The time traveller was becoming despondent. Here she was, 2.7 billion years back in time, and she had spent most of the day flying over a flat, featureless plane. True, some hours back, she had passed over a chain of fiery stratovolcanoes strung out along the margin of the continent, no doubt marking the trace of an active subduction zone.

It is often useful to estimate obscured or missing remotely sensed data. Traditional interpolation methods, such as nearest-neighbor or bilinear resampling, do not take full advantage of the spatial information in the image. An alternative method, a geostatistical technique known as indicator krigingo is described and demonstrated using a Landsat Thematic Mapper image in southern Chiapas, Mexico. The image was first classified into  pasture and nonpasture land cover. For each pixel that was obscured by cloud or cloud shadow, the probability that it was pasture was assigned by the algorithm. An exponential omnidirectional variogram model was used to characterize the spatial continuity of the image for use in the kriging algorithm. Assuming a cutoff probability level of 50%, the error was shown to be 17% with no obvious spatial bias but with some tendency to categorize nonpasture as pasture (overestimation). While this is a promising result, the method's practical application in other missing data problems for remotely sensed images will depend on the amount and spatial pattern of the unobscured pixels and missing pixels and the success of the spatial continuity model used. <...>

II conte Enrico Fossa Mancini nacque a Jesi (AN) il 7 dicembre 1884' da Eugenio e Margherita Censi, discendente da nobile famiglia originaria di Arcevia (AN). Compiuti gli studi liceali classici si laured in Giurisprudenza presso l’Universita di Perugia nel 1907 (Frenguelli, 1950; Radice, 1950; Herrero, 1953; Urbani 1992 e 1993). Nel 1909, a Roma, contrasse matrimonio con Caterina Isabella Fabri di S. Vittoria in Matenano (AP), figlia del conte Luigi. Studio poi Fisica all’Universita di Roma, (1909-1910), per trasferirsi infine all’Universita di Pisa (1910-1913), dove consegui la laurea in Scienze Naturali. All’Universita di Pisa Fossa Mancini ebbe tra i suoi maestri il Prof.

This laboratory manual is based on our collective 70-plus years of teaching and coordinating introductory geology courses. Those experiences have helped us understand not only how students best learn geologic principles, but also how to stimulate their engagement with the material to enhance their learning process. Our manual provides (1) an up-to-date, comprehensive background that addresses the hands-on tasks at the core of any introductory geology course; (2) patient stepby-step explanations that are more easily understood by students than those in textbooks; (3) text and exercises that lead students to think like geologists, engaging them in solving real-life problems important to their lives; and (4) the passion and excitement that we still feel after decades as teachers and geologists.