No comments about Crustal Heat Flow: A Guide to Measurement and Modelling.

No comments about Igneous Petrology.

2 comments about Soils and Geomorphology.

1. I read this book for one of my graduate courses. Totaly this is a good book for people who know about soil science, but the weakness of this book is using too much terms which are not explained in this book. So, if you do not have a very good back ground in geology, it will be difficult for you to understand some parts of this book and you need a geology dictionary to read this book.



2. The process is pedogenesis and this book will tell you what you want to know. I'm using this book in a class I am taking and I would recommend it to anyone who is seriously thinking about wanting to understand soils in a more geomorphologic and geologic perspective. Not a light read, but definitely not a traditional textbook either. The extensive references section will also help to lead you in other directions you may wish to take in order to find more on specific studies and research papers.

No comments about Basic Exploration Geophysics.

2 comments about Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life.

1. This book could as easily have been titled "Is the Sky Blue?" And the answer to that is yes and no.
   Gotz Hoeppe, a German science journalist, points out that the sky near the horizon, if clear, is whitish not blue.
   So when a child asks her father, "Daddy, why is the sky blue?" one answer could be: Take a closer look.
   A longer, yet still incomplete, answer would be: Light from the sun hits viruses and molecules of gas in the atmosphere and is reflected as blue light. The sky itself -- mostly nitrogen and oxygen -- is colorless.
   Figuring this out took a long time. The Greeks about 2,500 years ago were the first to become dissatisfied with mythical answers, but although they put a lot of effort into proposing reasons, they did not know how to test them.
   Hoeppe traces the thinking of prescientific physicists through 2,000 years before getting to the period when real answers started to be found.
   "Why is the sky blue?" is a childish question but answering it was not child's play. The first clues began to be teased out 400 years ago, and the big breakthrough came with Isaac Newton's experiments showing that white light is composed of colors, including, of course, sky blue. Newton published "Opticks" in 1704.
   Some of his ideas were wrong, which began to be recognized about 50 years later. It took another hundred years to straighten most things out, but another 50 after that for Albert Einstein (and others) to explain the weird qualities of light.
   One of the interesting things about "Why the Sky is Blue" is that as a German, Hoeppe spreads credit for the development of physics farther east than most popular scientific histories in English do.
   He also presents a number of phenomena that readers can try out in their backyards.
   For example, the "blue hour." When the sun goes down, the sky stays blue for a while. The hue is almost, but not quite, the same in the blue hour as during bright daylight, but the mechanism for producing it is entirely unrelated.
   A careful look at the sky, with Hoeppe's guidance, will reveal a number of other curiosities that we tend to overlook.
   Unfortunately, Hoeppe's guidance goes awry in his summation, when he raises the alarm about what increased carbon dioxide is likely to mean for the blue sky.
   The answer, very likely, is nothing, thanks to clouds and other buffering effects, but -- astonishingly -- Hoeppe manages to write about greenhouse gases for two chapters without mentioning the most important one -- water vapor.
   It wouldn't hurt to skip Chapter 10.



2. If you have any penchant for physics and enjoy the human adventure that goes with it, then you will enjoy this book, perhaps as much as I have. The author takes us back in time, and places us in the minds of those early Greeks who could only speculate as to the cause behind the beautiful blue in the sky. It is remarkable just how far and to what great heights, literally, mankind has tried to tackle this topic. Hoeppe carries the reader along this marvelous adventure, and does so with a cogent style that makes even the more complicated points easy to grasp.
   
   Many other related subjects are addressed throughout the book that are handled in-depth and give us a view we are unlikely to find elsewhere. John W. Strutt's, Lord Rayleigh, original mechanical treatment for scattering is nicely explained, followed by a close look at his modern electromagnetic modification to it once Maxwell revealed light is an electromagnetic wave.
   
   I especially enjoyed learning of the Chappuis Effect - it might explain the purple color of our Moon during a lunar eclipse when volcanic activity has altered our atmosphere.
   
   With over 250 exoplanets discovered, and thousands more to come, this book will help us understand what we may someday behold when we actually obtain visible images of them. It already helps us understand what we see for the atmospheres of our neighboring planets. For instance, why the Martian sky is not blue and why the cloudless regions on Saturn are a rich sky blue color.

2 comments about Remote Sensing: The Image Chain Approach.

1. Most hard-core remote sensing engineers would love this book, especially those interested in the overall design and physics of sensors themselves. I don't reference it as much as other texts I own on the subject, although I do reluctantly consider it a "must have" for remote sensing students who are interested in pursuing the field further. The price tag was not student-friendly, however.



2. The other books on the subject of remote sensing mainly look like they were written by and for geologists. There is usually lots of tabular data, tons of prose on the subject, and very little in the way of mathematics or algorithms. This just won't do if you are a programmer or engineer who needs to know how the final product got to be the final product, from optics to sensors to image processing. Engineers understand via equations and figures, and this book delivers those details.
   
   Granted, the author does and must skip quite a few details when he is deriving equations such as the governing equation on the light that hits a sensor that appears to be coming from a target point. However, if the author was to go into those details the book would be 6000 pages long, not 600 pages. The part on image processing is OK, but still weaker than Gonzales and Woods book Digital Image Processing (3rd Edition). That book is essential if you want to manipulate the final product. Once again though, Schott had to delete some of the details in order to keep the book on track and on topic and prevent it from becoming an unwieldy tome. Highly recommended for engineers interested in remote sensing from an engineering standpoint.

1 comments about Exploring Stone Walls: A Field Guide to New England's Stone Walls.

1. The book, Exploring Stone Walls, A Field Guide to New England's Stone Walls by Robert Thorson is split up into eleven detailed chapters. From there it is distributed into three separate sections. The first section is divided into four chapters. Thorson mainly talks about how there are many different types of life in and or around a stone wall. Many different types of organisms live here including the smallest life forms such as lichens and bacteria to large mammals such as dogs and cats. Although Thorson doesn't give much of an overview about this section, it is highly detailed fact-wise. I found this quite interesting because even if you are not an in-depth stonewall observer, than you can still have an enjoyable time watching them if you also have other interests such as ecology or if you're a naturalist. During the course of this book, there was one small segment about how he talked about artificial stone being very abundant throughout New England. I feel like this had little reference to the rest of the topics that Thorson was explaining. But there was an extremely well-developed chapter that I felt helped me overcome the very puzzling question of "How do you know whether to classify stone as a wall or a pile?" Very challenging question. Or is it? There is a simple answer to this problem. If the wall is anything less than four times long than it is wide it is a pile and vice-versa. In chapter eight of the book there is a well thought of segment about how to determine a certain wall's age. If you like to have history tied in with reading than you'll like this book. I didn't enjoy the chapter about the terrain because it was too detailed and it barely even talked about the walls. But his best chapter was chapter eleven, where he described some of his personal favorite stone walls to visit. This is even more interesting if you love to travel and explore. Overall, Thorson is a very good author and many people will benefit reading this book.

No comments about Revealing the Buried Past: Geophysics for Archaeologists.

No comments about Geothermal Energy: An Alternative Resource for the 21st Century.

4 comments about Field Geophysics (Geological Field Guide).

1. This book covers almost all of the current geophysics topics. It gives a sometimes too brief description of the equipment. Reviews the theory and discusses field operations with many helpful hint to stay out of trouble. The book does not cover remote sensing or the metal detector which too many geologists have written off as mearly a hobby



2. John thinks of every eventuality in the field, and especially recommends a very natty rubber mac - I can just see him in it! This book covers every geophysical field technique useful for four or less people (which does NOT include remote sensing, as the person above seems not to recognise). It is written in the same dry, and sometimes faintly sarcastic vein, that anyone who knows him will recognise.



3. This book is a chance to update new advances, technics, and methods in geophysics. I rather think this is focused for professionals (on Geology or Geophysics) who have been dealing with a specific area for some years and need to know about the state of the art on Geophysical methods. New developments in GPR, Gravimetry, Magnetometry, Seismic and Electrical exploration is a pretty good chance to take an updated overview on Geophysics.
   I recommend such issue as an overview of modern Geophysics, it is not necessary to get involved in hard math develops to understand the goal of the book.



4. I wish I would have had this book six years ago when I started performing geophysical field work. This book covers everything that you would possibly need to think of when doing small scale geophysical surveys. I have purchased copies of this book for all of the new geophysicists that I work with so they won't make the same mistakes that I did. I read the entire book and highlighted the best sugestions and dog eared a lot of pages.