"Nearly 25% of the world's population lives in karst areas -- landscapes that are characterized by sinkholes, caves, and underground drainage. Living with Karst, the 4th booklet in the AGI Environmental Awareness Series, vividly illustrates what karst is and why these resource-rich areas are important. The booklet also discusses karst-related environmental and engineering concerns, guidelines for living with karst, and sources of additional information."--Provided by publisher.

Land use decisions in karst terrains can have immediate and serious impacts on the local landscape and groundwater resources. The existing literature on karst and land use can be very difficult to locate in the journals of any of a half-dozen different disciplines. This book brings the interdisciplinary knowledge together in one place, in a format that academics and professionals alike will find accessible, informative and useful. Based on an examination of existing regulations, the experiences and opinions of planners and land use professionals, and quantitative analysis of publicly-available data, the book explores how human settlement patterns and urban systems in karst terrains are affected by land use regulations intended to protect karst resources. The book pays particular attention to the questions of whether these regulations will have a noticeable impact on density and on opportunities for economic growth and development in communities that choose to implement them. This analysis serves as the basis for a regulatory framework that may be used to understand the workings of land use regulations in karst terrains, and to aid in the development of such regulations in the future.

Focusing specifically on the management of karst environments, this volume draws together the world’s leading karst experts to provide a vital source for the study and management of this unique physical setting. Although karst landscapes cover 12% of the Earth’s terrain and provide 25% of the world’s drinking water, the resource management of karst environments has only previously received indirect attention. Through a comprehensive approach, Karst Management focuses on engineering issues associated with surface karst such as quarries, dams, and agriculture, subsurface topics such as the management of groundwater, show caves, cave biota, and geo-archaeology projects. Chapters that focus on karst as an integrated system look at IUCN World Heritage sites, national parks, policy and regulation, measuring systematic disturbance, information management, and public environmental education. The text incorporates the most up-to-date research from leading karst scientists. This volume provides important perspectives for university students, educators, geoengineers, resource managers, and planners who are interested in or work with this unique physical landscape.

Everything young readers 12 and up ever wanted to know about these unique formations. A sinkhole is a hole in the ground, but a very special one, appearing anywhere where rock dissolves allowing the ground above it to sink. Some sinkholes happen gradually, but others open up almost instantly. (These are the ones you hear about in the news when one swallows a house.) Sinkholes happen worldwide—from valleys in the high Himalayan Mountains to the depths of the Adriatic Sea, from the crystal-clear springs of Florida to the oases of the Arabian Desert. With 140 color photos, this book illustrates how sinkholes are an important part of our natural environment.

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

This volume covers major advances in the study of the geomorphology, hydrology, engineering geology and management of these specialized and fragile environments. The book will be valuable for geologists, engineers and geophysicists interested in karst, along with land planners, developers, and managers of show caves, natural parks and reserves in karst areas.

Landscapes of the past have always held an inherent fascination for ge ologists because, like terrestrial sediments, they formed in our environment, not offshore on the sea floor and not deep in the subsurface. So, a walk across an ancient karst surface is truly a step back in time on a surface formed open to the air, long before humans populated the globe. Ancient karst, with its associated subterranean features, is also of great scientific interest because it not only records past exposure of parts of the earth's crust, but preserves information about ancient climate and the movement of waters in paleoaquifers. Because some paleokarst terranes are locally hosts for hydrocarbons and base metals in amounts large enough to be economic, buried and exhumed paleokarst is also of inordinate practical importance. This volume had its origins in a symposium entitled "Paleokarst Systems and Unconformities-Characteristics and Significance," which was orga nized and convened by us at the 1985 midyear meeting of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. The symposium had its roots in our studies over the last decade, both separately and jointly, of a number of major and minor unconformities and of the diverse, and often spectacular paleokarst features associated with these unconformities.