Eos, Vol. 83, No.
13, 26 March 2002
ray tracing seismologists should be aware of.
As far as I know, I am not aware of another
book providing a so extensive description
of these new features. Complete and original
reflection and transmitted coefficients presen­
tation illustrates the ambition of the author to
write a book which could be used as a refer­
ence book. Detailed discussions of ray polar­
ization, ray amplitude and, finally ray series
expansion for both acoustic, elastic media
complete the picture of what is developed
by the author.
Very logically the reader is now ready for a
presentation of the numerous strategies for
ray seismogram constructions either in the
time domain or in the frequency domain
including the integral summation in both
time and frequency domains.
If this book is an exceptional contribution
to seismic ray theory and, more generally to
ray theory in many fields, it does not intend
to tackle the enormous problem of medium
description, especially in three-dimensional
configuration.Therefore, practical constructions
of ray tools should require additional readings
essentially based on computer graphic theory
How to interpolate a velocity field, how to find
the intersection between a ray and an inter­
face rely more on analytical geometry field
than on asymptotic theory itself and ray trac­
ing software efficiency will strongly depend
on well-designed tools which are nothing to do
with ray tracing theory itself. A complementary
reading is, therefore, necessary for reaching
the computer programming level.
Reviewer
Jean Virieux
Universite de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, UMR
Geosciences Azur,Valbonne, France
New Perspectives on
the Old Red Sandstone
PAGE 153
P . F. FRIEND AND B . P . J .
WILLIAMS (EDS.)
Geological Society Special Publication No. 180,
400 pp., ISBN 1-86239-071-1,2000, $142.
The Old Red Sandstone is amongst the most
distinctive and well-known stratigraphic units
in the British Isles. It is mainly of Devonian
age; in fact, its lower boundary was used to
define the base of the Devonian until relative­
ly recently, and it was called "Old" back in the
nineteenth century to distinguish it from a
superficially similar succession of Triassic age
named the New Red Sandstone. The Old Red
Sandstone has long been known to be a non-
marine syntectonic to post-tectonic deposit
associated with the Caledonian Orogeny One
of the most famous outcrops of the red sand­
stone is at Siccar Point in northeast England
at one of several outcrops named "Hutton's
unconformity" where it lies, with marked
angularity, on Silurian lithic sandstones and
shales. It was at these outcrops, toward the
end of the eigthteenth century that James
Hutton first came to understand the meaning
of angular unconformities as structures
representing vast amounts of missing time
during which major upheavals of the Earth's
crust occurred.
One of the main reasons why so much atten­
tion has been focused on the Old Red Sand­
stone is because of its tectonic associations.
Unravelling the relationships between struc­
tural characteristics and stratigraphic architec­
ture and the light these relationships throw
on regional tectonics has been one of the
most important strands of the research under­
taken to reconstruct the later stages of the
Caledonian collision between Laurentia, Baltica,
and Africa. In addition, some of the early,
important work on the nature of cyclic sedi­
mentation in non-marine deposits and the
evolution of early vertebrates was based on
research carried out on these deposits.
The Caledonian Orogen is immense, extend­
ing from Florida to Newfoundland to northern
Greenland and Norway, and deposits of Old
Red facies are found along the length of this
orogen. In New York and Pennsylvania, they
comprise the well-known Catskill Delta. My
Ph.D. thesis research was carried out on one
of the few fragments of Old Red Sandstone not
described in this book, in Prince of Wales
Island in the Canadian Arctic, which I concluded
was formed following uplift triggered by far-
field Caledonian stresses acting along a line
of weakness in the Canadian Shield.
Hutton's unconformity at Siccar Point is
now understood as the record of the closure
of the Iapetus Ocean that formerly lay
between Baltica and Laurentia.The uplifted
Silurian sediments represent deep-marine
continental margin deposits formed in the
remnant ocean prior to collision, while the
Old Red Sandstone is the syntectonic to
post-tectonic product of uplift and erosion
of the Caledonian orogen. For the general
reader, the most interesting part of New Per­
spectives on the Old Red Sandstone is likely
to be the first three papers, which constitute
a set of reviews dealing with Devonian
chronostratigraphy and the kinematics and
dynamics of Old Red Sandstone basins.
P F Friend and B.P J.Williams, two of
Britain's leading sedimentologists and stratig-
raphers of the non-marine record, are listed
as co-authors of two of these papers (together
with E.A.Williams and M.Ford),while Michael
House, an eminent biostratigrapher, is the
author of the third paper. Both Friend and
Williams have long associations with the Old
Red Sandstone in Britain, Canada, Greenland,
Svalbard, and the United States, having carried
out research projects throughout Old Red
Sandstone country stretching back 30 years
or more.Their synthesis of plate kinematics
draws on a large base of published literature
and employs our current understanding of
the formation of sedimentary basins in
response to crustal stresses. Although they
focus on Britain, the synthesis, as in Dewey's
classic 1982 paper on the plate tectonics of
Britain, stretches from Florida to Svalbard.
The remainder of the book consists of a
series of 28 research papers dealing with spe­
cific basins, in which such details as facies
architecture, geochemistry, structural deforma­
tion, and fossil content are described and, in
most cases, placed into a regional paleogeo-
graphic and tectonic context. These regional
studies are grouped under the headings East­
ern North America, Ireland-Dingle and North,
Ireland-Munster, Wales, Scotland, Norway, and
the Arctic. More than one-third of the book is
devoted to the two sections on Ireland.
Some of the regional studies—such as that
by B.J. Bluck,which deals with Midland Scot­
land—provide a regional overview. Others,
such as the only study that deals with a Cana­
dian location, are more specialized, in this
case employing facies analysis methods to
better understand plant paleoecology It is
clear that Old Red Sandstone studies are
alive and well and very much part of
mainstream modern, multidisciplinary
geological research. Hutton, I am sure, would
be utterly astonished.
Reviewer
Andrew D. Miall
Department of Geology, University of Toronto,
Ontario, Canada
Continental
Reactivation and
Reworking
PAGE 153
J. A . MILLER, R . E . HOLDSWORTH,
By I. S. BUICK, AND M . HAND (EDS.)
Geological Society Special Publication 184, The
Geological Society, London, ISBN 1-86239-080-0,
408 pp., 2001, $142.
Continental crust may be repeatedly deformed,
metamorphosed, intruded, and eroded
over time by plate boundary and intra-plate
processes, and mantle lithosphere may have
an equally dynamic evolution during orogenesis.
The sum of these events is displayed in rocks
and structures that we see at the surface and
infer for the parts of the lithosphere we can't
directly observe. The "reworking" of continental
lithosphere involves many processes that
operate at different spatial and temporal scale.
Thus, a collection of papers on the subject of
continental reactivation and reworking is nec­
essarily multidisciplinary, with contributions
from structural geology geochronology petrol­
ogy, sedimentary geology, geophysics, and
various types of geodynamical modeling.
Many of the papers in Continental Reactiva­
tion and Reworking are related to presentations
made at a conference,"Orogenesis in the
Outback," which was held in 1999 in Alice
Springs, Australia.The Paleozoic Alice Springs
orogeny has been described by many workers
as an intra-plate event, and nearly half of the
papers in this volume describe and debate the