Redox : fundamentals, processes, and applications /

"Redox" is chemists' slang for "reduction-oxidation," the transfer of electrons between chemical species. This class of reactions dominates the chemical behavior of the surface of Earth, particularly including the biosphere. Thus, measurement of the redox state of natural waters, soils, and gas pockets provides important information about their composition, health, and likely future. Although it is experimentally easy to measure a redox potential, it is often difficult to understand the true origins and meanings of the numbers produced, and to reproduce them on subsequent tries. The editors of this collection of essays offer a review of best practices in the measurement and interpretation of redox potentials and provide a series of case studies in which such measurements have been carefully and synoptically made, and in which intelligible conclusions drawn from them. Field areas described are located exclusively in Germany. The syntax is that of nonnative speakers of English, and is sometimes baffling. Although an editor is credited, he should have recruited Anglophone help. Still, this book is preferable on that score to T.F. Yen's Environmental Chemistry (CH, Mar'99). American readers will learn more from the redox chapters of Werner Stumm and James J. Morgan's classic Aquatic Chemistry (Ch, Jul'96). Graduate students through professionals. T. R. Blackburn; American Chemical Society