Book Review
Introduction to Seismology, by Peter Shearer
Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999, 304 pages.
Paperback, ISBN 0521669537; hardcover, ISBN
0521660238.
In teaching seismology (to students who may have essentially
no prior familiarity with the subject) there has always, in my
experience, been a significant gap between the general phe-
nomenological undergraduate-level texts on earthquakes and
associated issues and the advanced, terser, and specialized
theoretical or applied seismology texts (especially Aki and
Richards' Quantitative Seismology, which has tragically gone
out of print, but which we all hope will be updated and
republished soon?). For me, this situation has necessitated
assembling material from a wide variety of sources, including
home-grown notes, the peer-reviewed literature, features of
my own professors' notes from graduate school, and the
Web.
It is thus exciting to see a concise and practical survey
text that does a fine job of covering the basics and is adapt-
able for both upper-level undergraduate and introductory
graduate courses. The book's eleven short chapters and five
appendices span essentially the entire field, including a brief
historical summary, stress-strain and wave equation con-
cepts, ray theory, and basic source theory. Although most
applied discussion centers on earthquake issues, there is a
chapter on reflection techniques to ensure that students
acquire a conceptual familiarity with reflection stacking and
migration. Chapters are generally just ten to twenty pages
long and are written in simple and intelligible prose with
basic figures. Each chapter is thus sized conveniently for one
to two lectures, and a survey course based on this text could
be made to fit conveniently into a semester timeframe.
Topics are primarily presented at a general physics level,
rather than being linked to copious topical references in the
literature. Because of this, the book should remain funda-
mentally useful as an educational resource for a long time.
The only portion of the book for which this general princi-
452 SeismologicalResearchLetters Volume71,Number1 January/February2000
pie is not as rigorously followed is the obligatory final chap-
ter on "earthquake prediction." However, even that chapter
is succinct and general enough to provide a useful basic sum-
mary of crucial issues in this area of profound general inter-
est, irrespective of any significant future progress that might
occur.
As is appropriate for the scope of the book, the ten or so
exercises in each chapter, like the text itself, do not empha-
size derivations, but rather concentrate on spurring physical
insight and illustrating important results. The computer-ori-
ented components of the problem sets include some accom-
panying Fortran 77 subroutines in the text and appendix.
Although I sincerely doubt that many students are program-
ming in Fortran (I assign all such problems in Matlab these
days), Fortran subroutines are at least extremely easy to
translate into other languages. Students who are just begin-
ning to develop a facility with complex numbers and vector
calculus will benefit from a convenient math review
appendix.
I see two basic niches for this text. In isolation, it is ide-
ally suited for an intermediate-to-advanced undergraduate
class where either engineers or nonseismology geophysics
and other students can acquire a basic understanding of the
concepts and important applications of the field. In a more
advanced course context, this text provides a useful baseline
reference and jumping-off point for more in-depth teaching
incorporating material from other resources. I am looking
forward to using the text in this context this year in a gradu-
ate-level Theoretical Seismology course at New Mexico Tech.
I envision that Introduction to Seismology will become a stan-
dard reference that will be a benefit to both the seismological
and broader communities for many years to come. El
Rick Aster
Associate Professor of Geophysics
Department of Earth and Environmental Science
New Mexico Tech
Socorro, NM 87801
aster@ dutch m a n.nmt. edu