Development and use of polymeric materials in the form of geosynthetics and fibres as a new class of construction materials have revolutionized the infrastructure and the environmental protection works in the construction industry during the past three to four decades. Geosynthetics are available in a wide range of compositions appropriate to different applications and environments.

Natural hazards are potentially damaging physical events and phenomena, which may cause the loss of life, injury or human life disruption, property damage, social, economic, and political disruption, or environmental degradation. Natural disasters cause fear and horror for people. The most unpredictable is earthquakes.  Active volcanoes are constantly monitored that gives the possibility to anticipate a possible eruption. Tsunamis have a number of predictive features that give possibility to mitigate their consequences.

Geology today demands the knowledge of a large number of fundamental ideas which are provided by neighboring sciences. The student, or the geologist at the beginning of his career, runs the risk of losing himself in a multitude of details and complications, which will seldom be useful to him. To guide him, we have endeavored to prepare a work which is easy to read, not overburdened with tables and graphs, and which avoids swamping the reader with all the details of many specialized disciplines. Our aim is to stress the general facts and to bring out the conclusions which will enable the reader to reconstruct the great events that have taken place in the past on the surface of the earth. <...>

This edited volume compiles the state of the art in research on the geological record of tsunamis and other extreme-wave events and guides the reader in designing goaland site-specific research. It has evolved from an initial idea, first explored by the editors in early 2016, to final publication online and in print in mid-2020. The motivation for developing a handbook-type compendium on this topic was driven by the observation that such a unifying volume devoted to this particular discipline, which lies at the crossroads between sedimentology and tsunami science, was missed by the scientific community.

This work attempts to present the geology of Svalbard in some detail, arranged systematically as a definitive study and so reflecting the present conjuncture of research. It may thus meet the needs of specialists with information on related fields or of any geoscientist wanting an indication of what is known about this key region. Spitsbergen (peaked mountains), the name earlier referred to the whole archipelago. It is now replaced by the name Svalbard (cold coasts), within which Spitsbergen is the principal landmass. Spitsbergen alone is about the size of Switzerland and the whole archipelago a little less than the area of Scotland.

WILSON, M., NEUMANN, E.-R., DAVIES, G. R., TIMMERMAN, M. J., HEEREMANS, M. & LARSEN, B. T. Permo-Carboniferous magmatism and rifting in Europe: introduction

NEUMANN, E.-R., WILSON, M., HEEREMANS, M., SPENCER, E. A., OBST, K., TIMMERMAN, M. J. & KIRSTEIN, L. Carboniferous-Permian rifting and magmatism in southern Scandinavia, the North Sea and northern Germany: a review
TIMMERMAN, M. J. Timing, geodynamic setting and character of Permo-Carboniferous magmatism in the foreland of the Variscan Orogen, NW Europe
HEEREMANS, M., FALEIDE, J. I. & LARSEN, B. T. Late Carboniferous-Permian of NW Europe: an introduction to a new regional map
PRAEG, D. Diachronous Variscan late-orogenic collapse in response to multiple detachments: a view from the internides in France to the foreland in the Irish Sea