Monitoring the Earth

Monitoring the Earth is the first book to review the recent advances in satellite technology, computing and mass spectrometry that are opening up completely new avenues of enquiry to Earth scientists. Among the geological changes that were previously considered too slow or too extensive for direct measurements and that can now be monitored directly are continental displacements, mountain uplift, the growth and decay of icesheets and glaciers, the faulting and folding of rocks, the progress of weathering and sedimentation, and the growth of coral reefs.
In addition to these developments, the book assesses progress in fields not normally considered part of physical geology, such as the shape and orbit of the gravity and the terrestrial magnetic field. The results from the new findings are already helping Earth scientists analyze and explain the underlying mechanisms, notably with regard to the storage and release of strain during earthquakes and the interaction of glacial history with the Earth's rate of rotation. The outcoe is a foretaste of the physical geology of the space age.lly illustrated with line drawings and photographs, and ith a bibliography that encompasses the scattered and disparate litarature, Monitoring the Earth is intended for undergraduates in geology, geomorphology, geomatic engineering and planetary science, but it should also be of interest to astronomers and historians of science.

Claudio Vita-Finzi was Professor of Neotectonics at University College London before moving to the Department of Mineralogy at the Natural History Museum in 2001 as a Scientific Associate. He has worked on Holocene deformation in South America, the Near East and Southeast Asia, and is the author of many articles and books, including Recent Earth movements (1986). He was awarded the G.K. warren Prize of the US Academy of Sciences in 1994 for his work in fluvial geology and was elected to the Qamerican Philosophical Society in 1997.