Deformation processes in minerals, ceramics and rocks / Деформационные процессы в минералах, керамике и горных породах

Most of the chapters comprising this monograph are based on oral presentations delivered at the meeting held in London in April 1987, to which we refer in the Preface. The additional contributions were judged to be needed in order to make the monograph more comprehensive and self-sufficient. In particular, there are two overviews written by the individual editors, which are intended to give the necessary frameworks and references to relevant previous work in the two broad and rather poorly defined fields of fracture and ductile deformation, respectively. These overviews by Meredith and Barber also give limited introductions to current problems in these fields and provide links to and between the contributed chapters, which are also grouped under these headings. 
The contributors represent a fairly wide cross-section of Earth and materials scientists, who are concerned with various aspects of the deformation of nonmetals, whether to do with theory, experimental testing, or naturally occurring deformation, and who address problems concerned with solids ranging from single mineral phases to rocks, synthetic aggregates, ceramics, etc. The term ‘deformation processes’ embraces a very large spectrum of régimes, size scales, and timescales (earthquakes and plate tectonics are extreme examples), and no monograph based on a two-day meeting can hope to be fully comprehensive or even representative of present-day research activity in this diverse field. However, we concentrate on the microprocesses and micromechanisms which can be important in controlling events on much larger scales, and endeavour to illustrate both the current state of the art and some of the problems that remain to be solved.  <...>