Encyclopedia of Caves

About this book

Encyclopedia of Caves is a self-contained, beautifully illustrated work dedicated to caves and their unique environments. It includes more than 100 comprehensive articles from leading scholars and explorers in 15 different countries. Each entry is detailed and scientifically sound, yet accessible for students and non-scientists. This large-format reference is enhanced with hundreds of full-colour photographs, maps, and drawings from the authors' own work, which provide unique images of the underground environment. This version includes 24 new articles commissioned especially for this 2nd edition.

Contents

1. Types of Caves
2. Cave features
3. Hydrology and Hydrogeology
4. Speleothems and other cave deposits
5. Cave ages and paleoclimate
6. Exceptional caves
7. Biology of particular organisms in caves
8. Ecology
9. Cave invasion
10. Biogeography and Diversity
11. Evolution and Adaptation in Caves
12. Exploration of Caves
13. Contemporary use of caves
14. Historical use of caves
15. Ground water contamination and land use hazards in cave regions

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Biography

William B. White is Professor Emeritus of Geochemistry at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a BS degree in chemistry from Juniata College (Huntingdon, PA) and a PhD in geochemistry from Penn State. Prior to his retirement, Dr White spent 40 years teaching at Penn State including a course on the geology of caves and karst. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Speleological Society and the Mineralogical Society of America. Other books on caves and karst include Geomorphology and Hydrology of Karst Terrains, Karst Hydrology: Concepts from the Mammoth Cave Area (with E.L. White), Benchmark Papers in Karst Science (with D. Culver), and The Caves of Burnsville Cove, Virginia.

David C. Culver received his B.A. from Grinnell College and his PhD from Yale University. He is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at American University He has studied the ecology, evolution, biogeography, and biodiversity of the subterranean fauna for five decades and has published more than 120 papers in refereed journals, and authored or co-authored four books, two with Tanja Pipan. His studies of the subterranean fauna have taken him to more than 20 countries. He was co-editor with William B. White of the first two editions of the Encyclopedia of Caves.

Tanja Pipan received her PhD in biology from the University of Ljubljana. She is currently Research Advisor at the Karst Research Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC-SAZU) and Professor of Biology at the University of Nova Gorica. She has broad research interests in subterranean biology, especially biodiversity, biogeography, ecology of shallow subterranean habitats, and ecosystem function. She has extensive experience with a variety of Slovenian subterranean habitats and has done the most extensive ecological study to date of the very rich fauna found in the epikarst. Since 2011 she is an associate editor of the Journal of Speleology for the field of biospeleology. She has travelled extensively in her study of the epikarst and other subsurface habitats.