This abundantly illustrated book provides a concise overview of our understanding of the entire mantle, its evolution since early differentiation and the consequences of superplumes for earth surface processes. The book’s balanced authorship has produced a state-of-the-science report on the emerging concept of superplumes. This presents a new concept to explain catastrophic events on Earth through geologic time.

This abundantly illustrated book provides a concise overview of our understanding of the entire mantle, its evolution since early differentiation and the consequences of superplumes for earth surface processes. The book’s balanced authorship has produced a state-of-the-science report on the emerging concept of superplumes. This presents a new concept to explain catastrophic events on Earth through geologic time.

Presents an introduction to volcanoes and earthquakes, explaining how the movement of the Earth's interior plates cause their formation and describing the volcanoes which currently exist around the world as well as some of the famous earthquakes of the nineteenth through twenty-first cenuturies.

Surveys the origin of continents, and the accretion and breakup of supercontinents through earth history. This book also shows how these processes affected the composition of seawater, climate, and the evolution of life.

Fifty years ago, Tuzo Wilson published his paper asking `Did the Atlantic close and then re-open?’. This led to the `Wilson Cycle’ concept in which the repeated opening and closing of ocean basins along old orogenic belts is a key process in the assembly and breakup of supercontinents. The Wilson Cycle underlies much of what we know about the geological evolution of the Earth and its lithosphere, and will no doubt continue to be developed as we gain more understanding of the physical processes that control mantle convection, plate tectonics, and as more data become available from currently less accessible regions. This volume includes both thematic and review papers covering various aspects of the Wilson Cycle concept. Thematic sections include: (1) the Classic Wilson v. Supercontinent Cycles, (2) Mantle Dynamics in the Wilson Cycle, (3) Tectonic Inheritance in the Lithosphere, (4) Revisiting Tuzo’s question on the Atlantic, (5) Opening and Closing of Oceans, and (6) Cratonic Basins and their place in the Wilson Cycle.

This book on multiscale seismic tomography, written by one of the leaders in the field, is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and professionals in Earth and planetary sciences who need to broaden their horizons about seismotectonics, volcanism, and interior structure and dynamics of the Earth and Moon. It describes the state-of-the-art in seismic tomography, with emphasis on the new findings obtained by applying tomographic methods in local, regional, and global scales for understanding the generating mechanism of large and great earthquakes such as the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake (Mw 9.0), crustal and upper mantle structure, origin of active arc volcanoes and intraplate volcanoes including hotspots, heterogeneous structure of subduction zones, fate of subducting slabs, origin of mantle plumes, mantle convection, and deep Earth dynamics. The first lunar tomography and its implications for the mechanism of deep moonquakes and lunar evolution are also introduced.