International Tables for Crystallography started life in in 1935 as a two-volume set entitled Internationale Tabellen zur Bestimmung von Kristallstrukturen, with C. Hermann as editor. We are now in the third series, with eight volumes covering all aspects of crystallography from symmetry to macromolecular crystallography. However, there has always been one glaring omission and one that has become increasingly serious: powder diffraction. This is odd: powder crystallography started as early as 1916 with the seminal work of Debye and Scherrer, and has grown to include quantitative and semi-quantitative analysis, structure solution and refinement, two-dimensional data, comprehensive databases, clustering, and microstructural properties, and is applied to a wide range of problems of both academic and industrial interest.

The Gulf of Mexico Basin is one of the best-known and most highly explored petroleum basins in the world. The literature on the basin is enormous and continues to grow each year. The deep-water part of the basin is now one of the most prolific new provinces in the world, and it is the continued focus for oil and gas exploration. Here the industry leads the world in the application of modern drilling and production techniques.

The technique of rock blasting has within recent years developed from a mere manual occupation in which long-time experience, personal skill and intuition havo played a dominating part, into a technical science in which the fundamental concepts can be taught to students, engineers and workers. The aim of the present book is to provide an introduction to this technology as it has been built up in mining and civil engineering in the post-war years through research, theoretical investigations, field tests and full scale application. 

The central geological properties of a shale gas play are generally assessed in terms of depositional environment, thickness, organic geochemistry, thermal maturity, mineralogy, and porosity. The key features of successful shale gas plays include high total organic carbon (TOC) content (>2%), thermally mature (Ro 1.1–1.5%), shallow for the given maturity, and a low clay content/high brittle mineral content.

With the rapid development of the national economy, China’s demand for energy continues growing, and the contradiction between oil and gas supply and demand has become increasingly prominent. From a net exporter of crude oil in 1993 to an importer, China’s demand for crude oil import has increased year by year as domestic demand continues growing. In 2007, China’s net crude oil imports were 15928
104 t, a year-on-year increase of 14.7%. The external dependence of crude oil reached 46.05%. According to the forecast, like crude oil, natural gas will have a supply gap in recent years. CBM is an unconventional natural gas resource-rich and less developed in China. The total resource of CBM with a depth of less than 2000 m in China is 32.86
1012 m3 , of which the technically recoverable resource is 13.90
1012 m3

The Canary Islands Archipelago, offshore of the northwestern coast of Africa, originated from ocean-island volcanism over a span of 20 million ears. This 600-km-long chain of islands (total population *2 million), with their beautiful volcanic landscapes, beaches, and year-round mild climate, receives more than 12 million visitors each year. The prime tourist destination is Teide Volcano on the Island of Tenerife, the centerpiece of Teide National Park and the focus of this scientific volume. In 2010, Teide National Park was the most heavily visited national park of any European country and the second most visited worldwide.

Compared to entire continents, islands are miniature worlds with discrete ecologies that are both more vulnerable to environmental disruption and more fertile as incubators of biological innovation. This book offers excursions to a dozen ancient islands caught in geologic time with relationships exceptionally preserved among fossil plants and animals in the context of the coastal settings they once inhabited.

It is an old wisdom that metals are indispensable for life. Indeed, several of them, like sodium, potassium, and calcium, are easily discovered in living matter. However, the role of metals and their impact on life remained largely hidden until inorganic chemistry and coordination chemistry experienced a pronounced revival in the 1950s. The experimental and theoretical tools created in this period and their application to biochemical problems led to the development of the field or discipline now known as Bioinorganic Chemistry, Inorganic Biochemistry, or more recently also often addressed as Biological Inorganic Chemistry. By 1970 Bioinorganic Chemistry was established and further promoted by the book series Metal Ions in Biological Systems founded in 1973 (edited by H.S., who was soon joined by A.S.) and published by Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York, for more than 30 years. After this company ceased to be a family endeavor and its acquisition by another company, we decided, after having edited 44 volumes of the MIBS series (the last two together with R.K.O.S.) to launch a new and broader minded series to cover today’s needs in the Life Sciences. Therefore, the Sigels’ new series is entitled <...>