The purpose of this book is to recount the lives and achievements of some of the great geologists and geomorphologists who have studied the Jurassic Coast, England’s only natural World Heritage Site, and have made it the Mecca that it has become for all those interested in Earth Science since the late seventeenth century. We classify these individuals into six groups: the earliest investigators, the fossil collectors, the geologists of the so-called Golden Age, the geological mappers, gifted stratigraphers and palaeontologists, and remarkable amateurs and some other stars.

The main geological results of exploration by the British Petroleum Company Limited since 1945 are outlined, and the general basis of operations described.
In the south of England new data emphasize the progressive development of the Wealden area as a Jurassic depositional basin, on a surface of mainly Devonian and Carboniferous rocks. In the East Midlands and West Yorkshire more information on the relation of Carboniferous basins is now available, and extensive occurrences of contemporary and intrusive basic igneous rocks are described.

Precambrian Belt Basin of Northwestern United States: Its Geometry, Sedimentation and Copper Occurrences Jack. E. Harrison
Heat Flow and Continuous Seismic Profiles in the Cayman Trough and Yucatan Basin  A.J. Erickson, С.E. Helsley, and G. Simmons
Coarse Sediment Transport by Flood Flows on Knik River, Alaska W.C. Bradley, R.K. Fahnestock, and E. T. Rowehamp
Chemical and Mineralogical Variations during Prograde Metamorphism, Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina and Tennessee G. C. Allen and P. C. Ragland
Palynological Evidence Bearing on the Ordovician—Silurian Paraconformity in Ohio  J. Gray and A. J. Boucot
Sediments of the Continental Margin off the Eastern United States  J.D. Milliman, О.H. Pilkpy, and D.A. Ross

The great classical tectcnicians, such as Suess, Argand and Wegener, att empted (0 und erstand. without the benefi t of the plate tecto nic theory. the workings of the Ea rth engine as a who le, and the part that deformation played in that who le. In my student days, I deri ved great pleasure and benefit from De Sitter's textbook on str uctural geology where the study of geo logical structures and major Earth structure received more or less equal rreatment. Since then, until relatively recently, there has been a tendency for str uctu ral geology to become more parochial and inward-looking, despite the enormous advances in understand ing that the plate tectonic revolutio n has brought abo ut. I have longfelt the need, therefo re, for a bo ok tha t would give students a tectonic overview in which geo logical structures and deformation could be seen in their context as byproducts of the plate tectonic system <...>