An Introduction to Environmental Chemistry

As concerns mount about the fate of hazardous wastes in the environment and the role of anthropogenic chemicals in global warming, environmental chemistry has become a pivotal discipline. This elementary text is aimed at undergraduate students and readers with little background knowledge to introduce some of the fundamental chemical principles which are used in studies of environmental chemistry and to illustrate how these apply in various cases ranging from the global to local scale. A strong theme of the book is the understanding of how natural geochemical processes operate over time so that the effects of human perturbations can be measured against these. Following an introduction, chapters are concerned with the atmosphere, the terrestrial environment, oceans, and concludes with a chapter on global change. -after Authors