Earthfire; the eruption of mount st helens by Charles Rosenfeld and Robert Cooke. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983. No. of pages: 155. Price: £20.00
✍ Scribed by P. E. Baker
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 174 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0072-1050
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✦ Synopsis
The book is one of several general physical geology textbooks written by American authors with an American audience in mind. The field covered by the books tends to be rather similar and very broad in coverage. This book has 20 chapters which cover the major features of earth structure: geological time; igneous rocks, ore bodies and processes of emplacement; metamorphic rocks; physical processes at the earths surface; planetary geology; and the role of geology in m'ety. Most chapters are readable and present the topic in a stimulating manner. For anyone who requires a book which will give the 'feel' of geology, this book is to be recommended.
Many British University courses have a considerable formal element so that a general physical geology book will only provide background reading. A simple example from Sanders book is the section on Geology and Geologic Time (Chapter 3). This is an interesting account of the historical development of our understanding of the geological time span, which is then illustrated by three examples, one is the Grand Canyon, a second is the Mississippi Delta, and the third is the Great Spokane Flood (an example of catastrophic events). This is valuable and stimulating but it neglects to describe how formal stratigraphic units are used to record relative time which is a basic element of geology. In spite of being six hundred pages long, most topics are treated fairly superficially. This is not a criticism, it is the consequence of the breadth of coverage.
I have some reservations about the organization of the book. Plate tectonics provides such a helpful structure to many of our,observations of phenomena that it seems worthwhile using it as a framework instead of briefly mentioning it in Chapter 1 and explaining the principles in more detail in Chapter 18.
Nearly all the illustrations are useful, the line diagrams are well presented and the photographs well produced. At f 11.15 it is good value for a book which is well written and well produced.