Books

Books : reviews

J. John Lowe, Michael J. C. Walker.
Reconstructing Quaternary Environments: 2nd edn.
Longman. 1997

This second edition of Reconstructing Quatemary Environments has been revised and updated to provide a new look at the various forms of evidence that can be used to establish the history and scale of environmental changes during the Quatemary. The evidence is extremely diverse, ranging from landforms and sediments, to fossil assemblages and stable isotope ratios. Dating methods are described and evaluated, and the principles and problems of Quaternary stratigraphy and correlation are also considered.

The volume concludes with a new final chapter which examines the evidence for environmental change in the North Atlantic region during the course of the last 130,000 years. This synthesis not only serves to exemplify the methods and approaches that have been described earlier in the book, but it also introduces a number of exciting new ideas that have emerged during the past decade about the patterns and causes of climatic change, as well as the nature of the environmental responses that these induced.