New Zealand’s many distinctive landforms are packed into a small space. Geoff Chapple, author of Te Araroa: The New Zealand Trail, set out on a year-long journey to find out why, and to seek out the shifting forces that shape them. For company, he chose to walk with geologists and the artisans who work the rock. The journey took him back through geology’s global history and onward from end to end of New Zealand. Terrain is the result – a lucid, personal and sometimes funny account of New Zealand’s most astonishing landscapes. Their stories and revelations are a prompt to look more closely at the ground we walk on.

The dramatic journeys of the 19th century Gold Rush come to life in this geologist’s tour of the American West and the events that shaped the land. In 1848, news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. The dramatic terrain these settlers crossed is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts once seemed to them. Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses settler’s diaries and letters—as well as his own experiences on the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West shaped our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place. “Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled.”—Library Journal

Engineers from around the world recount in this volume their successes and failures in attempting to deal with unique and quixotic landscapes.

This 2004 book provides a concise, accessible account of the geology and landscape of Southwest USA, for students and amateurs.

This is a book of a hundred stories and life lessons: crazy; beautiful; very serious. It is of a golden life and nine near-death encounters, moving between remote camps amidst poor indigenous folk, the salt of the Earth, and the glossy skyscrapers of our cities. Mineral exploration is a strange game. It is highest technology, big dollars, outback people and their aspirations, wonderful places, and flies, dirt, mud, budget cuts and enduring friendships. Remote projects keep explorers abroad in this beautiful world, but far from families. You have time and yearning on your hands, time to think and dream. When you reach executive ranks, you deal in public ideologies about mining, government and NGOs at all levels, billions of dollars, and changing whole regions around great mines for better more than for worse. This is the easily-written story of man and manager, major public policies, and many good folk across the world. To read more, go to Rossfardonbooksandessays.com where you can also download essays for free.

This book introduces the reader to the principles of terrrane analysis, and describes how accretion tectonics relates to classic plate tectonics theory and what this represents in terms of mountain building and continental growth processes. A forensic-like investigation of continental geology is detailed, integrating many different sub-disciplines of the Earth Sciences. The concepts outlined have a practical bent and help to explain the nature and occurrences of petroleum and metallic mineral deposits.