James Benton is surprised at the role the mineral jacksonite has played in his life. Now jacksonite has brought Benton to Colliery, the headquarters of the immensely powerful and wealthy Jacksonite Corporation. He will know this world, and liberate it--and in process liberate something deep within himself.

Resources running low, the population exploding, the planet is in danger: are we masters of our own destruction, or have we been invaded by aliens bent on mass extinction? Is this a pattern across the entire universe, or just our small sector of cosmic life? This new title in our successful Gothic Fantasy Short Stories series explores the theme of a dying planet, written by a fabulous mix of classic, ancient and brand new writing, with contemporary authors from all over the world. For the first time we’ve made a conscious effort to reach beyond our usual submissions seeking broader voices. This book offers a glorious mix of American, British, Canadian, Italian, Indian, Spanish and Chinese writers with contributions from Barton Aikman, V.K. Blackwell, Steve Carr, Brandon Crilly, AnaMaria Curtis, Kate Dollarhyde, Megan Dorei, Stephanie Ellis, Anita Ensal, E.E. King, Michael Kortes, Raymond Little, Ken Liu, Thana Niveau, John B. Rosenman, Sydney Rossman-Reich, Elizabeth Rubio, Zach Shephard, Shikhandin, Alex Shvartsman, Kristal Stittle, Rebecca E. Treasure, Francesco Verso, and Marian Womack. These sit alongside classic stories by authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, Stanley G. Weinbaum, H.G. Wells and more, as well as stretching back much further, to the Norse Eddas and Sagas, and an Ancient Egyptian Myth on the death of humankind.

A new and detailed picture of Mercury is emerging thanks to NASA’s MESSENGER mission that spent four years in orbit about the Sun’s innermost planet. Comprehensively illustrated by close-up images and other data, the author describes Mercury’s landscapes from a geological perspective: from sublimation hollows, to volcanic vents, to lava plains, to giant thrust faults. He considers what its giant core, internal structure and weird composition have to tell us about the formation and evolution of a planet so close to the Sun. This is of special significance in view of the discovery of so many exoplanets in similarly close orbits about their stars. Mercury generates its own magnetic field, like the Earth (but unlike Venus, Mars and the Moon), and the interplay between Mercury’s and the Sun’s magnetic field affects many processes on its surface and in the rich and diverse exosphere of neutral and charged particles surrounding the planet. There is much about Mercury that we still don’t understand. Accessible to the amateur, but also a handy state-of-the-art digest for students and researchers, the book shows how our knowledge of Mercury developed over the past century of ground-based, fly-by and orbital observations, and looks ahead at the mysteries remaining for future missions to explore.

One Man's Planet is a slightly off-centered geologist's introduction to how politics, pop-culture and the earth sciences mix it up every day in all of our lives. A humorous look at a myriad of issue that grace the news and drive political debates from local councils to international discourse. One Man’s Planet picks apart the rhetoric on all sides of these debates to look at how the science describes the issue, often to the nakedness of the opposing parties. Tackling topics like climate, energy, water, and hazards, Stephen Testa channels Beanie Babies, Mad Max, and Shakespeare among others to examine the latest scientific understanding of these issues. Author Stephen Testa weaves science, personalities, pop culture and politics into a very informative and entertaining tapestry on the planet today and the planet's tomorrow. Come tour the Earth with Testa as your guide!

‘OUT OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT II’ is a sequel to my first book OUT OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT I about the paranormal and the supernatural. I am sure that you have already noticed the vicious dragon on the front cover coming out of the Bottomless Pit along with locusts with scorpion tails and ferocious giants coming out of the Pit and attacking people taken from the Book of Revelation chapter 9. What will a transhuman technology do to our future? Is it wise to create hybrids? Could some of our tinkering in dark science end up coming to haunt mankind? I have personally met the ‘Men in Black’ many years ago and had many strange paranormal experiences in seeing UFO’s on five different occasions. Some of the experiences were not pleasant. What are the Ley-lines? Why does science pretend to know so much, when in fact they know very little because they deny so much! Why? Because they leave out the supernatural and the fact there are many other dimensions. - The Author

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Large Meteorite Impacts and Planetary Evolution held at the Vredefort Dome, South Africa, in Aug. 2008.

Chapter 3 The First Judgment: The World Prior To Adam There may have been many judgments upon the earth since its beginning millions or billions of years ago; however, the present commentary will deal only with the last tens of thousands of years of earth’s existence. In Genesis 1:2, the verses written by Moses (as author of the Genesis account) portray an earth that was veiled in darkness so that its form could not be discerned. The earth at that time was covered with water (ice) high above the mountain tops so that it gave the appearance of being a dark revolving sphere of frozen water (Table-2). God’s spirit is described as hovering over this revolving ball of water and brooding over the sad condition of this dark, void planet. God did not create a dark and dismal planet at the beginning, because God does not create darkness; in fact, darkness is incompatible with His existence and presence. So what had happened that God viewed (Gen. 1:2) such a decrepit state of the world? Does scripture attempt to explain this phenomenon, or does the inspired word of God remain silent on this issue? It was first proposed as a theory by the Scotsman Thomas Chalmers in the early 19th century that a “gap” in time existed between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. This gap-in-time would encompass a “ruin-reconstruction theme” and the existence of pre-Adamic living beings. Obviously, a huge catastrophic event would have had to occur to produce this decadent state of the world. The “gap concept” was later popularized by mention in the margin notes of the Scofield Reference Bible.

This volume is an introduction to the study of the earth sciences, a multitude of the earth's composition; geology, which embraces geochemistry, the science the science of the earth's structure; meteorology and climatology, the study of both local and planetary weather; tectonics, the fledgling science of the move ment of sections of the earth, of earthquakes, and of volcanoes; biology and agricultural engineering; the water cycle and reclamation; the chemistry of the atmosphere and the origin of the changes it undergoes; the seas, the oceans, or oceanography; beach movement and deserts; hydrology, the science of water from the viewpoint of the sources of energy; pressure and temperature effects; the crust or lithosphere; the hydrosphere, or water areas; the atmosphere, winds, weather, hurricanes, and cyclones, as well as the technology of tracking them; the interfaces of the sections of the planet, and the uses of the earth by its peoples. The human race has developed on the crust and at the interfaces of the land, air, and sea of an unstable planet - a dynamic geological entity whose thermal equilibrium is still millions of years away. The crust of the earth in its movement and cracking evolves earthquakes and volcanoes which are destructive of human work and limit our habitation. Over the last 1500 years, earthquakes have killed as many people as now inhabit the planet, and fifteen times the present U. S. population.

The present volume focuses on Henry Bate, the first scholar to bring Ibn Ezra’s astrological work to the knowledge of Latin readers, and offers critical editions of all six of Henry Bate’s complete translations of Ibn Ezra’s astrological writings.