The second edition of The Chemistry of Soils, published in 2008, has been used as a main text in soil-science courses across the world, and the book is widely cited as a reference for researchers in geoscience, agriculture, and ecology. The book introduces soil into its context within geoscience and chemistry, addresses the effects of global climate change on soil, and provides insight into the chemical behavior of pollutants in soils. Since 2008, the field of soil science has developed in three key ways that Sposito addresses in this third edition. For one, research related to the Critical Zone (the material extending downward from vegetation canopy to groundwater) has undergone widespread reorganization as it becomes better understood as a key resource to human life. Secondly, scientists have greatly increased their understanding of how organic matter in soil functions in chemical reactions. Finally, the study of microorganisms as they relate to soil science has significantly expanded. The new edition is still be comprised of twelve chapters, introducing students to the principal components of soil, discussing a wide range of chemical reactions, and surveying important human applications. The chapters also contain completely revised annotated reading lists and problem sets.

The Environmental Chemistry of Aluminum provides a comprehensive, fundamental account of the aqueous chemistry of aluminum within an environmental context. An excellent reference for environmental chemists and scientific administrators of environmental programs, this book contains material reflecting the many recent changes in this rapidly developing discipline.
The first three chapters discuss the most fundamental aspects of aluminum chemistry: its quantitation in soils and natural waters, including speciation measurements, and its stable chemical forms, both as a dissolved solute and in a solid phase. These chapters emphasize both critical assessments of and definitive recommendations for laboratory methodologies and measured thermodynamic properties relating to aluminum chemistry.
The next four chapters in The Environmental Chemistry of Aluminum build on this foundation to provide details of the polymeric chemistry of aluminum: its polynuclear and colloidal hydrolytic species in aqueous solution, its complexes with natural organic ligands, including humic substances, and its role as an adsorptive and adsorbent in surface reactions. These chapters are grounded in experimental results rather than conceptual modeling.
The final three chapters describe the chemistry of aluminum in soils, waters, and watersheds. These chapters illustrate the problems of spatial and temporal variability, metastability, and scale that continue to make aluminum geochemistry one of the great challenges in modern environmental science.

Whether processes in the natural world are dependent or independent of the scale at which they operate is one of the major issues in hydrologic science. In this volume, leading hydrologists present their views on the role of scale effects in hydrologic phenomena occurring in a range of field settings, from the land surface to deep fractured rock. Self-contained and thought-provoking chapters cover both theoretical and applied hydrology. They provide critical insights into important topics such as general circulation models, floods, river networks, vadose zone processes, groundwater transport, and fluid flow through fractured media. This book is intended as an accessible introduction for graduate students and researchers to some of the most significant questions and challenges that will face hydrologic science in the twenty-first century.

There have been many advances in soil chemistry since Oxford published the first edition of The Chemistry of Soils in 1989 (RTD: 6,747). The physical-chemistry approach to soil chemistry taken in the book, groundbreaking for its time, has been adopted by nearly every soil chemistry book published since. This book offers a thorough update of all topics covered in the previous edition. In the last 16 years, soil chemistry as a discipline has assumed major significance in connection with global climate change. The 2nd edition addresses the emergent issue of global climate change by exploring the interaction between organic carbon and soil. The largest repository of organic carbon on earth is still soil, and the process by which organic carbon is sequestered by soil, thus preventing the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is one of the proper concerns of soil chemistry. Thus, the revision provides a rigorous discussion of soil chemistry in its broader environmental and biogeochemical contexts

Whether processes in the natural world are dependent or independent of the scale at which they operate is one of the major issues in hydrologic science. In this volume, leading hydrologists present their views on the role of scale effects in hydrologic phenomena occurring in a range of field settings, from the land surface to deep fractured rock. Self-contained and thought-provoking chapters cover both theoretical and applied hydrology. They provide critical insights into important topics such as general circulation models, floods, river networks, vadose zone processes, groundwater transport, and fluid flow through fractured media. This book is intended as an accessible introduction for graduate students and researchers to some of the most significant questions and challenges that will face hydrologic science in the twenty-first century.

This book covers the development of both experiment and theory in natural surface particle chemistry. It emphasizes insights gained over the past few years, and concentrates on molecular spectroscopy, kinetics, and equilibrium as they apply to natural particle surface reactions in aqueous media. The discussion, divided among five chapters, is complemented by lengthy annotations, reading suggestions, and end-of-chapter problem sets that require a critical reading of important technical journal articles.

This book clearly illustrates the limitations of using chemical thermodynamics to describe chemical phenomena in soils--especially with regard to kinetics and molecular mechanisms--and proposes that the quantitative description of soils is not complete without adequate characterization of the rates of the chemical reactions. The author, a renowned authority in the field, focuses on reactions in the soil solution and considers aqueous phase properties. He also cogently draws distinctions between thermodynamic chemical species and kinetic chemical species. This critical introduction to the use of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics for describing reactions in the soil solution will appeal not only to professionals but to students as well.