During the past ten years, evidence has developed to indicate that seawater convects through oceanic crust driven by heat derived from creation of lithosphere at the Earth-encircling oceanic ridge-rift system of seafloor spreading centers. This has stimulated multiple lines of research with profound implications for the earth and life sciences. The lines of research comprise the role of hydrothermal convection at seafloor spreading centers in the Earth's thermal regime by cooling of newly formed litho sphere (oceanic crust and upper mantle); in global geochemical cycles and mass balances of...

This book has been written as part of a new series of scientific text-books being published by Plenum Publishing Company Limited. The scope of the series is to review a chosen topic in each volume, and in addition, to present abstracts of the most important references cited in the text. Thus allowing the reader to supplement the information contained within this book without have to refer to many additional publications. This volume is devoted to the subject of Radiation Detectors, known as Photodetectors, and particular emphasis has been placed on devices operating in the infrared region of...

The NATO Advanced Study Institute on Quantum Electrodynamics of Strong Fields was held at Lahnstein on the Rhine from 15-26 June, 1981. The school was devoted to the advances, theoretical and exper imental, in the physics of strong fields made during the past decade. The topic of the first week was almost exclusively quantum electrodynamics, with discussions of symmetry breaking in the ground state, of the physics of heavy ion collisions and of precision tests of perturbative quantum electrodynamics. This was followed in the second week by the presentation of a broad range of other areas...