Carbonate aquifers are an important source of water throughout the world. They are complicated systems and not always easy to interpret. Caves and channels form in the rock, leading to complex flow pathways and unpredictable contaminant behaviour. This volume covers the range of techniques used to analyse groundwater flow and contaminant transport in carbonate aquifers. The book opens with a review of thoughts and methods, and continues by discussing the use of tracers, hydrograph and hydrochemograph evaluation, estimation of aquifer properties from outcrop studies, numerical simulation, analogue simulation, and 3-D visualization of conduits. Other papers address the critical evaluation of matrix, fracture and conduit components of flow and storage. An understanding of these approaches is important to engineers or hydrogeologists working in carbonate aquifers.

John E. Mylroie and Ira D. Sasowsky' Caves occupy incongruous positions in both our culture and our science. The oldest records of modem human culture are the vivid cave paintings from southern France and northern Spain, which are in some cases more than 30,000 years old (Chauvet, et ai, 1996). Yet, to call someone a "caveman" is to declare them primitive and ignorant. Caves, being cryptic and mysterious, occupied important roles in many cultures. For example, Greece, a country with abundant karst, had the oracle at Delphi and Hades the god of death working from caves. People are both drawn to and mortified by caves. Written records ofcave exploration exist from as early as 852 BC (Shaw, 1992). In the decade of the 1920's, which was rich in news events, the second biggest story (as measured by column inches of newsprint) was the entrapment of Floyd Collins in Sand Cave, Kentucky, USA. This was surpassed only by Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic (Murray and Brucker, 1979).

This book is for geoscience researchers and students with interests in climate change, paleohydrology, and sedimentology. "Studies of Cave Sediments" is unique in that it is the first comprehensive volume on cave sediments, provides case-studies from around the world, gives guidance on appropriate applications of techniques, and their limitations, synthesizes methods that can be used to decipher complex deposits, and includes chemical deposits (speleothems) as well as clastic sediments.