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Books > Earth & environment > Earth sciences > Geology & the lithosphere > Geological surface processes (geomorphology) > General
Ocean Hotspots provides a comprehensive overview of recent and ongoing research on intraplate volcanism in the ocean basins with special emphasis on the Pacific Ocean. The geology of the seamounts and their associated seamount chains is described, along with detailed geophysical, geochemical and hydrothermal observations made by a multi-disciplinary group of marine geoscientists. These observations lead to a deeper understanding of how the ascending mantle melts, represented by hotspots, are able to penetrate the lithosphere, build seamounts, and enhance hydrothermal circulation. The "fixed" hotspot-generated seamount chains also provide key constraints on plate tectonic reconstructions on the Earth's crust.
Antarctica, the sixth continent, was discovered more than 160 years ago. Since then this large, mysterious continent of ice and penguins has attracted world interest. Scientific expeditions from various countries have begun to study the geographical and natural conditions of the icy continent. Systematic and comprehensive inves tigations in the Antarctic started in the middle of our century. In 1956 the First Soviet Antarctic Expedition headed to the coast of Antarctica. Their program included studies of the atmosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere. Thirty years have since passed. Scientists have unveiled many secrets of Antarctica: significant geophysical processes have been investigated, and a large body of new information on the Antarctic weather, Southern Ocean hydrology and Antarctic glaciers has been obtained. We can now claim that the horizons of polar geo physics, oceanology, and particularly glaciology, have expanded. Scientific inves tigators have obtained new information about all Antarctic regions and thus have created the opportunity to use the Antarctic in the interests of mankind."
Deserts are parts of the Earth that receive little or no rain; 25 cm or less per year. The physical processes that act upon these parched lands are vastly different from those that shape the more humid parts of the terrestrial landmasses. In the desert, wind is a major agent of erosion and transportation. As the results of recent space missions have indicated, this is also true in the case of the planet Mars. Thus, our understanding of desert processes sheds light on fundamental planetary processes that may apply on any planetary body that is enveloped by a windy atmosphere. An understanding of the physical layout of arid lands, and the nature of processes that initiate changes therein is also fundamental to thoughtful utilization of these lands for the benefit of mankind. It is with this in mind that we prepared this book for publication. We believe that the collection of articles in this book will be useful to scientists who are interested in desert landforms and processes, and to planners of economic develop ment of arid lands. The book also serves as a guide for students as to the state of our knowledge in this field as well as to the topics that require additional research."
This is a detailed description of the steps leading from raw signals measured in space, to calibrated comparable long term data sets, to its final form: useful information for user communities. Examples of applications and data validations result from different investigations in the Mediteranean area. An appendix summarizes useful formulas of the evaluation of satellite data.
Coastal Lowlands by virtue of their position across the boundary of land and sea belong to the earth's most dynamic systems. This is true in the physical, i. e. geological and biological, as much as in the cultural and social sense. Although the nearness to the sea was and still is fraught with danger coastal lowlands have always attracted human interest, providing challenging opportunity, holding the promise of profitable enterprise. Coastal lowlands, especially where rivers enter the region, are the cradles of great civilisations and there, of old, populations reached highest densities. As an example, Dutch history is a tale of human struggle and endeavour with and against the sea. Dutch 'low landers' wrestled their land from the sea, in turn the sea forged a nation of independent fishermen, navigators, farmers and traders who built their towns and ships at the borders of the North and Zuyder Seas. As lowlands subside and sea level rises, apparently these days at an increasing rate, concern about this environment world-wide is also rising. It certainly was appropriate and timely for the Royal Geological and Mining Society of the Netherlands when celebrating its 75th birthday to organize and call together a symposium, focussing attention on the geology and geotechnology of coastal lowlands; geology to better understand their formation and evolution, geotechnology to better manage and harvest resources as much as protect a unique and crucial environment.
Global warming, melting polar caps, rising sea levels and intensifying wave-current action, factors responsible for the alarming phenomena of coastal erosion on the one hand and adverse environmental impacts and the high cost of 'hard' protection schemes, on the other, have created interest in the detailed examination of the potential and range of applicability of the emerging and promising category of 'soft' shore protection methods. 'Soft' methods such as beach nourishment, submerged breakwaters, artificial reefs, gravity drain systems, floating breakwaters, plantations of hydrophylous shrubs or even dry branches, applied mostly during the past 20 years, are recognised as possessing technical, environmental and financial advantageous properties deserving more attention and further developmental experimentation than has occured hitherto. On the other hand, 'hard' shore protection methods such as seawalls, groins and detached breakwaters, artefacts borrowed from port design and construction technology, no matter how well designed and well implemented they may be, can hardly avoid intensification of the consequential erosive, often devastating, effects on the down-drift shores. Moreover, they often do not constitute environmentally and financially attractive solutions for long stretches of eroding shoreline. Engineers and scientists practising design and implementation of shore defence schemes have been aware for many years of the public demand for improved shore protection technologies. They are encouraging efforts that promise enrichment of those environmentally sound and financially attractive methods that can be safely applied.
Soil formation is related to the nature of landforms on which that formation takes place. The nature of the soil affects some of the processes shaping the landforms and which cause landscape change. An accurate assessment of the evolution of landforms and of the patterns of soil formation is possible only if the interdependence of soils and landforms is recognized. This book provides an integration of geomorphology and pedology to fully assess this relationship. After an opening chapter outlining the approach adopted, specific chapters examine the relationships between soil formation and specific suites of landform assemblages. The highly influential catena concept is followed by an analysis of soil within drainage basins, on erosion surfaces, flood plains, river terraces, coastal plains, glacial and fluvioglacial landforms, deserts and periglacial landforms. The concluding chapter addresses the way in which soils can be used to assess major phases in landscape evolution. Undergraduate students and lecturers in geography or soil sciences will find this a valuable interdisciplinary introduction to soil geomorphology.
A wide variety of problems are associated with the flow of shallow water, such as atmospheric flows, tides, storm surges, river and coastal flows, lake flows, tsunamis. Numerical simulation is an effective tool in solving them and a great variety of numerical methods are available. The first part of the book summarizes the basic physics of shallow-water flow needed to use numerical methods under various conditions. The second part gives an overview of possible numerical methods, together with their stability and accuracy properties as well as with an assessment of their performance under various conditions. This enables the reader to select a method for particular applications. Correct treatment of boundary conditions (often neglected) is emphasized. The major part of the book is about two-dimensional shallow-water equations but a discussion of the 3-D form is included. The book is intended for researchers and users of shallow-water models in oceanographic and meteorological institutes, hydraulic engineering and consulting. It also provides a major source of information for applied and numerical mathematicians.
This book is an engineering guide for design of slopes and stabilisation works in rocks and residual soils. It is tailored to the practising geotechnical engineer and engineering geologist. Engineering and engineering geology students will find it quite useful and a practical course guide. It can be used as textbook in courses on landslides and slope stabilisation. The book's purpose is to present a concise documentation on how to design slopes and how to select a slope stabilisation method. The authors were selected among those who have lots of experience in their field.
Few scientists doubt the prediction that the antropogenic release of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to some warming of the earth's climate. So there is good reason to investigate the possible effects of such a warming, in dependence of geographical and social economic setting. Many bodies, governmental or not, have organized meetings and issued reports in which the carbon dioxide problem is defined, reviewed, and possible threats assessed. The rate at which such reports are produced still increases. However, while more and more people are getting involved in the 'carbon dioxide business', the number of investigators working on the basic problems grows, in our view, too slowly. Many fundamental questions are still not answered in a satisfactory way, and the carbon dioxide building rests on a few thin pillars. One such fundamental question concerns the change in sea level associated with a climatic warming of a few degrees. A number of processes can be listed that could all lead to changes of the order of tens of centimeters (e. g. thermal expansion, change in mass balance of glaciers and ice sheets). But the picture of the carbon dioxide problem has frequently be made more dramatic by suggesting that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is unstable, implying a certain probability of a 5 m higher sea-level stand within a few centuries."
In the course of a decade's work on the mountains of East Africa, I met some of the most wonderful people on Earth. It is impossible to record all those who have helped me in this study in one way or other. Glacier research in East Africa has some history. Nearly half a century ago, Carl Troll completed the first detailed mapping of Lewis Glacier. I had the good fortune of exchanging ideas with him at his home in Bonn in 1974, shortly before his death. Paul C. Spink, Ulceby, North lincolnshire, England, shared with me his photographs and observations on Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya in the 1940s. When I joined the University of Nairobi in 1973, several members of the 1957-58 IGY Mc)Unt Kenya :Expedition were still there. I received generous advice and help from Igor Loupekine, John Loxton, but especially from Robert A. Caukwell and Frank Charnley. Their continuous coopera- tion was a great encouragement over the years. Heinz Loeffler, University of Vienna, informed me about the depth of Lewis Tarn. Helmut Heuberger, University of Munich, provided me data on his measurements of glacier terminus positions. Peter Gollmer of Geosurveys and Alan Root, Nairobi, gave me aerial photographs of Kibo f~om the early 1970s. I acknowledge support from various other colleagues at the University of Nairobi: Raouf Rostom of the Department of Surveying and Photogrammetry; Neville Skinner of the Department of Physics; G. C. Asnani, John Ng'anga, J. K.
The purpose and scope of this book on theoretical glaciology is outlined in the Introduction. Its aim is to study the theoretical aspects of'ice mechanics' and the 'dynamics of ice masses in a geophysical environment. For the mature reader, the book can serve as an introduction to glaciology. How ever, this is not what I would regard as advisible. Glaciology is an inter disciplinary science in which many special scientific disciplines play their part, from descriptive geography to fairly abstract mathematics. Advance ment will evolve from a merger of two or more branches of scientific specialization. In the last 20 years, several researchers in different fields of glaciology have written books emphasizing the aspects of their specialities and I have listed some which are known to me at the end of the Introduction. When glancing through these books, one recognizes that the mathematical aspects of glaciology are generally glossed over and, to date, there seems to be nothing available which concentrates on these. Therefore, I have written this book in an effort to close the gap and no apologies are offered for the mathematical emphasis. Rather, I believe that this neglect has, to a certain extent, aggra vated progress in the modelling of glaciology problems."
The authors have synthesized 16 years of geological and geophysical studies which document an 85-km-wide impact crater buried 500 m beneath Chesapeake Bay in south eastern Virginia, USA. In doing so, they have integrated extensive seismic reflection profiling and deep core drilling to analyze the structure, morphology, gravimetrics, sedimentology, petrology, geochemistry, and paleontology of this submarine structure. Of special interest are a detailed comparison with other terrestrial and extraterrestrial craters, as well as a conceptual model and computer simulation of the impact. The extensive illustrations encompass more than 150 line drawings and core photographs. An accompanying CD-ROM includes selected seismic profiles, scaled cross sections, detailed maps, and downhole geophysical logs.
Of huge relevance in a number of fields, this is a survey of the different processes of soil clay mineral formation and the consequences of these processes concerning the soil ecosystem, especially plant and mineral. Two independent systems form soil materials. The first is the interaction of rocks and water, unstable minerals adjusting to surface conditions. The second is the interaction of the biosphere with clays in the upper parts of alteration profiles.
Glaciers or ice sheets are natural accumulations of ice possessing in trinsic motion, which have appeared on the Earth's land surface as a result of the accumulation and transformation of precipitation 2]. Only a very small portion of the surface of the land is now covered by glaciers, and at low latitudes they are found justat high elevations, on mountain slopes. However, glaciers are known to play very important roles in shaping the topography of the Earth, in determiningits past, present, and future climate, and in creating the state of the world Ocean. Recently there has also been a marked increase in the practical value of our knowledge about glaciers, as a part of the human habitat and as a factor affecting the economy. Interest in glaciers on other planets is also growing. Voyages of spacecraft to Jupiter, for instance, have shown that some Jovian satellites possess ice sheets tens of kilometers in thickness."
This publication deals with soil erosion and sedimentation. Soil erosion and associated sediment deposition are natural landscape-forming processes that can be greatly accelerated by human intervention through deforestation, overgrazing, and non-sustainable farming practices. Soil erosion and sedimentation may not only cause on-site degradation of the natural resource base, but also off-site problems- downstream sediment deposition in fields, floodplains and water bodies, water pollution, eutrophication and reservoir siltation, etc. -with serious environmental and economic impairment. There is an urgent need for accurate information to quantify the problem and to underpin the selection of effective soil-conservation technologies and sedimentation-remediation strategies, including assessment of environmental and economic impacts. Existing classical techniques to document soil erosion are capable of meeting some of these needs, but they all possess important limitations. The quest for alternative techniques for assessing soil erosion, to complement existing methods, directed attention to the use of environmental radionuclides, in particular fallout as tracers to quantify rates and establish patterns of soil redistribution within the landscape. The concept of a project on the use of environmental radionuclides to quantify soil redistribution was first formulated at an Advisory Group Meeting convened in Vienna, April 1993, by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The main objective of this research is to investigate the governing processes and characteristics that drive morphodynamic evolution in alluvial estuaries by application of a process-based numerical model (Delft3D). It is of utmost importance to understand estuarine processes so that impact of human interference (like dredging and land reclamation) and long-term changes (like sea level rise) can be evaluated. The research addresses a number of cases ranging from an rectangular basins to real estuaries like the Western Scheldt in the Netherlands or San Pablo Bay in California. The more schematized approach allow to study morphodynamic evolution over several millennia under constant forcing and answers more fundamental questions related to conditions of equilibrium and related time scales. The more realistic cases give insight into the skill of the approach in predicting decadal morphodynamic developments. More processes are included to mimic realistic conditions and model results are compared to bathymetric measurements over the last century. The research shows that the modeling approach is good capable of describing stable morphodynamic calculations over a timescale of millennia with patterns similar to patterns observed in reality. Additionally, the approach shows that it is possible to predict decadal morphodynamic developments in real estuaries with significant skill.
Several important developments in our understanding of the chemistry of weathering have occurred in the last few years: 1. There has been a major breakthrough in our understanding of the mechanisms controlling the kinetics of sil icate dissolution, and there have been major advances in computer modeling of weathering processes. 2. There has been a growing recognition of the importance of organic solutes in the weathering process, and hence of the inter-relationships between mineral weathering and the terrestrial ecosystem. 3. The impact of acid deposition ("acid rain") has been widely recognized. The processes by which acid deposition is neutral ized are closely related to the processes of normal chemical weathering; an understanding of the chemistry of weathering is thus essential for predicting the effects of acid deposition. 4. More high-qual ity data have become available on the chemical dynamics of smal I watersheds and large river systems, which represent the integrated effects of chemical weathering.
Recent landslide events demonstrate the need to improve landslide
forecasting and early warning capabilities in order to reduce
related risks and protect human lives. In this thesis, local and
regional investigations were carried out to analyse landslide
characteristics in the Swabian Alb region, and to develop
prototypic landslide early warning systems.
This thesis includes a wealth of cave maps, as well as photos of the caves and karst morphologies. At the heart of the thesis is the important discovery of a flank margin cave with speleothem hiatuses and fossil invertebrate associations. The analysis of the structural and karst morphological elements surveyed in the main explored caves in Monti di Capo San Vito has made it possible to identify both the state of control of the processes of karstification in tectonic phases during the Plio-Pleistocene upliftings and the kinematic character of some karstified structures, linked at two speleogenetic phases. Furthermore, the surveying of karst forms on the relict sea-cliffs and particularly the exceptional discovery and dating of marine and continental incrustations in the Rumena cave, has yielded essential advances in our knowledge of past climatic events and eustatic level changes in the Mediterranean, as well as their influence on the evolution of the coastal belt.
This Routledge Revivals set makes available for the first time
as a collection the first three volumes of The History of the Study
of Landforms or the Development of Geomorphology, the
groundbreaking and definitive study in geomorphology compiled by
Richard J. Chorley, Robert P. Beckinsale and Antony J. Dunn. Volume 1 (1964) dealt with contributions to the field up to 1890. Volume 2 (1973) dealt with the concepts and seminal contributions of William Morris Davis and Volume 3 (1991) treats historical and regional themes during the 'classic' period of geomorphology, between 1890 and 1950.
This re-issue, first published in 1964, is the first of a seminal series analysing the development of the study of landforms, from both the geographical and geological point of view, with especial emphasis upon fluvial geomorphology. Volume 1 treats the subject up to the first important statement of the cycle of erosion by W. M. Davis in 1889, and attempts to identify the most significant currents of geomorphic thought, integrating them into the broader contemporary intellectual frameworks with which they were associated. As well as dealing with such key figures as Werner, De Saussure, Hutton, Playfair, Buckland, lyell, Agassiz, Ramsay, Dana, Peschel, Powell, Gilbert and Davis, attention is also given to many less important contributions by American, British and continental workers. A spirited biographical treatment, attractively set off by contemporary portraits, diagrams and sketches, will make this book of great interest to the historian of science, and indeed to the general reader, as well as to the student and scholar in geomorphology, hydrology and any other earth science.
"Geosciences, Environment and Man" has three major objectives, which determine the division in three parts of this volume: I. To consider the main natural geological processes interfering with and therefore threatening the activities of man: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, land movements, floods, wind and coastal risks; main prevention and mitigation measures against these natural hazards are presented. II. To examine the exploitation of earth's natural resources such as materials, ores and minerals, fossil fuels, water, radioactivity, and the resulting consequences on solid Earth balance and future. III. To assess the hold level reached by the activities of man on planet surface envelopes through agriculture, urbanization, industrialization, and communication; the local to global effects of human influence triggered by recent demographic growth on underground, soils, water and air characters are taken into account. Both deteriorating and beneficial aspects of Earth - the interactions of man are emphasized, as well as mitigation or restoration measures and perspectives.
Riverbank filtration is a low cost, yet efficient water treatment technology. It has most potential to provide safe drinking water to large cities located along rivers or lakes. In particular, it is ideal for large population centres in developing countries, where the cost of building extensive treatment facilities is prohibitive. Water filtration can be successfully implemented using naturally occurring sand and gravel along the river/lake banks. The cost of water produced by this means is much lower than that of water treated in conventional treatment plants. Authored by a multi-disciplinary team of experts, this volume addresses the scientific basis of the filtration process, and also numerous topics of importance for the planning, technical realization, and security of such plants. Their application for the removal of relevant chemical pollutants and a variety of pathogens is analysed in detail. |
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