Book excerpt: An account of some aspects of marine geology and marine geophysics, comprehensible to those at an early stage in their study of geology and to scientists who are not specialists in these fields. There are many biologists, chemists, mathematicians or physicists who work in the laboratory or on board ship with geologists and geophysicists and this book will help them to understand the aims of their colleages' experiments. Wherever possible, without a loss of necessary precision, terminology is deliberately simplified.