Earth materials. Introduction to mineralogy and petrology / Состав Земли. Введение в минералогию и петрологию

Over the past two decades, many curriculum changes have occurred in geology, Earth science, and environmental science programs in universities. Many of these have involved the compression of separate one-semester courses in mineralogy, optical mineralogy, and petrology into a single-semester offering that combines mineralogy and petrology, commonly called Earth Materials. Such a course is a challenge to the instructor (or a team of instructors) and the students. This is especially so when few, if any, textbooks for such a one-semester course have been available.
 This text, Earth Materials , is an introduction to mineralogy and petrology in which both subjects are covered with a roughly even balance. To keep this textbook reasonably short and applicable to a one-semester course, we decided against providing a shallow survey of everything and instead concentrated on what we consider the most fundamental aspects of the various subjects.  In the writing of this text, we assumed that the students who enroll in an Earth materials course would have previously taken an introductory physical geology course, as well as a course in college-level chemistry. <...>