“In this crazy world where survival is all that matters, we come face to face with the new leader of our troubled neighbors, and let me tell you, things get real tense, fast. Garrett and I, we're holding our rifles tight, eyeing them skeptically when they show up. Dad’s not having it with this guy’s friendly overtures and I’m not sure what to believe. Darius, their new leader, and Zane, his right-hand man, they're calm and without weapons. They're talking about food, which hits close to home. I tell them how we've been dealing with the predators, trying to sound confident. But truthfully, we haven’t seen one in a long time. I try to keep my cool as they size us up, trying to figure out who we are in this ragtag settlement. The vibe shifts again, as they spill their own story – searching for a new place to call home, hoping Coeur d’Alene is it. They sound friendly, but you can never be too sure in these times. As we dig deeper, the truth unravels – Darius and Zane's hunt for a fresh start. It's a wild mix of hope and uncertainty. But just when things seem settled, a curveball hits, that messes with our newfound harmony. Zane brings up Paisley, his missing daughter, and that’s when things take a dark turn. Memories and emotions start stirring, and the air gets heavy with tension. Doubt creeps in, and I'm itching to untangle the mess and get to the bottom of what's really going on because there’s no way I’m letting this guy near Paisley.”

"Rough-Hewn Land tells the geologic story of the American West--the story of its rocks, rivers, mountains, earthquakes, and mineral wealth, including gold. It tells it by taking you on a 1000-mile-long field trip across the rough side of the continent from the California coast to the Rocky Mountains. This book puts you on the outcrop, geologic hammer in hand, to explore the evidence for how the spectacular, rough-hewn lands of the West came to be. When North America broke free from Eurasia and Africa some 200 million years ago, it triggered a cascade of violent geologic events that shaped the West we see today. As the west-moving continent crunched across the seabed of the ancient Pacific, islands and assorted pieces of ocean floor collected against its prow to build California--and plant gold there too. Meanwhile, mountains squeezed upward from California to Colorado, and vast quantities of molten rock seeded the crust with precious metals while spewing volcanic fire across the land. Later, the land stretched like an accordion to form the washboard-like Basin and Range province and Great Basin within it, while California began to crackle along the San Andreas fault. Throughout the West today, a near-constant drumroll of earthquakes testifies to a world still reshaping itself in response to the ceaseless movements of the Earth's tectonic plates. Rough-Hewn Land weaves these stories into the human history of the West. As we follow the adventures of John C. Frémont, Mark Twain, the Donner party, and other historic characters, we see how geologic forces have shaped human experience, just as they direct the fate of the West today"--

Best Day on Earth is the definitive photographic guide to the world's most unforgettable travel experiences, from sunrise until after dark.

The classic field guide to snakes found in the Old Dominion, now available in paperback.

Featuring more than three hundred color photographs and nearly fifty distribution maps, Snakes of the Southeast is stuffed with both entertaining and detailed, in-depth information. Includes and explores size charts, key identifiers (scales, body shape, patterns, and color), descriptions of habitat, behavior and activity, food and feeding, reproduction, predators and defense, and conservation.

Seismic waves - generated both by natural earthquakes and by man-made sources - have produced an enormous amount of information about the Earth's interior. In classical seismology, the Earth is modeled as a sequence of uniform horizontal layers (or spherical shells) having different elastic properties and one determines these properties from travel times and dispersion of seismic waves. The Earth, however, is not made of horizontally uniform layers, and classic seismic methods can take large-scale inhomogeneities into account. Smaller-scale irregularities, on the other hand, require other methods. Observations of continuous wave trains that follow classic direct S waves, known as coda waves, have shown that there are heterogeneities of random size scattered randomly throughout the layers of the classic seismic model. This book focuses on recent developments in the area of seismic wave propagation and scattering through the randomly heterogeneous structure of the Earth, with emphasis on the lithosphere. The presentation combines information from many sources to present a coherent introduction to the theory of scattering in acoustic and elastic materials and includes analyses of observations using the theoretical methods developed. The second edition especially includes new observational facts such as the spatial variation of medium inhomogeneities and the temporal change in scattering characteristics and recent theoretical developments in the envelope synthesis in random media for the last ten years. Mathematics is thoroughly rewritten for improving the readability. Written for advanced undergraduates or beginning graduate students of geophysics or planetary sciences, this book should also be of interest to civil engineers, seismologists, acoustical engineers, and others interested in wave propagation through inhomogeneous elastic media.