Recent expeditions to East Greenland, under the leadership of Dr. Lauge Koch, have succeeded in bringing back collections of the greatest importance from many localities and from many formations; but, at least in so far as the invertebrate remains are concerned, there are few to rival in interest and beauty of preservation the Upper Jurassic am ­monite faunas of Cape Leslie.

The extraction of fossil fuels and mineral resources has grown exponentially since the early 20th century and far from decelerating, it is expected to increase in the coming decades. “The Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972) already alerted that if demand of metals and fossil fuels maintained the same trend, mankind would sooner or later be close to collapse. The book provoked a strong controversy between those that considered that the Earth was plentiful of non-renewable resources (technooptimists) and those who believed in the need for a rational management of the planetary mineral endowment.

The concentration of production of rare earth elements (REEs) outside the United States raises the important issue of supply vulnerability. REEs are used for new energy technologies and national security applications. Is the United States vulnerable to supply disruptions of REEs? Are these elements essential to U.S. national security and economic well-being?
There are 17 rare earth elements (REEs), 15 within the chemical group called lanthanides, plus yttrium and scandium. The lanthanides consist of the following: lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium. Rare earths are moderately abundant in the earth’s crust, some even more abundant than copper, lead, gold, and platinum.

This work investigates the permissibility and viability of property rights on the celestial bodies, particularly the extraterrestrial aspects of land and mineral resources ownership. In lay terms, it aims to find an answer to the question “Who owns the Moon?”

Er dankt seinen passenden Namen dem weissen Kalke, welcher die Schale meist gänzlich zerstörte, und einen bleichen Steinkern zurfickliess, der Bich schon in dieser Gestalt von allen anderen Petrefacten auf das Leichteste unterscheidet. Nur die Siphonalh&lle und der zugehörige Aptychus haben sich erhalten, man meint, der Stickstoffgehalt sei daran schuld.

Derselbe erreicht wohl die doppelte Mächtigkeit des Lias, und hat bezüglich seiner Thone, Kalke und Sandsteine noch grosBe Verwandtschaft damit. Daher wurden früher seine untern Glieder a und ß noch allgemein zum Lias gezählt, bis L. v. B uch ans dem terrassenförmigen Aufsteigen der OpoWnus-Thone, das gleich beim Kloster Banz am Main am Westrande der fränkischen Alp über den Gefilden der JurmsisMergel so augenfällig wird, erkannte, dass hier ein wichtiger Abschnitt gemacht werden müsste, was ich denn in meinem „Flözgebirge Würtembergs* weiter zu begründen suchte.

The current approach to the study of the origin of life and to the search for life elsewhere is based on two assumptions. First, life is a purely physical phenomenon closely linked to specific environmental conditions. From this, we hypothesise that when these environmental conditions are met, life will arise and evolve. If these assumptions are valid, the search for life elsewhere should be a matter of mapping what we know about the range of environments in which life can exist, and then simply trying to find these environments elsewhere. Second, life can be clearly distinguished from the non-living world.

This memoir reports on the geology and mineral resources of about 220 000 km2 of ground, roughly the size of the island of Great Britain, constituting almost the sum total of what is loosely called here the ‘Bolivian shield’: that part of the Precambrian Brazilian Shield lying in Bolivia (Figure 1). The area lies in the Bolivian departments of Santa Cruz and Beni and is bounded to the north and east by Brazil.

This planet contains so much water that perhaps it should have been better named Oceania. It is the only known body in the solar system that is surrounded by water filled with unique geologic structures and teeming with a staggering assortment of marine life. Some of the strangest creatures on Earth, whose ancestors go back several hundred million years, live on the deep ocean floor.

The ancients observed and collected rocks that fell from the sky. There are reports of the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Japanese, and the natives of North America and other countries collecting them, using them for trade, and putting them in places of importance such as tombs. Modern-age research on such objects opened with the pioneering work of Howard and Bournon (Fig. 1.1).