Europea n Geosciences Union Luisenstraße 37, 80333 Munich, Germany, Bösmüller, Stockerau, Austria, 2015. 120 p. By edition Lammerhuber. ISBN 978-3-901753-84-8
A Voyage Through Scales is an invitation to contemplate the Earth’s extraordinary variability across space and time scales. Depending on the view point, different features are revealed. Big structures and small structures, elongated in shape, connected, regular sinusoidal forms, vortices, branching structures or the more geometric shapes imposed by humans. They are a legacy of the intertwined processes of the Earth on its voyage through time. We can use them to understand how we arrived at what we see now, or we can use them to predict where we will go in the future.
This book presents photographs from around the world. Each photo comes with a yellow inset diagram with a small blue ellipse indicating the space and time scales of the processes depicted on the photo. The space scales relate, for example, to the diameter of a vortex, the time scales to its life time. The ranges of the diagrams were selected to conform to what humans can experience directly - from a millimetre to the diameter of the Earth, and from seconds to our immediate history of a few hundreds of years. Where measurement instruments are shown, the diagrams give the sampling scales as small squares. The introductory chapter provides a more detailed description of the notion of space and time scales.
This material is presented through the prism of the journals of the European Geosciences Union. The main body of the book is organized into fourteen chapters. Each addresses space-time scales in the field of one of the journals, from Annales Geophysicae that deals with the Sun-Earth system to The Cryosphere that is dedicated to all aspects of frozen water and ground. The authors were asked to interpret the scale issues in their respective fields that challenge our ability to measure, to model, to comprehend.
The final chapter highlights the fundamental editorial concept of these journals – Open Access. The European Geosciences Union, in cooperation with Copernicus Publications, has been a pioneer of Open Access Publication, having published open access journals since 2001, a concept that, since then, has spread to most fields of science.
