Books about Anthropogenic from Amazon.com

Amazonian Dark Earths are not only a testament to the vanished civilizations of the Amazon Basin, but may provide the answer to how the large, sophisticated societies were able to sustain intensive agriculture in an environment with mostly infertile soils. Locally known as Terra Preta de Indio or Indian black earth, these anomalous soils are even today fertile and highly productive. Though clearly associated with pre-European settlements questions remain whether the Dark Earths were intentionally produced or merely a by-product of habitation activities. This publication provides a comprehensive review of our current understanding of these fascinating soils: their origin, properties, and management through time. These new and multidisciplinary perspectives by leading experts on Amazonian Dark Earths may pave the way for the next revolution of soil management in the humid tropics..
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The regenerative qualities identified in prehistoric, anthropogenic Amazonian dark earths suggest that notoriously infertile tropical soils can be greatly improved. Soil enhancement practices by ancient Amerindians allowed them to intensively cultivate the land, without needing to continually clear new fields from forest. As increasing populations place ever greater pressure on tropical forests, this legacy of rich, "living" soils warrants further study in the search for high-yield, land intensive, yet sustainable forms of management. This volume’s international group of contributors provides a variety of stances centering on aspects of the origin, distribution, variability, persistence, and use of Amazonian dark earths.

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Satellite observations and computing technology have advanced our understanding of the monsoon climate enormously in the last two decades. The author provides an update of the knowledge gained over this period, presenting the modern morphology and the physical principles of monsoon climate variation on all time scales ranging from intraseasonal to tectonic time scales. He brings new ideas that can be expected to markedly improve the prediction of monsoon climate, and includes contributions by experts who expand our understanding of the monsoon environment by their study of paleoclimate records, who present evidence of human influences on monsoon climate, and who describe the links of the monsoon to the economy and to human health.

This is a comprehensive interdisciplinary text book summarizing new knowledge of Asian monsoon climate variability, dynamics, modeling, and prediction from intraseasonal to geological time scales, and human influence and its links to environmetal/economic issues.

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Price: $195.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The book presents an overview of the main hazards affecting karst, including collapse and subsidence phenomena, hydrological hazards and human-induced geohazards. Consideration is also given to the problems of geohazard management in karst. The geological and hydrological properties of karst terrains make them among the most fragile in the world and pose serious problems for land managers. Sustainable development in these terrains requires efforts to limit geohazards of anthropogenic origin and to recognize and mitigate against those of natural origin. Aimed at providing the reader with worldwide case studies, the contributions cover a range of geological and morphological settings. Geographically, the fourteen papers discuss very different karst areas, from North America, the Caribbean and Asia to several karst areas in Europe, including the British Isles, Spain, France and Italy..
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This book deals with environmental and human risk problems caused by contamination from the perspective of real world applications with quantitative procedures. It includes risk methods for the discussion of environmental problems where data are sparse or fuzzy, as well as incorporating political, social and economic considerations in determining directions of remediation solutions for environmental contaminant problems. Furthermore, it highlights the impact of contaminants on human health, in some cases ultimately leading to death, as well as the anthropogenic exacerbation of natural processes.

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Price: $109.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is a journal article from Atmospheric Environment, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The paper reviews the current state of knowledge regarding global emissions of mercury and presents a new inventory of global emissions of mercury to the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources for the year 2000. The largest emissions of Hg to the global atmosphere occur from combustion of fossil fuels, mainly coal in utility, industrial, and residential boilers. As much as two-thirds of the total emission of ca. 2190ton of Hg emitted from all anthropogenic sources worldwide in 2000 came from combustion of fossil fuels. Emissions of Hg from coal combustion are between one and two orders of magnitude higher than emissions from oil combustion, depending on the country. Various industrial processes account for additional 30% of Hg emissions from anthropogenic sources worldwide in 2000. Major contribution to emissions from this source category comes from gold production using Hg technology. The Asian countries contributed about 54% to the global Hg emission from anthropogenic sources in 2000, followed by Africa (18%) and Europe, including the European part of Russia (11%). China heads the list of the 10 countries with highest Hg emissions from anthropogenic activities. With more than 600ton of Hg, China contributes about 28% to the global emissions of mercury. It is expected that future changes of Hg emissions from anthropogenic sources worldwide until the year 2020 should be within +/-20% of the current estimates, although this assessment should be treated with great caution. Emission estimates for various continents presented in this paper were used to prepare global emission maps. These maps are presented in a companion paper (Wilson et al., 2005. Spatial distribution of global anthropogenic mercury atmospheric emissions. Atmospheric Environment, in this issue). .
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