Recent environmental problems and natural disasters have given cause for increasing concern over the future habitability of our planet. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a clear understanding of the Earth's past evolution can provide the key to its possible future development. The Earth: Its Birth and Growth explores the evolution of the Earth over 4.6 billion years using basic reasoning and simple illustrations to help explain the underlying physical and chemical principles and major processes involved.

Geomagnetism has always been at the forefront among the various branches of geophysics. At the end of the 16th century William Gilbert determined that the Earth is a big magnet, implying that it has a magnetic field; in the 1830s Carl Friedrich Gauss was able to formulate a procedure to measure the field completely and analyzed its characteristics with the spherical harmonic analysis, a method still used in the era of satellites and computers. Nevertheless, as recently as in the sixties, geophysics textbooks devoted only a thin chapter to geomagnetism, and limited their discussion mostly to prospecting methods, while many geologists’ curriculum practically left it out altogether. The essential contribution provided by the study of ocean floor magnetic anomalies and by paleomagnetism in the development of global tectonic models, made geomagnetism popular in the geological community, which nonetheless continued, and still continues, to view it as a highly specialist discipline. <...>

Storage is indispensable to the operation of the gas sector, since consumption, which is strongly influenced by weather, is seasonal and supply is relatively inflexible. Storing gas thus helps to avoid oversized extraction and transportation infrastructures, as well as to limit excessive price fluctuations.

Seasonal gas storage allows to inject gas during the summer, when demand is low, and to withdraw it during the winter, when demand increases. Given this pattern, storage capacity is usually measured by the amount of working gas that can be used throughout the year.1 Storage also helps gas suppliers to face unpredictable demand fluctuations, including peak-days requirements exceeding the average winter consumption. Daily demand fluctuations can be dealt with storage inside pipelines, known as linepack and traditionally provided by the network operator. <...>

By measuring the degree of flattening and the orientation of the c-axis of single quartz grains in a naturally deformed ("cleaved") sandstone, Becker (1995) showed that: "quartz grains with a small angle between c-axis and the Z-axis of shortening exhibit the least amount of pressure solution, whereas grains with c-axes oriented at about 50° to Z manifest the highest degree of pressure solution". I briefly present some experimental results that show exactly the same. <...>