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Seismic anisotropy is ubiquitous at both the microscopic and macroscopic scales. The goal of this multidisciplinary book is to introduce students and more advanced scientists to seismic anisotropy at different scales, from the microscopic (0.1 nanometer) scale to the Earth (1000 kilometre) scale, and to improve the reader's understanding of all active Earth processes. Drawing on both mineral physics and seismology, it presents the different geological, mineralogical, and geodynamical applications of seismic anisotropy, and argues that an understanding of seismic anisotropy is necessary to interpret all seismic, geophysical, petrological, and geological data This volume is an invaluable for graduate students and research scientists in seismology/geophysics, and will be of considerable interest to geophysicists working in petroleum exploration/production and to mineral physicists and researchers in geodynamics and fluid flow in rocks. With an overview of the main recent advances in research, it also provides the perfect starting point for further research.
Climate change will increase the occurrence of floods in cities and open areas. As well as the widely documented social and economic impacts of floods, these events can also have a significant and long-lasting impact on water quality. This multidisciplinary edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of floods on water quality, with chapters written by experts on water chemistry, water management, flood risk management, and urban engineering and planning. It presents global case studies, ranging from Australia and Canada to India and China, and includes contributions by scholars from Asia, Latin America, and Europe. It evaluates precautionary measures, such as the need for early warning systems to predict pluvial flood events, and practical solutions involving urban drainage, in the context of the needs of different regions. This book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and professionals working in water management, environmental engineering and urban flooding.
Providing a new approach to Earth history, this engaging undergraduate textbook highlights key episodes in the history of our planet and uses them to explain the most important concepts in geology. Rather than presenting exhaustive descriptions of each period of geological time, this conceptual approach shows how geologists use multiple strands of evidence to build up an understanding of the geological past, focusing on exciting events like the extinction of the dinosaurs and the formation of the Grand Canyon and the Himalaya. Beginning with an introduction to geology, tectonics, and the origin of the Universe, subsequent chapters chronicle defining moments in Earth history in an accessible narrative style. Each chapter draws on a variety of sub-disciplines, including stratigraphy, paleontology, petrology, geochemistry, and geophysics, to provide students who have little or no previous knowledge of geology with a broad understanding of our planet and its fascinating history.
Explore the concept of risk through numerous examples and their statistical modeling, traveling from a historical perspective all the way to an up-to-date technical analysis. Written with a wide readership in mind, this book begins with accounts of a selection of major historical disasters, such as the North Sea flood of 1953 and the L'Aquila earthquake. These tales serve to set the scene and to motivate the second part of the book, which describes the mathematical tools required to analyze these events, and how to use them. The focus is on the basic understanding of the mathematical modeling of risk and what types of questions the methods allow one to answer. The text offers a bridge between the world of science and that of everyday experience. It is written to be accessible to readers with only a basic background in mathematics and statistics. Even the more technical discussions are interspersed with historical comments and plentiful examples.
World leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century. However, little progress has been made in implementing policies to address climate change. In Climate Uncertainty and Risk, eminent climate scientist Judith Curry shows how we can break this gridlock. This book helps us rethink the climate change problem, the risks we are facing and how we can respond to these challenges. Understanding the deep uncertainty surrounding the climate change problem helps us to better assess the risks. This book shows how uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process. It provides a road map for formulating pragmatic solutions. Climate Uncertainty and Risk is essential reading for those concerned about the environment, professionals dealing with climate change and our national leaders.
Isostasy is a simple concept, yet it has long perplexed students of geology and geophysics. This fully updated edition provides the tools to better understand this concept using a simplified mathematical treatment, numerous geological examples, and an extensive bibliography. It starts by tracing the ideas behind local and regional models of isostasy before describing the theoretical background, the observational evidence. It now also includes an exploration of the role of flexure in landscape evolution and dynamic topography and discussions of lithosphere memory, inheritance, and new NASA mission topography and gravity data. The book concludes with a discussion of flexure's role in understanding the evolution of the surface features of the Earth and its neighboring planets. Intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of geology and geophysics, it will also be of interest to researchers in gravity, geodesy, sedimentary basin formation, mountain building and planetary geology.
Data Science for the Geosciences provides students and instructors with the statistical and machine learning foundations to address Earth science questions using real-world case studies in natural hazards, climate change, environmental contamination and Earth resources. It focuses on techniques that address common characteristics of geoscientific data, including extremes, multivariate, compositional, geospatial and space-time methods. Step-by-step instructions are provided, enabling readers to easily follow the protocols for each method, solve their geoscientific problems and make interpretations. With an emphasis on intuitive reasoning throughout, students are encouraged to develop their understanding without the need for complex mathematics, making this the perfect text for those with limited mathematical or coding experience. Students can test their skills with homework exercises that focus on data scientific analysis, modeling, and prediction problems, and through the use of supplemental Python notebooks that can be applied to real datasets worldwide.
With the increasing prevalence of big data and sparse data, and rapidly growing data-centric approaches to scientific research, students must develop effective data analysis skills at an early stage of their academic careers. This detailed guide to data modeling in the sciences is ideal for students and researchers keen to develop their understanding of probabilistic data modeling beyond the basics of p-values and fitting residuals. The textbook begins with basic probabilistic concepts, models of dynamical systems and likelihoods are then presented to build the foundation for Bayesian inference, Monte Carlo samplers and filtering. Modeling paradigms are then seamlessly developed, including mixture models, regression models, hidden Markov models, state-space models and Kalman filtering, continuous time processes and uniformization. The text is self-contained and includes practical examples and numerous exercises. This would be an excellent resource for courses on data analysis within the natural sciences, or as a reference text for self-study.
Many contemporary problems within the Earth sciences are complex, and require an interdisciplinary approach. This book provides a comprehensive reference on data assimilation and inverse problems, as well as their applications across a broad range of geophysical disciplines. With contributions from world leading researchers, it covers basic knowledge about geophysical inversions and data assimilation and discusses a range of important research issues and applications in atmospheric and cryospheric sciences, hydrology, geochronology, geodesy, geodynamics, geomagnetism, gravity, near-Earth electron radiation, seismology, and volcanology. Highlighting the importance of research in data assimilation for understanding dynamical processes of the Earth and its space environment and for predictability, it summarizes relevant new advances in data assimilation and inverse problems related to different geophysical fields. Covering both theory and practical applications, it is an ideal reference for researchers and graduate students within the geosciences who are interested in inverse problems, data assimilation, predictability, and numerical methods.
Python is one of the most popular programming languages, widely used for data analysis and modelling, and is fast becoming the leading choice for scientists and engineers. Unlike other textbooks introducing Python, typically organised by language syntax, this book uses many examples from across Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth science, and Engineering to teach and motivate students in science and engineering. The text is organised by the tasks and workflows students undertake day-to-day, helping them see the connections between programming tools and their disciplines. The pace of study is carefully developed for complete beginners, and a spiral pedagogy is used so concepts are introduced across multiple chapters, allowing readers to engage with topics more than once. “Try This!” exercises and online Jupyter notebooks encourage students to test their new knowledge, and further develop their programming skills. Online solutions are available for instructors, alongside discipline-specific homework problems across the sciences and engineering.
What causes Ice Ages? How did we learn about them? What were their affects on the social history of humanity? Allan Mazur's book tells the appealing history of the scientific 'discovery' of Ice Ages. How we learned that much of the Earth was repeatedly covered by huge ice sheets, why that occurred, and how the waning of the last Ice Age paved the way for agrarian civilization and, ultimately, our present social structures. The book discusses implications for the current 'controversies' over anthropogenic climate change, public understanding of science, and (lack of) 'trust in experts'. In parallel to the history and science of Ice Ages, sociologist Mazur highlights why this is especially relevant right now for humanity. Ice Ages: Their Social and Natural History is an engrossing combination of natural science and social history: glaciology and sociology writ large.
Over 15,000 years ago, a band of hunter-gatherers became the first people to set foot in the Americas. They soon found themselves in a world rich in plants and animals, but also a world still shivering itself out of the coldest depths of the Ice Age. The movement of those first Americans was one of the greatest journeys undertaken by ancient peoples. In this book, David Meltzer explores the world of Ice Age Americans, highlighting genetic, archaeological, and geological evidence that has revolutionized our understanding of their origins, antiquity, and adaptation to climate and environmental change. This fully updated edition integrates the most recent scientific discoveries, including the ancient genome revolution and human evolutionary and population history. Written for a broad audience, the book can serve as the primary text in courses on North American Archaeology, Ice Age Environments, and Human evolution and prehistory.
Deliberative democracy is well-suited to the challenges of governing in the Anthropocene. But deliberative democratic practices are only suited to these challenges to the extent that five prerequisites - empoweredness, embeddedness, experimentality, equivocality, and equitableness - are successfully institutionalized. Governance must be: created by those it addresses, applicable equally to all, capable of learning from (and adapting to) experience, rationally grounded, and internalized by those who adopt and experience it. This book analyzes these five major normative principles, pairing each with one of the Earth System Governance Project's analytical problems to provide an in-depth discussion of the minimal conditions for environmental governance that can be truly sustainable. It is ideal for scholars and graduate students in global environmental politics, earth system governance, and international environmental policy. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.
This volume addresses current concerns about the climate and environmental sustainability by exploring one of the key drivers of contemporary environmental problems: the role of status competition in generating what we consume, and what we throw away, to the detriment of the planet. Across time and space, humans have pursued social status in many different ways - through ritual purity, singing or dancing, child-bearing, bodily deformation, even headhunting. In many of the world's most consumptive societies, however, consumption has become closely tied to how individuals build and communicate status. Given this tight link, people will be reluctant to reduce consumption levels – and environmental impact -- and forego their ability to communicate or improve their social standing. Drawing on cross-cultural and archaeological evidence, this book asks how a stronger understanding of the links between status and consumption across time, space, and culture might bend the curve towards a more sustainable future.
Carbon plays a fundamental role on Earth. It forms the chemical backbone for all essential organic molecules produced by living organisms. Carbon-based fuels supply most of society's energy, and atmospheric carbon dioxide has a huge impact on Earth's climate. This book provides a complete history of the emergence and development of the new interdisciplinary field of deep carbon science. It traces four centuries of history during which the inner workings of the dynamic Earth were discovered, and documents extraordinary scientific revolutions that changed our understanding of carbon on Earth forever: carbon's origin in exploding stars; the discovery of the internal heat source driving the Earth's carbon cycle; and the tectonic revolution. Written with an engaging narrative style and covering the scientific endeavours of more than a hundred pioneers of deep geoscience, this is a fascinating book for students and researchers working in Earth system science and deep carbon research.
In this book, Sander Van der Leeuw examines how the modern world has been caught in a socio-economic dynamic that has generated the conundrum of sustainability. Combining the methods of social science and complex systems science, he explores how western, developed nations have globalized their world view and how that view has led to the sustainability challenges we are now facing. Its central theme is the co-evolution of cognition, demography, social organization, technology and environmental impact. Beginning with the earliest human societies, Van der Leeuw links the distant past with the present in order to demonstrate how the information and communications technology revolution is undermining many of the institutional pillars on which contemporary societies have been constructed. An original view of social evolution as the history of human information-processing, his book shows how the past offers insight into the present, and can help us deal with the future. This title is also available as Open Access.
On the centenary of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, this book reviews the state-of-the-art research in geomagnetism, aeronomy and space weather. Written by eminent researchers from these fields, it summarises the advances in research over the past 100 years, and looks ahead to current and emerging studies on Earth's magnetic field. It provides a comprehensive overview of the generation of Earth's magnetic field, its history and its response to external forces. Starting at the centre of the Earth, the reader is taken on a journey from the interior core and mantle, through the upper atmosphere and magnetosphere, before reaching the Sun's atmosphere and corona. The applications of this research are also discussed, particularly the societal impact of solar activity on critical infrastructures in our increasingly technologically dependant society. This book provides a valuable resource and reference to academic researchers and students in geomagnetism and aeronomy.
This book evaluates the global response to climate change from a cosmopolitan justice perspective. Going above and beyond existing studies, Dietzel neatly illustrates that climate justice theory can be used to normatively assess and compare both state (multilateral) and non-state (transnational) climate change governance – or, in other words, that theory and practice can be bridged. Investigating the role of states, cities, corporations, and non-governmental organisations in the post-Paris Agreement era, Dietzel provides fresh insight into the 'big picture' of climate change (mis)management and the injustices that come along with it. These insights allow her to make recommendations for change that should be of keen interest to climate justice scholars and climate governance practitioners alike.
How do scientists impact society in the twenty-first century? Many scientists are increasingly interested in the impact that their research will have on the public. Scientists likewise must answer the question above when applying for funding from government agencies, particularly as part of the 'Broader Impacts' criterion of proposals to the US National Science Foundation. This book equips scientists in all disciplines to do just that, by providing an overview of the origins, history, rationale, examples, and case studies of broader impacts, primarily drawn from the author's experiences over the past five decades. Beyond including theory and evidence, it serves as a 'how to' guide for best practices for scientists. Although this book primarily uses examples from the NSF, the themes and best practices are applicable to scientists and applications around the world where funding also requires impacts and activities that benefit society.