"Climate Change in Deserts: Past, Present and Future" by Martin Williams

The book is an invaluable reference for researchers and advanced students interested in the climate and geomorphology of deserts, including geographers, geologists, ecologists, archaeologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, climatologists and natural resource managers.

This book reconstructs climatic changes in deserts and their margins at a variety of scales in space and time. It draws upon evidence from land and sea, including desert dunes, wind-blown dust, river and lake sediments, glacial moraines, plant and animal fossils, isotope geochemistry, speleothems, soils, and prehistoric archaeology.

This volume has three main aims.
One is to examine critically the various lines of evidence from geology, biology and archaeology that have been used to reconstruct climatic change within the arid and semi-arid lands that now occupy some 36 per cent of the land area of the globe.
The second aim is to trace systematically the climatic history of the deserts from the inception of Cenozoic aridity some 30 million years ago through the fluctuations of the past 2.5 million years of Quaternary time until the droughts and floods of the present day.
The final aim is inherently more speculative, but worthwhile withal, because it seeks to use the insights from our study of past events to envisage howhuman societies are likely to interact with possible future climatic changes in the desert world.

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Climatic change in deserts: An introduction
2 Present-day desert environments
3 Cenozoic evolution of deserts
4 Adaptations to life in deserts
5 Evolution of desert research
6 Dating desert landforms and sediments
7 Stable isotope analysis and trace element geochemistry
8 Desert dunes
9 Desert dust
10 Desert rivers
11 Desert lakes
12 The pluvial debate
13 Desert glaciations
14 Speleothems and tufas in arid areas
15 Desert soils, paleosols and duricrusts
16 Plant and animal fossils in deserts
17 Prehistoric occupation of deserts
18 African and Arabian deserts
19 Asian deserts
20 North American deserts
21 South American deserts
22 Australian deserts
23 Historic floods and droughts
24 Desertification: Causes, consequences and solutions
25 Current climatic trends and possible future changes
26 Towards sustainable use of deserts
Bibliography
Index