Product Description

Our understanding of earthquakes and faulting processes has developed significantly since publication of the successful first edition of this book in 1990. This revised edition has therefore been thoroughly up-dated whilst maintaining and developing the two major themes of the first edition. The first of these themes is the connection between fault and earthquake mechanics, including fault scaling laws, the nature of fault populations, and how these result from the processes of fault growth and interaction. The second major theme is the central role of the rate-state friction laws in earthquake mechanics, which provide a unifying framework within which a wide range of faulting phenomena can be interpreted. With the inclusion of two chapters explaining brittle fracture and rock friction from first principles, this book is written at a level which will appeal to graduate students and research scientists in the fields of seismology, physics, geology, geodesy and rock mechanics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2689854 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Review
‘Scholz has been a key player in earthquake and fault mechanics for at least 30 years. This is his broad perspective of the whole subject and is likely to remain the most important textbook in the area for some time.’ Journal of Geological Magazine

'… included … chapters on brittle fracture and rock friction … provide geologists a foundation for understanding the subsequent discussions on fault and earthquake mechanics.' Environmental and Engineering Geoscience

Customer Reviews

Faultless book on faults?
Christopher Scholz has written a welcome update to the classic 1990 edition of his book, and if you thought that Crustal Deformation was a field where nothing exciting happens, think again! Substantial chunks of the book have been re-written and re-organized to bring the text bang up-to-date with the cutting edge of tectonics and rock mechanics research.
The beauty of this book is that Scholz, along with his students and research associates, basically has been the cutting edge of research in this field for the past 30 years. The book therefore reads as a guide to the evolution of ideas and a personal memoir of scientific exploration, while allowing the reader to follow the same thought processes, and more fully understand what we currently think regarding these subjects.
The text is a monograph, quite different from the usual condescending tone found in textbooks, and can be understood and appreciated by readers of widely differing abilities, from interested laymen to fellow researchers. Thorough explanations are given for each topic, with examples taken from actual scientific papers, putting the reader in touch with the original papers, a glaring omission in many other textbooks. The language is never more complicated than it needs to be, and Scholz's straight-forward explanations and no-nonsense style make comprehension almost too easy, leaving the reader a real feeling that one has learned something at the end, which will come as a breath of fresh air to any student that has suffered through a horribly dull and irrelevent lecture, only to remain scratching their head at the end.
The book is a tribute to the intellect and longeivity of the man's career, blessed as he is with a happy knack for being proven "right" by the passing of time, and continuing accumulation of research results. A classic text, and again, a must-read for anyone with a desire to know more about the planet we live on.