Whether the decline is merely temporary or heralds the beginning of
a reduction to a more sustainable level of production, only time will tell.
The decrease in numbers has not, however, been matched by any deterioration
in quality. Nor is there any real indication that the text book writer is
a dying species. Continuing, rapid, and sometimes spectacular, progress
in the Earth sciences guarantees that there will always be ‘gaps in the
market’ awaiting the perceptive author.

One such gap has now been filled magnificently by Roy Chester’s 698-page
Marine Geochemistry. It is not that study of the composition of the oceans
is new; on the contrary, it goes back more than a century. As in many other
branches of the Earth sciences, however, the past 20 years have seen important
advances in the techniques of sampling and analysis, the rapid development
of theoretical concepts and the acquisition of masses of new data, often
through large-scale international projects for sampling and measurement.

To answer the question ‘How do the oceans work as a chemical system?’,
Chester looks at where the ocean’s elements come from, where they end up
and what happens to them in between. But this is no mere in-out accounting
catalogue; he selects tracer elements to illustrate the different oceanic
cycles. To use the jargon, it is ‘process oriented’, which at once makes
for a better narrative and prov ides a framework within which to assimilate
future discoveries. The book is clearly recognisable as a standard text
for years to come.

Chester’s main interest in deep-ocean sediments is in their function
as geochemical sinks. In Deep Marine Environments, by contrast, the concern
of K. T. Pickering and his colleagues is with sedimentary processes and
environments of the deep ocean, particularly in the context of the controls
that plate tectonics exert.

The publicity given to the plate-tectonic revolution of the 1960s has
tended to obscure the fact that sedimentology has undergone conceptual upheavals
of its own, inspired in part by the more general revolution but in part
driven by its own internal dynamic. The surprising, not to say alarming,
aspect of Deep Marine Environments is that almost everything within it has
been discovered or developed since 1970. Taking the form of a general survey
backed up by many case histories that illustrate both general principles
and contingent factors, the text will clearly be a boon to sedimentology
students, but it will also enable others to discover how modern opportunities
have demystified what was practically terra incognita until as recently
as the 1950s.

The deep-ocean environment may be a very modern topic, but it must still
rely to some extent on ancient stratigraphic principles. At the same time,
however, stratigraphy itself has expanded to include non-stratified (igneous
and metamorphic) rocks and to incorporate new stratigraphies based on seismic,
magnetic, isotopic and other methodologies. So even one of geology’s oldest
branches needed its modern chronicler.

Now, almost simultaneously, it has two. Donald Prothero’s Interpreting
the Stratigraphic Record is an American-style, large-format, highly illustrated
text, albeit with no second colour (reflecting harder times?). Robert Schoch’s
Stratigraphy is a book of more traditional appearance. Both texts offer
good introductions to old and new principles and techniques, although Prothero’s
book is generally more approachable and takes more account of plate-tectonic
influences.

Mountain studies have as long a history as stratigraphy, albeit a less
successful one in that geologists had to struggle for almost two centuries
before finally discovering how mountains really form. Geomorphologists,
by contrast, were largely content to accept that mountains exist and investigate
their behaviour and influences as conspicuous features of the environment.

This being so, it comes as some surprise to discover that Moun tain
Environments by A. J. Gerrard is ‘the first book to be devoted to the systematic
analysis of the processes that shape mountain environments’. Of course,
many of the topics dealt with by Gerrard (weathering, hydrology, slope characteristics,
glaciation and so on) have been covered separately elsewhere; but that is
not to detract from his achievement in collating and summarising modern
knowledge in so interesting and useful a way.

If books on stratigraphy and mountains celebrate more than a century
of study, others cover topics that just 20 years ago could hardly be said
to have existed at all. One such is Peter Cattermole’s Planetary Volcanism,
an excellent summary of a surprisingly large body of knowledge on the volcanic
activity of the Earth (to set the framework), the Moon, Venus and Mars,
and even of Io and the icy satellites.

Another example is The Origin of the Solar System, in which John Dormand
and Michael Woolfson make the case for the hypothesis that the planets formed
from material captured by the Sun from a passing star. Born just 26 years
ago, the so-called ‘capture theory’ has not yet replaced the more popular
nebular hypo thesis, but Dormand and Woolf son argue convincingly that it
explains the known properties of the Solar System better.

Finally, from the frontiers of science to reconsiderations of the past.
Most working Earth scientists take little interest in the historical and
philosophical background to their subject, but the undergraduate years are
a time when students should make some attempt to learn at least a little
about how geological studies developed.

Two new books make the task easy and enjoyable. First, there is the
second edition of A. Hallam’s Great Geological Controversies, which contains
two new chapters – one on the cause(s) of mass extinctions and the other
on the emergence of stratigraphy. The first deals with an issue as yet unresolved
and the second offers an interpretation with which not everyone will agree,
but the book as a whole is still a fine exposition of some of geology’s
major arguments of the past.

Secondly, Richard Huggett’s Cataclysms and Earth History expands on
one of the issues – diluvialism – considered briefly by Hallam. Diluvialism
as represented by the Deluge died long ago; but, as Huggett points out,
neo-catastrophist tendencies hint of a return in modern guise. Thus do history
and the frontiers of science conjoin.

Marine Geochemistry by Roy Chester, Unwin Hyman, pp 698, Pounds sterling
90 hbk, Pounds sterling 34.95 pbk

Deep Marine Environments: Clastic Sedimentation and Tect onics by K.
T. Pickering, R. N. Hiscott and F. J. Hein, Unwin Hyman, pp 416, Pounds
sterling 75 hbk, Pounds sterling 29.95 pbk

Interpreting the Stratigraphic Record by Donald R. Prothero, Freeman,
pp 410, Pounds sterling 19.95

Stratigraphy: Principles and Methods by Robert M. Schoch, Van Nostrand
Reinhold, pp 375, Pounds sterling 31.50

Mountain Environments by A. J. Gerrard, Belhaven Press, pp 317, Pounds
sterling 30

Planetary Volcanism: A Study of Volcanic Activity in the Solar System
by Peter Cattermole, Ellis Horwood, pp 443, Pounds sterling 35

The Origin of the Solar System: The Capture Theory by John R. Dormand
and Michael M. Woolfson, Ellis Horwood, pp 230, Pounds sterling 29.95

Great Geological Controversies (2nd edition) by A. Hallam, Oxford, pp
244, Pounds sterling 25 hbk, Pounds sterling 12.50 pbk

Cataclysms and Earth History: The Development of Diluvialism by R. Huggett,
Oxford, pp 220, Pounds sterling 21.50

Peter Smith is reader in Earth sciences at the Open University and editor
of Geology Today

What has evolved to replace the large general text is a great diversity
of shorter works. Often these record and reflect geological growth areas
and reorganisations of knowledge, some of which may have arisen through
the need to reinterpret old and new data in platetectonic terms.

But although the typical modern text on geology may be restricted in
its coverage, the subject matter’s centrality to the Earth sciences is not
necessarily impaired by this. On the contrary, by synthesising a vast mass
of data into a coherent framework, it may actually be enhanced – a phenomenon
well demonstrated by the two most original of recent publications, Don L.
Anderson’s Theory of the Earth and M. Wilson’s Igneous Petrogenesis: A Global
Tectonic Approach.

Theory of the Earth is a deliberate play on the 200th anniversary of
James Hutton’s revolutionary book of the same name. Anderson sets out to
record and interpret what we now know, or may infer, about the physical
structure and chemical composition and behaviour of the Earth’s interior.
Both as a book and as testimony to recent advances in geophysics and geochemistry,
it’s an impressive achievement. In its synthesis of data from astronomy
and planetology, through geology and mineralogy, to materials science and
seismology, it is also exhilarating, although in its clear demonstration
of the modern Earth scientist’s need to be familiar with advanced mathematical
techniques it’s not a little daunting.

At last year’s British Association meeting, Tony Hallam more or less
accused geomathematical modellers of indulging in pointlessly sterile exercises
of little or no relevance to the real Earth, and there is not a little justice
in that charge. In the case of the Earth’s interior, however, for which
the data are few and often of dubious merit, modelling governed by ‘plausible’
assumptions is freqently the only way of making progress. Anderson’s able
description of just how far human ingenuity has taken this process forms
an original, if not always uncontentious, synthesis that will surely be
welcomed not only by students and lecturers in the field, but as a convenient
review, by other Earth scientists not hitherto intimately concerned with
deep-Earth modelling.

Igneous Petrogenesis, also a much-needed first synthesis, inevitably
covers some of the same ground as Anderson’s book. But, in concentrating
on geochemistry rather than geophysics, the author makes it somewhat more
accessible. By excluding, however, those parts of the Earth (for example,
the core) not intimately involved in petrogenesis, he makes it less wide-ranging.
Nevertheless, its aim is similar, namely, to reduce a vast mass of information
into a coherent story and to assess the extent to which the data may or
may not reflect clearly defined processes related to plate tectonics and
the Earth’s internal structure.

As Wilson points out, there has in the past been a marked tendency for
the writers of petrology texts to steer clear of the uncertainties, and
perhaps even controversies, of petrogenetic models. In accepting the challenge,
however, Wilson, as Anderson does in his different way, has defined the
framework for the future undergraduate study of geochemistry.

The remaining books are, in comparison, inevitably less original, although
neither less useful nor lacking in quality. Rhona Black’s The Elements of
Palaeontology, for example, now appears in its second edition, 18 years
after the first and with numerous intervening reprints. Despite a new chapter
on trace fossils, an expanded treatment of microfossils and some rewriting
throughout, the book has a curiously dated air about it; but that should
not inhibit anyone wanting convenient basic information on fossils. As generations
of students have discovered, Black delivers just what she promises in simple
unpretentious terms, albeit with scant reference to some modern concerns.

Two other texts to have proved their worth, and in a much shorter time,
are R. G. Park’s Foundations of Structural Geology and J. D. Collinson and
D. B. Thompson’s Sedimentary Structures. Both are primers for beginning
students, aiming to describe and illustrate all the basic structural features
within their respective scopes as a preliminary to being able to cope with
the more advanced texts. Both also appear here in their second editions,
the former with additional material on extensional and strike-slip tectonics
and on terrane accretion, the latter with more general rewriting to ‘take
account of advances in experimental work and of a deeper appreciation of
aeolian, shallow-marine, volcaniclastic, carbonate and mass flow processes’.

It’s quite impossible to overemphasise the usefulness of elementary
works like these; and would that there were more of them in other subfields
of the Earth sciences.

Things may be changing, however. Robin Gill’s Chemical Fundamentals
of Geology, for example, is in essence a book on basic chemistry, but there
is barely a conventional laboratory reaction in sight. The chemical principles
are all there, of course; but Gill describes them almost entirely in the
context of geochemical processes and of the ‘geo-revelant’ elements, for
those whose interest in chemistry is solely in its ability to aid understanding
of the Earth.

J. R. Holloway and B. J. Wood have the same audience in mind for their
equally elementary text Simulating the Earth: Experimental Geochemistry,
although, ironically, they take the Earth in a manner of speaking back into
the laboratory. Their chief aim is to encourage students to become experimentalists,
but at the very least they hope to enable students to evaluate critically
published experimental work and to understand the sort of problems that
experiments might be expected to resolve. To those ends, the authors explain
why geochemical experiments are useful, what kinds of experiments can be
done, and the major problems of experimental work and its limitations.

Finally, to change the subject almost completely, it’s always fascinating
to come across something one barely knew existed. For me this year, it has
been the eponymous subject of T. J. Marshall and J. W. Holmes’ Soil Physics,
which turns out to be largely about the physics of soil-water interactions.

I have no idea how many university courses there are in soil physics
nor how many students they accommodate. But whoever and wherever they are,
such students are clearly well served by a fascinating text (the only one?)
on a subject that could be said, without exaggeration, to hold the key to
the life-support system of the whole planet.

Postscript: All the books I have mentioned were published in Britain
(although not all the authors are British). Thirty years ago, this would
hardly have been thought worthy of mention; chauvinism in textbook usage
was normal. But in these days of rapid transport and largely unrestricted
markets, and bearing in mind that the North American geological community
is bigger than that of Britain by a factor of at least five, it’s perhaps
worth a note. The truth is that where English-language books for students
in the Earth sciences are concerned, British publishers are conspicuously
way ahead of the field.

Theory of the Earth by Don L. Anderson, Blackwell Scientific, pp 366,
Pounds sterling 49.50.

Igneous Petrogenesis: A Global Tectonic Approach by M. Wilson, Unwin
Hyman, pp 466, Pounds sterling 50 hbk, Pounds sterling 24.95 pbk.

The Elements of Palaeontology by Rhona M. Black, Cambridge UP, pp 404,
Pounds sterling 27.50 hbk, Pounds sterling 12.95 pbk.

Foundations of Structural Geology by R. G. Park, Blackie, pp 148, Pounds
sterling 30 hbk, Pounds sterling 12.95 pbk.

Sedimentary Structures by J. D. Collinson and D. B. Thompson, Unwin
Hyman, pp 207, Pounds sterling 35 hbk, Pounds sterling 14.95 pbk.

Chemical Fundamentals of Geology by Robin Gill, Unwin Hyman, pp 292,
Pounds sterling 35 hbk, Pounds sterling 14.95 pbk.

Simulating the Earth: Experimental Geochemistry by J. R. Holloway and
B. J. Wood, Unwin Hyman, pp 196, Pounds sterling 25 hbk, Pounds sterling
11.95 pbk.

Soil Physics by T. J. Marshall and J. W. Holmes, Cambridge UP, pp 374,
Pounds sterling 45 hbk, Pounds sterling 15 pbk.

Peter Smith is scientific editor of Geology Today and reader in Earth
sciences at the Open University.