“Wiley & Sons”, the largest scientific publishing house of the USA, published the monograph “Studying the geological evolution of the Earth: the Baltic Shield”. It was written by Nikolay Sorokhtin, Chief Researcher of the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and employees of the Geological Institute of the Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences Nikolay Kozlov, Head of the Institute, and Evgeny Martynov, Senior Researcher. Viktor Glaznev, Head of the VSU Department of Geophysics of the Geological Faculty, acted as the co-author of the monograph.
The results of many years of geological and geophysical studies of the evolution of the Earth during the early stage of its development are summed up in the monograph. The team of authors collected and processed an array of new interpretational materials and analytical data on the oldest stage of the Earth’ evolution based on the Baltic crystalline shield with the age of its formation covering a period of 3.8–2.6 billion years. The principal idea of the research summarising nearly fifteen years studies conducted by the authors based on the orders of the Russian Academy of Sciences and grants of Russian scientific foundations was the search for possible answers to the following questions: why the evolution of the early Earth developed according to a certain scenario, what controlled the course of the planet’s development at an early stage, and what physical processes have formed its present internal structure.
The authors tried to answer these questions as generally as they could based on possible physical and mathematical models of the processes occurring in the depths of the young planet.
The authors’ theoretical developments were combined with the results of field studies of the oldest geological formations of the Baltic Shield. The methods of geophysical research which allowed studying the inhomogeneities of the Baltic Shield’s lithosphere were highly important in this study. Due to the analysis of the whole data set on the study of the region, it was possible to identify the peculiar features of the lithosphere’s structure and describe the spatial-temporal patterns of the formation of mineral deposits on the Baltic shield.
