Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 General analytical methods
- 3 Grain and crystal sizes
- 4 Grain shape
- 5 Grain orientations: rock fabric
- 6 Grain spatial distributions and relations
- 7 Textures of fluid-filled pores
- 8 Appendix: Computer programs for use in quantitative textural analysis (freeware, shareware and commercial)
- References
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 General analytical methods
- 3 Grain and crystal sizes
- 4 Grain shape
- 5 Grain orientations: rock fabric
- 6 Grain spatial distributions and relations
- 7 Textures of fluid-filled pores
- 8 Appendix: Computer programs for use in quantitative textural analysis (freeware, shareware and commercial)
- References
- Index
Summary
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac NewtonNewton's ‘Ocean of Truth’ seems to me more like a landscape: the plains are densely populated with information and most researchers work there. It is not easy to get a perspective on such a mass of information without climbing the surrounding hills. Valleys in the mountains may be difficult to find, and sparsely populated, but some lead to new basins of information ready to be explored. Other valleys may be so deep that we can glimpse what they contain, but cannot explore them closely, or even at all. This book is a guide to a country set in that landscape. Like real countries, its name varies according to who you ask, and the borders do not always follow geographic features. And like most travel writers, my description of the landscape is coloured by where I come from and what I have done.
Petrological methods
In petrology we generally examine the results of natural experiments and have to tackle the inverse problem of what happened to what starting material to produce the rock that we observe.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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