Preface
Steve Sparks and Chris Hawkesworth    
Foreword
Masaru Kono    
The Earth's Core: An Approach From First Principles C. David Price, D. Alfe, L. Vodadlo, and M.J. Gillan    
Modeling the Earth's Dynamo Cary A. Clatzmaier, Darcy E. Ogden, and Thomas L. Clune    
Core-Mantle Boundary Structures and Processes Thorne Lay and Edward J. Garnero    
Seismological Insights Into Fleterogeneity Patterns in the Mantle B. L. N. Kennett    
Geophysical and Geochemical Models of Mantle Convection: Successes and Future Challenges Yanick Ricard and Nicolas Coltice    

For centuries, people had picked up huge bones in the ground and puzzled over their origins. In some parts of the world, they were thought to be the remains of legendary dragons, sea monsters, or Cyclopes. On the Greek island of Samos, the numerous large bones were thought to be the remains of Amazon warrior women who had died in battle. (We now know they are the remains of elephants, giraffes, antelopes, cattle, hyenas, and other mammals that were abundantly fossilized there.)

The area to he described consists of two irregularly elongate outcrops of Lower Carboniferous sedimentary rocks in the counties of Tyrone, Fermanagh, and Donegal; the larger southern outcrop, covering 148 square miles, extends from Lough Erne in the west to the Strule Valley in the east; the northern outcrop, about 30 square miles in extent, lies about six miles north of the southern outcrop.

Geologists have long maintained that their discipline differs strikingly from chemistry and physics in being historical. There has been almost no explicit consideration by geologists, however, of the particular methodological problems imposed by the historical dimension. Historians and philosophers, on the other hand, have considered the problems of historical method at great length, and in recent years there has been, it seems, an increased interest in the methodology and philosophy of history. It is my purpose here to consider the extent to whieh the issues raised in recent discussions of explanation in human history are pertinent to the problem of explanation in historical geology. Because paleontology presents special methodological problems that I shall later discuss in detail (see pp. 148-70), Ihave omitted at this point any consideration of geological explanations containing paleontological concepts. <...>