Physical Principles of Sedimentology is available to be downloaded here now.
- Title: Physical Principles of Sedimentology – A Readable Textbook for Beginners and Experts
- Author: Kenneth J. Hsü
- Publisher: Spriger-Verlag
- Pages: 235
This is a textbook for geology undergraduates taking their first course sedimentology in for graduate students writing a term paper on sedimentology or preparing for their qualifying examinations, and for instructors, who deern it necessary to infuse a more physical-science approach to the teaching of geology. I also hope that some physics students might find the book readable and comprehensible, and that some of them might be inspired to start a career in the physics of geology.
This textbook is a revision of my lecture notes for my course Principles of Sedimentology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It is a twounit semester course given to second- or third-year undergraduate students, who have acquired a basic knowledge in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and geology. The purpose of teaching this course is to bridge the gap between what has been learned in middle school and in the first year of university to what shall be learned in geology during later years. I intend especially to impart the impression to my students that the study of geologic processes is applied physics, applied chemistry, and applied mathematics.
The content of the book is somewhat more extensive than wh at I have taught, and could be used as a textbook for a three-unit semester course, or even for a two-semester course, if a lecturer chooses to do so. We teach a second course in sedimentology, for which the students are recommended to consult textbooks on depositional environments and facies models. This textbook is not intended to replace, but to supplement those.
James Hutton in the late 18th century and Charles Lyell in the middle of the last century established the natural-history approach to study geology, and the success of the method is witnessed by the progress of the science over the last 2 centuries. The logic is inductive reasoning: Noting that quartz sands are terrigenous detritus derived from deeply weathered terranes, quartz sandstones or orthoquartzites are given paleoclimatic significance. Observing that marine organisms lived, died and are buried in marine sediments, fossil ecology becomes a key to interpreting sedimentary environments. There needs to be no reference to Newtonian mechanics or to Gibbsian thermodynamics, because physicallaws cannot be invoked to prove or falsify the interpretation.