Chapter 1

Motivations and Opportunities

In Chapter 1 we motivate the study of structural geology by introducing selected topics that illustrate the extraordinary breadth of interesting problems and important practical applications of this discipline. For example, we describe a mechanism for mountain building that was discovered in the Henry Mountains of southern Utah in the late 19th Century by one of the pioneers of structural geology, G. K. Gilbert.

The frontispiece for this chapter is a photograph of Mt. Ellsworth in the southern Henry Mountains. The inset is the frontispiece from Gilbert's classic 'Report on the Henry Mountains' (1877) showing the structural dome at Mt. Ellsworth. Other examples involve earthquake hazards in southern California, volcanic structures on Venus, normal faulting in a North Sea petroleum reservoir, and anticracks in limestone of southern France.

Downloadable supplementary materials available at the Cambridge University Press website for the textbook include exercises for students in WORD and PDF format, solutions for instructors in WORD and PDF format, all the images from the text in JPG format for classroom usage, and MATLAB .m scripts for the exercises.

Exercises

Introduction to MATLAB

This is a tutorial introduction to MATLAB that assumes the student has little or no MATLAB experience, but has opened MATLAB and is capable of responding to the instructions on their own computer. The summary section of the tutorial is a set of exercises using a provided script.