resources, but it is far from being one we control. In spite of channels, levees, lines and dams, the state's rivers still frequently flood, with devastating results. Almost all the rivers in California are dammed or diverted; with the booming population, there will be pressure for more intervention. The author argues that Californians know little about how their rivers work and, more importantly, how and why land-use practices impact rivers. The forceful reconfiguration and redistribution of the rivers has already brought the state to a critical crossroads. This text forces an evaluation of our use of the state's rivers and offers a foundation for participating in
This book is intended as a useful handbook for professionals and researchers in the areas of Physical Oceanography, Marine Geology, Coastal Geomorphology and Coastal Engineering and as a text for graduate students in these fields. With its emphasis on boundary layer flow and basic sediment transport modelling, it is meant to help fill the gap between general hydrodynamic texts and descriptive texts on marine and coastal sedimentary processes. The book commences with a review of coastal bottom boundary layer flows including the boundary layer interaction between waves and steady currents. The concept of eddy viscosity for these flows is discussed in depth because of its relation to sediment diffusivity. The quasi-steady processes of sediment transport over flat beds are discussed. Small scale coastal bedforms and the corresponding hydraulic roughness are described. The motion of suspended sand particles is studied in detail with emphasis on the possible suspension maintaining mechanisms in coastal flows. Sediment pickup functions are provided for unsteady flows. A new combined convection-diffusion model is provided for suspended sediment distributions. Different methods of sediment transport model building are presented together with some classical models.
'Groundwater Pumping Tests is a practical book details concepts, techniques, field work, case studies, and microcomputer models-information designed to improve accuracy and reliability. Too frequently, groundwater pumping test design and analysis ignore well storage capacity, delayed gravity yield, well partial penetration, and aquitard storativity impacts without proving them negligible. As a result, erroneous conclusions are reached concerning aquifer system hydraulic characteristics, boundaries, and discontinuities. Pumping test data often is filtered arbitrarily without adequate justification in attempts to match inappropriate aquifer models and field conditions. Antecedent water level trends and water level adjustments for changes in barometric pressure and surface water stages frequently are ignored in calculating drawdown and recovery. Finally, manual graphic analysis supplemented with microcomputer programs is, to an excessive extent, being replaced by fully automatic microcomputer analysis without critical examination of interpretative methods in program algorithms and their limitations. This book will focus needed attention on the facets mentioned above.
In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity's relationship with the land. Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, "What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down," Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example-water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey's words, "the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere."
South of Geneva, Switzerland, the River Aire runs across a plain that for centuries has been agricultural land. From the late 19th century, the waterway has been embanked for flood protection, also causing the gradual loss of habitat for a large variety of plants and animals. In 2001, decisions were taken to re-naturalise the river. Yet rather than to merely reconstruct its former natural bed, Superpositions, the association of firms commissioned with the project, applied 'topographic imagination', a method termed by American landscape designer Elissa Rosenberg. It combines the embanked channel with a newly designed pasture landscape. The channel indicates a work in progress and serves as a reference line that makes 'before' and 'after' traceable. This new book documents this much recognised, award-winning re-naturalisation project with drawings, images of construction work and of the new waterway. Essays and comments by international contributors Jean-Marc Besse, Lorette Coen, Gerorges Descombes, G. Mathias Kondolf, Elissa Rosenberg, Gilles A. Tiberghien, and Marc Treib demonstrate how the restored River Aire has been upgraded to become again a characteristic feature of this landscape on the fringe of the city. Text in English, French and German.
Significant changes are affecting coastlines around the world due to economic pressures and climate change. This book addresses the social, cultural and political context of the process of managed coastal realignment, the strategic abandonment of the coast, as a means of coping with these changes. With a specific focus on the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, Stuart Oliver analyses the cultural and social implications of managed retreat and proposes managed realignment as a practical way in which society can rethink itself, addressing the new realities of the environment and a move towards developing a more sustainable relationship with it.
The negotiation of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade agreement in 1985-88 initiated a period of substantially increased North American, and later, global economic integration. However, events since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 have created the potential for major policy shifts arising from NAFTA's renegotiation and continuing political uncertainties in the United States and with Canada's other major trading partners. Navigating a Changing World draws together scholars from both countries to examine Canada-U.S. policy relations, the evolution of various processes for regulating market and human movements across national borders, and the specific application of these dynamics to a cross-section of policy fields with significant implications for Canadian public policy. It explores the impact of territorial institutions and extra-territorial forces - institutional, economic, and technological, among others - on interactions across national borders, both within North America and, where relevant, in broader economic relationships affecting the movement of goods, services, people, and capital. Above all, Navigating a Changing World represents the first major study to address Canada's international policy relations within and beyond North America since the elections of Justin Trudeau in 2015 and Donald Trump in 2016 and the renegotiation of NAFTA.
A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Flooding has always threatened the rainy, wind-swept islands of the United Kingdom, but it is becoming more frequent and more severe. Combining travel writing and reportage with readings of history, literature and myth, Edward Platt explores the way floods have shaped the physical landscape of Britain and left their mark on its inhabitants. During the course of two years, which coincided with the record-breaking floods of the winter of 2013-14, Platt travelled around the country, visiting places that had flooded and meeting the people affected. He visited flooded villages and towns and expanses of marsh and Fen threatened by the winter storms, and travelled along the edge of the drowned plain that used to connect Britain to continental Europe. He met people struggling to stop their houses falling into the sea and others whose homes had been engulfed. He investigated disasters natural and man-made, and heard about the conflicting attitudes towards those charged with preventing them. The Great Flood dramatizes the experience of being flooded and considers what will happen as the planet warms and the waters rise, illuminating the reality behind the statistics and headlines that we all too often ignore.
Satellite Meteorology is the youngest and fastest growing branch of the science of meteorology and the present book traces its fascinating history, describes the current state of art, and envisions its potential and possibilities. The last decade has witnessed a significant improvement in the accuracy of short and medium range weather forecasting the world over, particularly in the tropics. Numerical weather prediction models seem to be taking over from synoptic meteorologists and may even be doing better. With the support of high power computers, numerical models have indeed become sophisticated and highly capable. However, it is undeniable that their recent success has been largely due to the real time assimilation of satellite data and products. Against the backdrop of these developments, revision of Satellite Meteorology had become overdue. The second edition retains the basic structure and style of previous edition but the updated content reflects more realistically the state of art in this ever-evolving field of science and technology. It incorporates the most recent factual and technical information, research results and references to the latest publications.
“Nowhere in the world do people hold mountains in so much regard as in Japan,” writes Fukada Ky?ya in the afterword to this book. “Mountains have played a part in Japanese history since the country's beginnings, and they manifest themselves in every form of art. For mountains have always formed the bedrock of the Japanese soul.” In One Hundred Mountains of Japan, Fukada pays tribute to his favourite mountains. Originating as a series of magazine articles about a personal selection of mountains, the work became an instant classic when it was first published in book form in 1964. More recently, Japan’s national broadcasting company has turned the original Nihon Hyakumeizan into a memorable TV series. Consisting of one hundred short essays, each celebrating one notable mountain and its place in Japan’s traditions, the book is an elegantly written eulogy to the landscape, literature and history that define a people. Fukada was bemused by his book’s success: “In the end, the one hundred mountains represent my personal choice and I make no claims for them beyond that.” Yet, half a century after he set down those words, his mountains have become an institution. Marked on every hiking map, his Hyakumeizan are today firmly embedded in the mountain traditions they grew out of. Now available in English translation, One Hundred Mountains of Japan will serve as a guide for a new cohort of hikers and mountaineers. It also opens up new territories for students of Japan’s literature, folklore, religions, and mountaineering history – in short, for mountain-lovers everywhere.
Janisse Ray was a babe in arms when a boat of her father's construction cracked open and went down in the mighty Altamaha River. Tucked in a life preserver, she washed onto a sandbar as the craft sank from view. That first baptism began a lifelong relationship with a stunning and powerful river that almost nobody knows. The Altamaha rises dark and mysterious in southeast Georgia. It is deep and wide bordered by swamps. Its corridor contains an extraordinary biodi-versity, including many rare and endangered species, which led the Nature Conservancy to designate it as one of the world's last great places. The Altamaha is Ray's river, and from childhood she dreamed of paddling its entire length to where it empties into the sea. "Drifting into Darien" begins with an account of finally making that journey, turning to medita-tions on the many ways we accept a world that contains both good and evil. With praise, biting satire, and hope, Ray contemplates transformation and attempts with every page to settle peacefully into the now. Though commemorating a history that includes logging, Ray celebrates "a culture that sprang from the flatwoods, which required a judicious use of nature." She looks in vain for an ivorybill woodpecker but is equally eager to see any of the imperiled species found in the river basin: spiny mussel, American oystercatcher, Radford's mint, Alabama milkvine. The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands. As in her groundbreaking "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood," Ray writes an account of her beloved river that is both social history and natural history, understanding the two as inseparable, particularly in the rural corner of Georgia that she knows best. Ray goes looking for wisdom and finds a river.
The Wadden Sea area of the North Sea is one which undergoes rapid morphological changes. Under natural conditions, the barrier islands would adjust themselves to a rising sea level. However, because the islands are densely populated and have an important role as holiday resorts, morphological changes are undesirable. Coastal engineering counter-measures have been undertaken to prevent beach erosion, shifting of tidal inlets, breaching of dune ridges and landward-directed washover. The natural processes and the results of human interference including the negative consequences of many of the measures are discussed in detail. The author presents the current state of research, together with the results of his own investigations. In addition, a comprehensive description of the geomorphological development and recent problems of the barrier islands from Texel to Fano is given for the first time. The book includes 40 colour photographs and 393 figures, almost all previously unpublished. Satellite and radar imagery as well as many aerial photographs are also included. The book is intended for geomorphologists, sedimentologists, environmentalists and all those with a scientific interest in tidal flats and barrier islands.
The proceedings of a symposium on Geomorphological Studies in Southern Africa, held in Transkei, on the 8-11 April 1988.
Contents: Alluvial history: Geology, groundwater hydrology, vegetation, soils & palaeoecology. Maps, figs., photos. |
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