Anyone who surveys the shelves of an average science library will soon become convinced that fluid mechanics has taken more than its share of the rapid growth of scientific publication following World War II. And within fluid mechanics, publications of astrophysical or geophysical interest have enjoyed increasing prominence. There are a number of obvious reasons for this, ranging from the academic to the practical. Prominent is the long-term aim of understanding and partially controlling the Earth's atmosphere, with implications that range from the environmental one of minimizing the spread of harmful industrial wastes to the humanitarian one of maximizing agricultural yields. No less pressing in these days of developing ocean resources is the need to understand sea movements, how they might diffuse radioactive wastes placed on the ocean floor, how they can be harnessed to help quench man's thirst for energy, how they affect oceanic life and the harvest man takes from the sea. Seismology and vulcanology are of scarcely less practical significance to many populous areas, and they owe their existence to crustal stresses set up by the motion of an underlying mantle. Beneath the mantle lies the Earth's core in whose internal motions lies the cause of the Earth's magnetism.
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