For many years, planetary science has been taught as part of the astronomy curriculum, from a very physics-based perspective, and from the framework of a tour of the Solar System – body by body. Over the past decades, however, spacecraft exploration and related laboratory research on extraterrestrial materials have given us a new understanding of planets and how they are shaped by geologic processes.

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.

Geomathematics provides a comprehensive summary of the mathematical principles behind key topics in geophysics and geodesy, covering the foundations of gravimetry, geomagnetics, and seismology. Theorems and their proofs explain why physical realities in geoscience are the logical mathematical consequences of basic laws.

Today the term plate tectonics is not only familiar to scientists, it is entering everyday language and finding its way into dictionaries. The resulting transformation of the way in which we regard the Earth has brought about a reappraisal of the vast accumulation of information about the surface of the Earth collected by geographers, geologists, oceanographers and others over the centuries, reviewing and reinterpreting that information in the comprehensive new framework provided by the new plate tectonic concept. But more than that, this revolution has brought about a change of approach in the scientific study of the Earth. No longer is geology a secondrate descriptive science-it has joined forces with the physical sciences in a new and more cohesive whole to which the term Earth sciences is now so much more appropriate. <...>

Based on the behavior of the asthenosphere, the rifting is driven by passive and active rifting components (Sengör and Burke, 1978; Figure 1.2), which are understood as rather end-members of the natural rift types driven by the mixture of these components (see, e.g., Huismans, 1999; Davis and Kusznir, 2002; Manatschal, 2004; Huismans and Beaumont, 2005; Simon and Podladchikov, 2006).

Every day there are about fifty earthquakes worldwide that are strong enough to be felt locally, and every few days an earthquake occurs that is capable of damaging structures. Each event radiates seismic waves that travel throughout Earth, and several earthquakes per day produce distant ground motions that, although too weak to be felt, are readily detected with modern instruments anywhere on the globe.

This volume represents the final contribution of the International Geological Correlation Program Project 260 'Earth's Glacial Record'. The project was active from 1987 until 1991. It succeeded IGCP Project 24 'Quaternary Glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere', and Project 38 'Pre-Pleistocene Tillites'. Thus, its goal was to promote further research on glaciations, whatever their age and location, and to encourage geologists working in Modern or Quaternary sequences and those working on Pre-Pleistocene rocks to share their experience and different approaches. In this way we hoped to emphasize and illuminate global aspects of glacial phenomena in addition to facies description and regional problems.

The purpose of this book is to introduce civil and environmental engineering students – and those active in engineering – to the fundamental principles of the earth sciences as they affect their practice. In particular, this book is intended for the use of geotechnical and geoenvironmental students and those in that practice. Hopefully, the reader will come to appreciate the complex problems that exist in engineering practice in a geological environment and find them intellectually rewarding.

At the time the first edition of Rock Mechanics and Engineering was being printed, important progress was being made both in theory and practice of rock mechanics. Some new advances were analysed in an 'Appendix' to the book, which is now incorporated, with the necessary additions, in the relevant chapters of the second edition. New developments of the new Austrian tunnelling method (NATM) and similar methods caused the important chapter on underground power-stations to be rewritten, and several new chapters to be added. <...>

It was a total disaster: tens of millions of yards of lava flowed down the volcano’s lower slopes and into the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In January of 2002, fissures opened along the southern flanks of Nyiragongo volcano, draining a lava lake and unleashing the massive lava flow. After damaging 14 villages on the volcano’s slopes, lava flowed down Goma’s broad main street; commercial buildings served as the molten river’s banks as it moved at a walking pace. Within hours, lava flows reached the airport, covered most of the runway, and severely disrupted the ongoing United Nations relief effort for war refugees from Rwanda. <...>