This unique book presents hundreds of spectacular photographs of large-scale to small-scale field geological features of flood basalt volcanism from around the world. Major flood basalt provinces covered in this book include the British Palaeogene, Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, Columbia River, Deccan, East Greenland, Emeishan, Ethiopian, Ferrar-Karoo-Tasmania, Iceland, Indo-Madagascar, Paraná, Siberian, West Greenland, and others. Intermediate- to small-sized flood basalts (such as Saudi Arabia and South Caucasus) are also included.
Different chapters of the book illustrate varied features of flood basalts, including landscapes, lava flow morphology and stacking, structures formed during lava flow transport, inflation and degassing, structures produced during lava solidification, subaqueous volcanism and volcanosedimentary associations, explosive volcanism, intrusions, igneous processes and magmatic diversity, tectonic deformation, secondary mineralization, and weathering and erosion.
This book will be valuable for a large audience: specialists studying flood basalt volcanology, petrology, geochemistry, geochronology, geophysics, and environmental impact and mass extinction links; nonspecialists who want to know more about flood basalts; field geologists (such as those working in geological surveys); students of volcanology and igneous petrology, and even people employed in the industry, such as those working on flood basalt-hosted groundwater or petroleum reservoirs.
About the Author: Dr. Hetu Sheth (1972 - ) is a Professor of Igneous Petrology and Volcanology in the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay, Mumbai). He earned his B.Sc. (Geology) from Mumbai University in 1992, and his M.Sc. (Applied Geology) in 1994 and PhD in 1998 from IIT Bombay. He then did post-doctoral work at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL, Ahmedabad, India), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the University of Hawaii (USA), and the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (TIFR, Mumbai). He was Deputy Website Manager of www.mantleplumes.org (2003-05), Associate, Indian Academy of Sciences (2003-07), and Associate Editor of the Journal of Earth System Science (2004-07). He has published and reviewed many tens of papers, co-edited two research volumes, and won several awards including the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Young Scientist Medal (2003), the IIT Bombay Young Investigator Award (2007), the Indian Geophysical Union (IGU) Krishnan Medal (2010), the National Geoscience Award of the Ministry of Mines, Govt. of India (2010), and the M. R. Srinivasa Rao Award in Petrology of the Geological Society of India (2017). His major research interests are flood basalt volcanism and volcanic rifted margins, and he has additional broader interests in intraplate and arc volcanism, anorthosites, granites and rhyolites, and crustal evolution.
