Just over 50 years ago, a group of prominent marine scientists of their day agreed to begin work on a digest of existing knowledge on the Gulf of Mexico. The eff ort was proposed by Lionel A. Walford of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Waldo L. Schmitt of the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, during a meeting of the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute in Miami. Paul S.

Applications of concepts and methods of physics and chemistry to geology resulted in the field of Isotope Geochemistry which has revolutionized our understanding of our Earth system and our environment. When isotope techniques applied to understanding environmental changes that have taken place in the anthropocene, the resultant field can be defined as Environmental Isotope Geochemistry.

The search for minerals can be traced back for millennia and the search for petroleum for more than a century. Despite this difference, the early days of both relied on clear surface manifestations of the commodities sought in the near-subsurface. Over the course of time, countless gossans and oil seeps have acted as the spur for the discovery of resources at depth.

Extractive metallurgy is that branch of metallurgy that deals with ores as raw material and metals as finished products. It is an ancient art that has been transformed into a modem science as a result of developments in chemistry and chemical engineering. The present volume is a collective work of a number of authors in which metals, their history, properties, extraction technology, and most important inorganic compounds and toxicology are systematically described.