Three decades ago, the first edition of Physical Geology by Plummer and McGeary was published. Twenty years later, Diane Carlson became a coauthor as David McGeary phased into retirement. Now, after ten more years, Lisa Hammersley joins the team for this, the 13th edition. As you may see from the brief biography at the end of this preface, Dr. Hammersley expands the diversity and expertise of the team of authors. The three authors were born and raised in Mexico (Plummer), northern Wisconsin (Carlson) and England (Hammersley). They have worked in geology in Alaska, Antarctica, Washington Cascades mountains, northeastern Washington, Idaho, Utah, Montana, on Ice Island T-3 in the Arctic Ocean, Mexico, the Andes (Peru and Ecuador), and California’s Sierra Nevada. <...>

What is the quality of the sample and assay data? Am I confident enough in my data to be able to make a potentially costly decision? These are the types of questions which should be asked when dealing with assay data.

QGIS is a crossing point of the free and open source geospatial world. While there are a great many tools in QGIS, it is not one massive application that does everything, and it was never really designed to be that from the beginning. It is rather a visual interface to much of the open source geospatial world. You can load data from proprietary and open formats into spatial databases of various flavors and then analyze the data with well-known analytical backends before creating a printed or web-based map to display and interact with your results. What’s QGIS’s role in all this? It’s the place where you check your data along the way, build and queue the analysis, visualize the results, and develop cartographic end products. This learning path will teach you all that and more, in a hands-on learn-by-doing manner. Become an expert in QGIS with this useful companion. <...>

This document gives guidelines for taking duplicate measurements by in-situ analytical instruments, or collecting duplicate samples for analysis in the mobile field laboratory, to assess random errors originating from sampling and analytical procedures, and to estimate the uncertainty of measurements. Since, NORISC is dealing with the assessment of contamination of small-size areas within cities, and relies mainly on in-situ analytical methods, a cost-effective technique, using robust analysis of variance for the estimation of necessary quality control parameters, and measurement uncertainty, is explained with examples <...>