William Lowrie - Fundamentals of Geophysics

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the Universitys mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall 2020

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.org/FoG3e.

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This book is dedicated to Marcia and Carolin

Widespread access to powerful computers, advances in instrumentation, and the expansion of remote sensing of properties of the Earth and some other planets from space missions have resulted in considerable advancements in many fields of geophysics in the years since the second edition of this book was published. During this time the continual spread of internet-related education has made online availability of teaching materials increasingly desirable. These developments encouraged us to prepare this third edition of Fundamentals of Geophysics , and to provide interactive involvement for students in solving problems online in the form of Jupyter Notebooks.

For this edition, William Lowrie, the author of the earlier editions, has been joined by Andreas Fichtner. Both authors are professors of geophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zrich), with different fields of specialization. The collaboration adds expertise and a fresher approach to the different disciplines covered in the book.

Geophysics is often taught as two topics, with titles like general and applied. In fact these are two sides of the same coin, and they often benefit from advances in instrumentation and analysis developed in each others domain. As in the earlier editions, we therefore continue to describe the principal methods in both fields.

It is not possible to explain briefly every recent advancement in an introductory textbook, but we have included some of the most striking. These include the geophysical results from space missions to other bodies in the solar system (e.g., Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Pluto). There has been great progress in remotely sensing the gravitational and magnetic fields of our own planet from orbiting satellites. A new section is added to deal with space geodesy, in which we explain some of the developments that have revolutionized research in geodesy and gravity. New seismic methods for understanding the Earths internal structure are described, for example by analyzing ambient noise. The danger presented by earthquakes can be estimated by probabilistic seismic hazard. Advancements in seismic tomography and the numerical modeling of geophysical processes (e.g., mantle dynamics) have illuminated and posed new questions about our understanding of the Earths interior. Text boxes are used to handle some topics in greater detail than is needed in the body of the text, which, as in the earlier editions, emphasizes fundamental principles in the individual disciplines.

The new structure of the book divides the field of geophysics into 12 chapters, with a little overlap between some of them. In order to keep the price to students as low as possible, the authors decided to continue to use black-and-white figures, avoiding the use of more expensive color. However, as the books title claims, its emphasis is on teaching the fundamental principles and these (mostly) do not change. If necessary, the teacher is in a position to enlarge upon the illustrations with colored examples, of which there is abundant choice in the professional literature. The website provides the solutions to the exercises at the end of each chapter for teachers who want to use them.