THE PERIGLACIAL ENVIRONMENT (second edition) by Hugh M. French, Longman, No. of pages: 341. Price: £22.99. ISBN 0-582-30536-5.
The second edition of this long-established text was certainly worth waiting for. The book has not only been updated, but the presentation is modernized, with clearer line drawings, many new diagrams and photographs, and new chapters on cryogenic weathering, applied aspects of periglacial geomorphology, landscape evolution, and the potential impacts of global warming. The text is aimed at undergraduates in geography and geology, but will also be valuable to engineering students concerned with construction in permafrost. Each chapter is prefaced by a summary, and ends with a series of discussion topics. The book is divided into four parts: Part 1 describes the periglacial domain; Part 2, present-day periglacial environments and processes; Part 3, Pleistocene periglacial environments; and Part 4, applied aspects.
Chapter 1 discusses concepts and processes relating to the periglacial zone, its definition and general character. This is followed by a chapter on periglacial landscapes in which the author emphasizes that many periglacial areas have been recently glaciated and illustrates the effects of prolonged periglacial climates with reference to one upland and one lowland area in the never-glaciated region of northern Canada. Chapter 3, the final chapter in Part 1, reviews the range and complexity of periglacial climates. Soil freezing processes and cryogenic physical and chemical rock weathering are discussed in Chapter 4. The next chapter is concerned with permafrost and discusses thermal conditions, definitions, distributions, surface features, hydrology, hydrogeology and hydrochemistry. The bias towards arctic permafrost in the author's research experience is clear, with relatively little space given to mountain permafrost phenomena. Ground ice is discussed in Chapter 6, beginning with an outline of cryostratigraphic description and leading the reader through the classification, character and origin of ground ice phenomena. Inevitably, this chapter relies heavily on the considerable literature available from the Canadian arctic.
The nature of the active-layer and active-layer processes, such as frost heave of soil and bedrock, frost sorting, thaw BOOK REVIEWS