Customer Reviews

Cave Geology

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This is an excellent book written by one greatest cave and karst geologists in the world. It contains information that is useful for cavers, geology students and anyone interested in cave geology. It is fully understandable with no background in the subject. A must have for any caver.

I was looking forward to this book during all the years it was rumored to be forthcoming, because even Palmer's journal articles are unusually lucid. I am not disappointed. This is a very nice book.

In the first nine chapters, Palmer leads the reader through all the principles of the geology of solution caves, from elementary concepts of geology through difficult topics like the chemistry and dynamics of limestone dissolution. To have done all this in a way that should be understandable to a high-school senior is a considerable feat of organization and ability to anticipate students' questions. There is no calculus, and where algebraic equations are used, he generally walks the reader through a numerical example. He is careful to clarify things that might be misunderstood, such as that by lower, applied to a negative quantity such as '34S, he means more negative, not closer to 0. He is careful to define technical terms he uses, and he even footnotes the pronunciation of things like gneiss, polje, and Cvijic', a boon to those of us who learn our geology from books instead of lectures. When a mechanism is of possible theoretical interest but unlikely to be significant except in unusual circumstances, he is careful to point that out. In some of the later of these chapters, his enthusiasm for giving examples from around the world does result in a few that are just curiosities and others that are not explained very clearly or completely. This and a certain amount of gratuitous citing of references are symptoms of some indecision about whether the book was to be a textbook or a scholarly monograph, but at least the reader is exposed to the full diversity of solution caves.

Subsequent chapters discuss cave minerals, lava caves, airflow and weathering in caves, and dating of passages and speleothems. A chapter on research techniques describes Palmer's methods for making careful and accurate vertical surveys of passages in order to study the effect of geologic structure on a cave, a specialty of his, and also briefly mentions geophysical techniques, although even a professional geologist will need specialist help with those. The fifteenth chapter briefly surveys applications of cave geology to other fields like land management and water supply. There are over 750 figures, nearly two per page. The roughly one thousand references listed are almost all in English and almost all from books or academic journals on paper (the scholarly monograph won out here).

The layout by the author is fully professional, and there are only a very few typos or editing glitches.

"Cave Geology" is not only the best major book on the subject available, it is also the cheapest. The main text is 405 large pages with two columns of fairly small type, so there is a lot there, and you won't read it in a couple of days or even a week. And, while you should understand most of it while you're reading it, you won't have learned it all. I still haven't, even with the help of the other ten thousand pages of cave geology I've read over too many years. But you will absorb the general ideas, and this is the book you will go back to later for the details.--Bill Mixon

This is one truly outstanding book, written from a person who clearly has great literary gift. Easy to read, very well organized, very informative. Tremendous effort and knowledge are needed to produce such a work. I bought this based on a lot of reviews and personal recommendations. Even then it surpassed my expectations. I am a speleology instructor, own a speleology school and have been an active caver for 25 years, so I am not easily impressed at all. Buy it, you won't regret. Kudos to the author for producing such a gem.

Cave geology is a college text book in many schools. It reads as such. This book answers almost every question you could ever have about formations, cave creation, hydrology, geology, etc.. The book also extensively references other books, Art gives you a long list of books to read if you want more in any area. I highly recommend this to any caver. I would almost make it mandatory reading to consider your self a real caver.