Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Geophysics

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I tried to use this book as an "updated" textbook for an introductory course on Physics of the Earth (second year geophysics major) I had to taught. Since my area of research is paleomagnetism and rock magnetism the name of William Lowrie was sort of a guarantee that the book would be good. However, in the middle of the term I had to switch back to the "great classics", namely Stacey's and Garland's books. There are several problems with this book, firstly most of the formulae are presented out of the blues without a comprehensive deduction. That is not the most serious problem though, I also found several mistakes in the 2000 edition (I do not know if further editions took care of these problems). Some of these mistakes are pretty serious. As an example: he states that the international formula for the gravity normal to the Earth's ellipsoid derives directly from MacCullah's formula. That is not correct since in MacCullah's formula the centrifugal term coming from Earth's rotation is not considered!!!! There are also lots of minor mistakes related to missing terms in several formulae and derivatives. I did not touch the chapters related to geomagnetism and rock magnetism but I gather they should be the best in the whole book (I really hope so!!!!) since that is precisely William Lowrie's field of research. However I would not recommend this book at all.

This book is what its title says "FUNDAMENTALS", I think it's a pre-basic book about Geophysics. There are other books better than this one, i.e. Telford's "Applied Geophysics" and Garland's "Introduction to Geophysics" (this is what Mr. Lowrie says).