The Transantarctic Mountains: rocks, ice, meteorites and water, Gunter Faure & Teresa Mensing, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2010.

The Transantarctic Mountains (TAM) are nearly 3000 km long and form the main physiographic and geologic divide between East and West Antarctica. Commonly overlooked by the general earth science community, they form an impressive mountain belt notable for its scale, relief and ancestry. The modern TAM are a relatively young geologic feature uplifted by recent extension along the West Antarctic rift system, yet they encompass some of the oldest rocks in Antarctica (Nimrod Group), they record events related to development of three major supercontinents (Rodinia, Gondwana and Pangea), and they are built upon an older (Ross) orogenic belt. In a word, the topic is huge. Now comes an equally impressive volume about the geology of the TAM. The Transantarctic Mountains is a brick of a book! Geologists Faure & Mensing have assembled a storehouse of information on all aspects of the TAM, from exploration, to physiography, to a wide range of geological topics, including cratonic basement, Ross Orogen sedimentation and tectonics, Gondwana magmatism and sedimentation, meteorites, mountain belt uplift, and glacial geology. What does a reader get out of this expansive and expensive book? The Transantarctic Mountains is richly adorned with colour photographs and figures; it contains many topographic and colour geologic maps; it provides geologic summaries of many key areas; it highlights historical background; and it contains dozens of useful tables and a deep reference list. As an all-in-one resource, this volume has no peer. The Transantarctic Mountains is in many ways a personal narrative by the authors, taken from many years experience studying the geology of Antarctica. It highlights many of the problems the authors have addressed in their own work, and it provides the context for the development of our current understanding, making connections between the first explorers and geographers to the early post-IGY scientific campaigns and beyond. Through personal experience and broad awareness of the scientific literature over many years, the authors weave as much a tale as a final story. From this standpoint, it is easy to read; the authors take care to outline each logical step and explain important methodologies. Undertaking a project of this magnitude will, of course, entail some limitations. Among the notable shortcomings are that the literature references appear to be current mostly as of about 2002, so it is almost a decade out of date. More recent work on Precambrian basement geology, Proterozoic rift-margin sedimentation, mechanisms of TAM uplift, and Ferrar sill emplacement are particularly lacking. This is understandable given the massive amount of material covered; however, readers should be aware of this at the outset. On the other hand, The Transantarctic Mountains is rich in references dating back over a century, particularly including key works between the 1960s and 1980s that are often overlooked. Some sections of text, particularly at the beginning of chapters, are laden with long descriptions of geography and the locations of geologic features. Although this could be helpful to those unfamiliar with given areas, much of this information could be gained by the reader through examination of readily-available topographic maps for areas of interest. As a result, the book is often ponderous in detail. The volume lacks graphical stratigraphic charts; rather, stratigraphic relations are depicted in modified tables, making it difficult to visualize stratigraphic relations and correlations as shown. Likewise, most, if not all, of the stratigraphic tables relate to one geographic area only, making it difficult to trace correlations between regions. For example, in the chapter on the Beacon Supergroup, there are eight separate stratigraphic tables. A final summary table attempts to bridge five of the key areas, but the table format is hard to read and largely summarized from a geologically informative correlation diagram of Barrett et al. (1986). Faure has published a series of widely-read texts on isotope geochemistry that are a staple of university courses and reference shelves; the latest of these, published in 2005, is up-to-date and comprehensive. Surprisingly, The Transantarctic Mountains gives inordinate space to discussing isotopic approaches that were once applied to studies of TAM geology, but which are now rarely used. For example, the authors recount at some length K-Ar data first published in the 1960s–1980s for igneous and metamorphic rocks of the TAM, even including newly compiled histograms of K-Ar ages that are now over 30 years old. Such summaries mostly neglect the now more widely used Ar/Ar method, a far superior approach to investigating cooling histories in crystalline rocks of mountain belts like the Ross Orogen. Although there is historical interest in how the early studies evolved, application of the K-Ar method in high-temperature igneous and metamorphic rocks is unreliable as a chronometer, particularly given that many of these data were obtained from whole-rock samples. Wellestablished relations between mineral closure temperatures and the ability to recognize problems arising from excess Ar make the Ar/Ar method better suited to the task.