Open textbook use in the geosciences is open for innovation and growth! Find examples for low cost, open and adaptable resources below.
Contact the Earth Sciences & Map Library to learn about using library-licensed ebooks in your course. The library may have access to relevant titles from publishers such as Geological Society of America, Geological Society of London, Cambridge, Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley.
Examples:
The Solid Earth by
The Solid Earth is a general introduction to the study of the physics of the solid Earth, including the workings of both the Earth's surface and its deep interior. The emphasis throughout is on basic physical principles rather than instrumentation or data handling. The second edition of this acclaimed textbook has been revised to bring the content fully up-to-date and to reflect the most recent advances in geophysical research. It is designed for undergraduates on introductory geophysics courses who have a general background in the physical sciences, including introductory calculus. It can also be used as a reference book for graduate students and other researchers in geology and geophysics. Each chapter ends with exercises of various degrees of complexity, for which solutions are available to instructors from www.cambridge.org/9780521893077. The book contains an extensive glossary of geological and physical terms, as well as appendices that develop more advanced mathematical topics.
Geochemistry by
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of geochemistry. The book first lays out the 'geochemical toolbox': the basic principles and techniques of modern geochemistry, beginning with a review of thermodynamics and kinetics as they apply to the Earth and its environs. These basic concepts are then applied to understanding processes in aqueous systems and the behavior of trace elements in magmatic systems. Subsequent chapters introduce radiogenic and stable isotope geochemistry and illustrate their application to such diverse topics as determining geologic time, ancient climates, and the diets of prehistoric peoples. The focus then broadens to the formation of the solar system, the Earth, and the elements themselves. Then the composition of the Earth itself becomes the topic, examining the composition of the core, the mantle, and the crust and exploring how this structure originated. A final chapter covers organic chemistry, including the origin of fossil fuels and the carbon cycle's role in controlling Earth's climate, both in the geologic past and the rapidly changing present. Geochemistry is essential reading for all earth science students, as well as for researchers and applied scientists who require an introduction to the essential theory of geochemistry, and a survey of its applications in the earth and environmental sciences. Additional resources can be found at: www.wiley.com/go/white/geochemistry
Exoplanets by
For the first time in human history, we know for certain the existence of planets around other stars. Now the fastest-growing field in space science, the time is right for this fundamental source book on the topic which will lay the foundation for its continued growth. Exoplanets serves as both an introduction for the non-specialist and a foundation for the techniques and equations used in exoplanet observation by those dedicated to the field.
Assembling California by
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by
An argument for the urgent danger of global warming in a book that is sure to be as influential as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Known for her insightful and thought-provoking journalism, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert now tackles the controversial subject of global warming. Americans have been warned since the late nineteen-seventies that the buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere threatens to melt the polar ice sheets and irreversibly change our climate. With little done since then to alter this dangerous course, now is the moment to salvage our future. By the end of the century, the world will likely be hotter than it's been in the last two million years, and the sweeping consequences of this change will determine the future of life on earth for generations to come. In writing that is both clear and unbiased, Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She travels to the Arctic, interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science and the studies, draws frightening parallels to lost ancient civilizations, unpacks the politics, and presents the personal tales of those who are being affected most--the people who make their homes near the poles and, in an eerie foreshadowing, are watching their worlds disappear. Growing out of a groundbreaking three-part series for the New Yorker, Field Notes from a Catastrophe brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done, and how we can save our planet.
Losing Earth by
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change--including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late.Losing Earth is their story, and ours. The New York Times Magazinedevoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon--the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Now expanded into book form,Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey'sHiroshima and Jonathan Schell'sThe Fate of the Earth,Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.
The Uninhabitable Earth by
"The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon."--Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker * The New York Times Book Review * Time * NPR * The Economist * The Paris Review * Toronto Star * GQ * The Times Literary Supplement * The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible--food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation's Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it--the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation--today's. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD "The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet."--Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times "Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells's outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too."--The Economist "Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the 'eerily banal language of climatology' in favor of lush, rolling prose."--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times "The book has potential to be this generation's Silent Spring."--The Washington Post "The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book."--Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Example:
by Horst Rademacher