Geological Society of America

Archean to anthropocene; field guides to the geology of the mid-continent of North America.

The guidebook was compiled for the 2011 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and describes 24 field trips that embrace not only 3.5 billion years of geological time, but also cover a diverse range of terrains, geologic disciplines, and approaches on how to view and teach geology in the field. Among the topics are classic Precambrian geology of northeast Minnesota, layered intrusions of the Duluth Complex, a glacial record spanning the Pleistocene in southern Minnesota, and Holocene landscape evolution and erosional processes in the Le Sueur River in central Minnesota. There is no index. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Field guide to Samos and the Menderes massif; along-strike variations in the Mediterranean Tethyan orogen.

Gessner (earth and environment, U. of Western Australia) et al. provide a field guide to the tectonics of Samos and the Menderes Massif in the eastern Mediterranean section of the Theyan orogen. They present outcrop descriptions, maps, and diagrams that explore the along-strike variations in the Hellenide-Anatolide orogen, including the architecture of the Early Tertiary Alpine nappe stack and its Miocene extensional overprint. After discussion of the geology of the Eastern Mediterranean, the guide presents a two-day field guide to outcrops in Samos Island, Greece, then a six-day guide that explores the Antolide Belt in western Turkey where the Menderes nappes form the tectonic footwall below the Cycladic Blueschist Unit, sections across the Bozdag and Aydin Mountains, and the southern margin of the Menderes Massif in the Milas-Selimiye area. The geology, general architecture, and structural history of these areas is also covered, and access and location coordinates are given. No index is included. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Societal challenges and geoinformatics.

The geological sciences now being informed by new information technologies, researchers from both fields propose how they can become more relevant to societal concerns. Their topics include ontological relation and spatial reasoning in earth science ontologies, grid quality optimization in analyzing cone penetration testing data, the role and development of a persistent interoperability test bed for geosciences research, data provenance for preserving digital geoscience data, and theoretical foundations of the event bush method. There is no index. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)