Geologic History of the Moon, Don Wilhelms

US Geological Survey Professional Paper 1348

Since 1987 The Geologic History of the Moon (D. Wilhelms) has remained the cornerstone reference for all lunar geologists, and was originally published as United States Geological Survey Professional Paper 1348. Unfortunately this volume has long been out of print.

Northwestern University Center for Planetary Sciences has disassembled a copy and scanned each page at a resolution of 200 dpi on a Lanier LD 060 production scanner. The color plates and chapter cover pages were scanned at a higher resolution (300dpi) on a high resolution Agfa flatbed scanner. Production and editing was done using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat on a Macintosh G4 laptop computer.

Text searchable versions of the chapters are available below (requires recent versions of pdf readers), file sizes range from 5 to 12 Mbytes. Since the pdfs were created from raster scans of book pages, rather than original text files, the optical character recognition of the text is imperfect, but pretty darn good. The raw scans of the chapters are typically 15-30 Mbytes in size with the largest being 50 Mbytes (Chapter 10).

The pdf containing all the color plates is about 40 Mbytes, a reduced file size version (3 Mbytes) is available here; slight artifacts are visible, but the quality is still good. Full resolution versions of each plate are also available in portable network graphics (PNG) format, and are typically 10 to 20 Mbytes each.

The whole book in a single file is also available. The file is just under a 100 Mbytes in size, and requires Adobe Acrobat version 5.0 or higher, note that it contains the more heavily compressed plates.

The dimensions of the original book are 11 inches by 14.5 inches.

** Note that Chapter 3 was corrected and replaced on July 13 2004, the all in one file was also modified.

Text Searchable Adobe Acrobat Files

Scanning, processing, and editing by Sandy Yoon, Carmen Salas, Julie Beck, and Mark Robinson of the Northwestern University Center for Planetary Sciences and Department of Geological Sciences. Many thanks to Paul Spudis (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) for contributing a copy of the book for dismantling and scanning.

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