In 1992, the first conference on Braided Rivers was held at the Geological Society of London (Best & Bristow, 1993). It sought to bring together a wide range of practitioners, primarily sedimentologists, geomorphologists and engineers, to review the state-of-the-art in research, and discuss common problems and future research directions.

Uranium is a trace element in the earth’s crust. Because of its low content and uneven distribution, the abundance of uranium in the earth’s crust varies greatly. The general value is on the order of parts per million (10−6), while the highest value can reach 10−4. Although it may seem that the content of uranium is minor, In fact, it is higher than that of tungsten, mercury, silver, and other familiar metals, being even thousands of times higher than that of gold!

Every day we walk across its surface, admiring its variety of plants, animals, and landscapes. Earth has taken billions of years to evolve into the planet we now inhabit. This volume examines this long history, from Earth’s origins in a cloud of gas and dust to its place as a planet teeming with life. It addresses questions that scientists have long debated:

Die Erde, der Mond und einige andere Himmelskörper sind aus Gesteinen aufgebaut. Gesteine sind aus meist mehreren Mineralen geformt und können daher als Mineralaggregate beschrieben werden. Minerale bestehen aus einem Element (z.B. Silber, Kupfer) oder einer chemischen Verbindung (z.B. Halit, NaCl) und aus einem festen, kristallinen, symmetrischen Körper, d.h. sie weisen eine Kristallstruktur mit regelmäßig angeordneten Atomen, Ionen oder Molekülen auf. Minerale sind auf natürliche Weise im Erdkörper gewachsen – und wurden durch einen geologischen Prozess gebildet.

Kashmir valley is a northwest-southeast directed, Neogene-Quaternary tectonic basin in the NW Himalaya. Due to the active tectonic set-up in and around this basin, this region has been struck by various destructive earthquakes (Ambraseys and Douglas, 2004). The October 8, 2005 Kashmir earthquake (Mw 7.6) was the most recent earthquake that shook the region.

The landforms of Austria are the direct consequence of a continuous interplay between tectonic and climatic forces that have built, destroyed and reshaped the surface of the most iconic mountain belt on Earth for almost 40 Million years. As such, landforms can only be understood with a thorough geological background. This paper gives an overview of the tectonic evolution, the geological build up and the landscape evolution in the Austrian territory. The tectonic evolution of the rocks forming the major tectonic units of Austria can be traced back to some 500 Million years when they were located at different ancient continents including Gondwana, Avalonia and Laurasia. In the late Palaeozoic, the basement rocks were affected by the Variscan tectonometamorphic event during amalgamation of the supercontinent Pangaea and by a Permian extensional event.