Customer Reviews

Meteorite Craters and Impact Structures of the Earth

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What the reader expects is an atlas of these crater structures, but what you get is little more than the content provided by any other run-of-the-mill tourist type book. This could have been a great work had there been some real meat and history added. Above all else, however is the insult of a [high]price tag ... outragious.

This book contains short discriptions, with some photos and usually a local map to be used when exploring each impact structure on the ground. It is not intended as an in-depth scientific discussion of the impact process or of any particular terrestrial impact structure, but rather, as a "travel guide" to impact sites. It fullfils this purpose admirably.

This is, as the Lunar Planetary Institute (LPI - [...]) points out, a useful book as a survey of major terrestrial impact structures. However, the printing screen on the images is coarse and the publisher should reconsider another edition with better reproductions. Quality of imagery presents a large part of the information for this topic. With resources online such as [...], I wonder why this book does not take more advantage of digital resources. As an author myself, I have real sympathy with the publications costs for a book that has as many images as this one does. Is there a possibility that the publisher can re-issue this book in color digital-on-demand format? It might have potential then as a coffee table book as well as an information source.

As for updates, even though the publication date is January 2010, many of the images seem old or have poor resolution, an issue in this age of digital plus satellite photography. For example, the LPI has presented some outstanding geophysical imagery of the Yucatan Chicxulub structure. It is not exposed at the surface, being about 65 my old, so only geophysical images show its configuration and extent. Further, the LPI gravity anomaly image has the 90 km trench that leads into the structure of overlying rings that are in turn overlain by a pair of "jets" that point into the Caribbean. All this detail underlies reasoning about the sequence of events connected to the impact of the 10 km asteroid that created Chicxulub (Mayan: "tail of the devil") is absent from the published grayscale image.

I was delighted to note that the helpful bibliography contains a reference to an Arthur Upfield "Napoleon Bonaparte" detective novel that takes place at the West Australian Wolfe Creek Crater. But the novel is "Will of the Tribe" rather than "Death of a Swagman" (location: Lake Mungo/Walls of China in New South Wales). A database at [...] has higher resolution images of the Wolfe Creek impact structure.

I found this book somewhat helpful if accompanied by a listing of impact structures by age as well as academic sites that discuss the geophysics of impacts beyond some basic diagrams and the thin sections of shocked quartz grains that accompany non-terrestrially created shock waves. Those who would like to extend their knowledge of impact structures to our larger solar system may find the pattern matching interesting because bolide collisions are common events in our astronomical neighborhood.

Dr. Hodge appropriately dedicated his work to Eugene Shoemaker, the astro-geologist who perished in a road accident in Australia while on a trip to evaluate impact structures. The Teague Ring in Australia now honors the memory of this geologist, whose ashes now reside on our Moon.

This book is great for identifying craters and for providing guidance to visit them. the maps and descriptions were very good, you can plan a trip from this book.