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The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences
214
the opportunity to become aware, in a synthetic way, of most of the important research which is carried out in the USSR and generally published only in Russian. The reverse side is that most of the references are unfortunately 5 years old at least because it takes time to translate such material. The book by Zubakov and Borzenkova has another advantage, dealing with a very important topic which attracts more and more attention from a great variety of members of the community dealing with Quaternary paleoenvironment. Scientists have indeed started to recognize the important contribution climatology and associated disciplines can make to a better understanding of our environment. One way is to make research in climate modelling, but another, extremely important one, is to examine the not-too-distant geological past in order to validate the climate models over many different paleoclimatic situations. The book by Zubakov and Borzenkova helps considerably serving this aim by reviewing paleoclimates over the Pleistocene, both at the regional scale and for the whole Northern Hemisphere. The subdivision of this book is quite complicated but logical. It deals with the global climatic events of the Pleistocene (Part I) and of the Cenozoic (Part II). Part I is subdivided into three sections about methodological problems, evidence for climate changes in the Mediterranean-Caspian region, in the loess zone of Eurasia for interpreting arid climates and in the high latitudes for recording continental glaciations. Climatic changes in the Russian plain, Siberia and the Arctic are particularly well documented. Section III, with 120 pages, is the heart of the book dealing with the timing of palaeoclimates in the Pleistocene. Correlating climate change, as given by proxy data at the regional scale, is a very debatable problem, but is absolutely necessary for reconstructing maps describing the Northern Hemisphere climates for some particular time slices and time series allowing to have a dynamic view of past climatic changes. Their proposal to use orthoclimath-
BOOK REVIEWS
ems and superclimathems as the major units of a unified climatochronologic classification of the Pleistocene is a good attempt to define a way for constructing a synthetic view of global climatic variations and for trying to resolve the problem of synchroneity of climatic changes during the Pleistocene, being given that "the response of the natural environment to these changes is not the same in all the places because of the different final rate of various geological processes". Many synthetic tables in chapter 8 are particularly interesting for covering the whole Late Pleistocene all over the northern hemisphere. This is also the case for the last deglaciation and the Holocene period (chapter 9). Part II describes pre-Quaternary climates extending over the last 50 million years with particular attention to the Pliocene climate of the Black and Caspian seas. The r~sum6s at the end of each chapter are clear and very interesting providing the most significant findings of the chapter. The production of the book, of the figures and tables is excellent. Although the reader has to become familiar with a specific terminology used here but clearly defined, this book is full of very useful data and the synthesis attempted for the whole Northern Hemisphere is very attractive. A book to recommend to specialists working on Cenozoic climatic variations. A. Berger, Lourain-La-Neuve
Earth sciences
A. Allaby and M. Allaby (Editors), 1991. The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 410pp (Softcover). £6.99. ISBN 019-286125-5. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences is an abbreviated version of the Oxford Dictionary of Natural History, containing about one third of the entries to be found in the parent work. In their introduction the authors discuss the etymology of
BOOK REVIEWS
geology, geosciences and earth sciences. They make it quite clear that this is a dictionary of earth sciences, which thus includes geology, planetology, oceanography and meteorology. This is the dictionary for you if you need to look up the meaning of breeze, blizzard, bumpiness (referring to air turbulence), frost, pampero (a south American wind), pannus, paradigm, parcel of air, parent material, roadway construction or willy-willy (a west Australian cyclone). I particularly enjoyed the entry for Blue s u n - - s e e Blue moon. As a geologist my main interest was to see how the authors tackled the rocky bits of earth science. This is catholic and impressive, ranging from the names of the twiddly bits of fossils to geophysical arcana. For a short time after scanning this dictionary I knew the meaning of abapical, fubarite, fossula, ijolite and toad's eye tin. The authors also include potted biographies of famous petrophiliacs. The only typographical error that I could spot was Stilpnomenalane. The authors are to be congratulated for producing a dictionary of geological terms devoid of any illustrations whatsoever. This decision was, presumably, forced on them by the publisher. It must have taken great courage to embark on the project with such an inhibiting restriction. To attempt to write a dictionary of geological terms without illustrations is as sadistic as asking a handcuffed structural geologist to describe the tectonic evolution of the Alpine mountain chain. The cliche "one picture is worth a thousand words" is particularly apposite for such a visual subject as geology. Perhaps earth scientists are more literate than visual. As I am only a geologist, I will continue to use the "Dictionary of Geology" of Whitten and Brooks. It has lots of simple labelled pictures that I can easily understand. REFERENCE:
Whitten, D.G.A. and Brooks, J.R.V., 1972. Dictionary of Geology.Penguin, Harmondsworth,495pp. R.C. Selley, London
215
Sedimentology Winfried Koensler, 1989. Sand und Kies
(Sand and Gravel) Mineralogie, Vorkommen, Eigenschaften, Einsatzm6glichkeiten. Ferdinand E n k e Verlag, Stuttgart, 123pp. DM39.00 ISBN 3-432-97551-1 (Softcover). Sand and gravel, for many geologists and mineralogists trivial components of our Earth's crust, are important commodities in our lives and as the author states, the average citizen of Germany, directly or indirectly, uses about 460 tons of them during a 70 year life span. These natural building materials are also not available in unlimited supplies and should thus be treated with respect and used wisely. Despite some shortcomings the author has succeeded in arousing the interest of the reader in such an apparently dull and uninteresting material and also created some respect for these materials by describing their application in many areas of our technical society, many applications which are normally hidden by their simplicity or the obscurity of their nature. In the first four chapters the reader is taken from basic definitions to the mineralogy of the components and further to the origin and deposits of sand and gravel. It is, unfortunately, in chapters 3 and 4 that a few errors, simplifications and badly-defined terms can be found. The use of these chapters for text book purposes can therefore not be recommended. In chapter 3.2.2 it is thus stated that tridymite is formed as a metastable modification from "watery gases (w~issrigen Gasen)" and that it occurs in lunar basalts and meteorites. This statement is not only inconsistent but also contains an erroneous term. Figure 3c shows two different units, mmol/1 and ppm SiO2, on the ordinate which is confusing and misleading. A few but minor errors are found in chapter 3 which show that the author's interest and special knowledge lie outside this sphere. But surely, marcasite belongs to the orthorhombic crystal system and is not tetragonal as stated!
the opportunity to become aware, in a synthetic way, of most of the important research which is carried out in the USSR and generally published only in Russian. The reverse side is that most of the references are unfortunately 5 years old at least because it takes time to translate such material. The book by Zubakov and Borzenkova has another advantage, dealing with a very important topic which attracts more and more attention from a great variety of members of the community dealing with Quaternary paleoenvironment. Scientists have indeed started to recognize the important contribution climatology and associated disciplines can make to a better understanding of our environment. One way is to make research in climate modelling, but another, extremely important one, is to examine the not-too-distant geological past in order to validate the climate models over many different paleoclimatic situations. The book by Zubakov and Borzenkova helps considerably serving this aim by reviewing paleoclimates over the Pleistocene, both at the regional scale and for the whole Northern Hemisphere. The subdivision of this book is quite complicated but logical. It deals with the global climatic events of the Pleistocene (Part I) and of the Cenozoic (Part II). Part I is subdivided into three sections about methodological problems, evidence for climate changes in the Mediterranean-Caspian region, in the loess zone of Eurasia for interpreting arid climates and in the high latitudes for recording continental glaciations. Climatic changes in the Russian plain, Siberia and the Arctic are particularly well documented. Section III, with 120 pages, is the heart of the book dealing with the timing of palaeoclimates in the Pleistocene. Correlating climate change, as given by proxy data at the regional scale, is a very debatable problem, but is absolutely necessary for reconstructing maps describing the Northern Hemisphere climates for some particular time slices and time series allowing to have a dynamic view of past climatic changes. Their proposal to use orthoclimath-
BOOK REVIEWS
ems and superclimathems as the major units of a unified climatochronologic classification of the Pleistocene is a good attempt to define a way for constructing a synthetic view of global climatic variations and for trying to resolve the problem of synchroneity of climatic changes during the Pleistocene, being given that "the response of the natural environment to these changes is not the same in all the places because of the different final rate of various geological processes". Many synthetic tables in chapter 8 are particularly interesting for covering the whole Late Pleistocene all over the northern hemisphere. This is also the case for the last deglaciation and the Holocene period (chapter 9). Part II describes pre-Quaternary climates extending over the last 50 million years with particular attention to the Pliocene climate of the Black and Caspian seas. The r~sum6s at the end of each chapter are clear and very interesting providing the most significant findings of the chapter. The production of the book, of the figures and tables is excellent. Although the reader has to become familiar with a specific terminology used here but clearly defined, this book is full of very useful data and the synthesis attempted for the whole Northern Hemisphere is very attractive. A book to recommend to specialists working on Cenozoic climatic variations. A. Berger, Lourain-La-Neuve
Earth sciences
A. Allaby and M. Allaby (Editors), 1991. The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 410pp (Softcover). £6.99. ISBN 019-286125-5. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences is an abbreviated version of the Oxford Dictionary of Natural History, containing about one third of the entries to be found in the parent work. In their introduction the authors discuss the etymology of
BOOK REVIEWS
geology, geosciences and earth sciences. They make it quite clear that this is a dictionary of earth sciences, which thus includes geology, planetology, oceanography and meteorology. This is the dictionary for you if you need to look up the meaning of breeze, blizzard, bumpiness (referring to air turbulence), frost, pampero (a south American wind), pannus, paradigm, parcel of air, parent material, roadway construction or willy-willy (a west Australian cyclone). I particularly enjoyed the entry for Blue s u n - - s e e Blue moon. As a geologist my main interest was to see how the authors tackled the rocky bits of earth science. This is catholic and impressive, ranging from the names of the twiddly bits of fossils to geophysical arcana. For a short time after scanning this dictionary I knew the meaning of abapical, fubarite, fossula, ijolite and toad's eye tin. The authors also include potted biographies of famous petrophiliacs. The only typographical error that I could spot was Stilpnomenalane. The authors are to be congratulated for producing a dictionary of geological terms devoid of any illustrations whatsoever. This decision was, presumably, forced on them by the publisher. It must have taken great courage to embark on the project with such an inhibiting restriction. To attempt to write a dictionary of geological terms without illustrations is as sadistic as asking a handcuffed structural geologist to describe the tectonic evolution of the Alpine mountain chain. The cliche "one picture is worth a thousand words" is particularly apposite for such a visual subject as geology. Perhaps earth scientists are more literate than visual. As I am only a geologist, I will continue to use the "Dictionary of Geology" of Whitten and Brooks. It has lots of simple labelled pictures that I can easily understand. REFERENCE:
Whitten, D.G.A. and Brooks, J.R.V., 1972. Dictionary of Geology.Penguin, Harmondsworth,495pp. R.C. Selley, London
215
Sedimentology Winfried Koensler, 1989. Sand und Kies
(Sand and Gravel) Mineralogie, Vorkommen, Eigenschaften, Einsatzm6glichkeiten. Ferdinand E n k e Verlag, Stuttgart, 123pp. DM39.00 ISBN 3-432-97551-1 (Softcover). Sand and gravel, for many geologists and mineralogists trivial components of our Earth's crust, are important commodities in our lives and as the author states, the average citizen of Germany, directly or indirectly, uses about 460 tons of them during a 70 year life span. These natural building materials are also not available in unlimited supplies and should thus be treated with respect and used wisely. Despite some shortcomings the author has succeeded in arousing the interest of the reader in such an apparently dull and uninteresting material and also created some respect for these materials by describing their application in many areas of our technical society, many applications which are normally hidden by their simplicity or the obscurity of their nature. In the first four chapters the reader is taken from basic definitions to the mineralogy of the components and further to the origin and deposits of sand and gravel. It is, unfortunately, in chapters 3 and 4 that a few errors, simplifications and badly-defined terms can be found. The use of these chapters for text book purposes can therefore not be recommended. In chapter 3.2.2 it is thus stated that tridymite is formed as a metastable modification from "watery gases (w~issrigen Gasen)" and that it occurs in lunar basalts and meteorites. This statement is not only inconsistent but also contains an erroneous term. Figure 3c shows two different units, mmol/1 and ppm SiO2, on the ordinate which is confusing and misleading. A few but minor errors are found in chapter 3 which show that the author's interest and special knowledge lie outside this sphere. But surely, marcasite belongs to the orthorhombic crystal system and is not tetragonal as stated!