|
Book Review |
P. F. Kerrow and O. L. White (eds). Geological Association of Canada Special Paper 42, 1998. US$120; viii+500pp. ISBN 0-919216-62-5.
| The first 250 words of the full text of this article appear below. Images appear only in PDF or full-text views. |
This is an impressive hardback that covers two basic themes. Firstly, it addresses the speciality of urban geology and, in covering 23 Canadian cities, provides a unique and comprehensive single source of reference material (there are over 1200 referenced papers and reports) covering the regional and applied geology, geotechnics, hydrogeology and construction issues of this vast country. Secondly, the book is a review of the status of urban geotechnical databases, with a call to resurrect the work of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) in the early 1970s. Canada's urban population has increased dramatically since, with a great many environmental, construction and related geological problems. Unfortunately the momentum of the GSC project has been partially lost, although the book describes what is still being carried out in the various cities to collect, collate and make available geotechnical and environmental geological databases to municipal and consulting engineers. The 23 cities selected by the editors have present-day populations exceeding 100 000, and of these only nine are actively developing and maintaining usable geological–geotechnical databases.
The book is well organized and easy to use. It is divided into five regions, with two cities from the mountainous west coast; five from the so-called ‘prairie provinces’; three from the Precambrian Shield; ten from the Great Lakes–St Lawrence corridor; and three from the Atlantic maritime provinces. The book is well indexed, allowing the reader to search by geographical location as well as by subject.
The comprehensive nature of this book is in its geographical coverage.
It
