Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Earth Sciences - General

Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95 percent of all living species died out--a global catastrophe far greater than the dinosaurs' demise 185 million years later. How this happened remains a mystery. But there are many competing theories. Some blame huge volcanic eruptions that covered an area as large as the continental United States; others argue for sudden changes in ocean levels and chemistry, including burps of methane gas; and still others cite the impact of an extraterrestrial object, similar to what caused the...

Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

Aimed at taking the mystery out of soil science, Soils: Principles, Properties and Management is a text for undergraduate/graduate students who study soil as a natural resource. Written in a reader-friendly style, with a host of examples, figures and tables, the book leads the reader from the basics of soil science through to complex situations, covering such topics as:

• the origin, development and classification of soil
• physical, chemical and biological properties of soil
• water and nutrient management
• management of problem soils, wetland soils...

The biosphere -- the Earth's thin layer of life -- dates from nearly four billion years ago, when the first simple organisms appeared. Many species have exerted enormous influence on the biosphere's character and productivity, but none has transformed the Earth in so many ways and on such a scale as Homo sapiens. In Harvesting the Biosphere, Vaclav Smil offers an interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistory to the present day. Smil examines all harvests -- from prehistoric man's hunting of megafauna to...

Graduate students in the natural sciences--including not only geophysics and space physics but also atmospheric and planetary physics, ocean sciences, and astronomy--need a broad-based mathematical toolbox to facilitate their research. In addition, they need to survey a wider array of mathematical methods that, while outside their particular areas of expertise, are important in related ones. While it is unrealistic to expect them to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of all the methods that are out there, they need to know how and where to obtain reliable and effective insights into these...