Hat tip to Arizona Geology, which noted that the Quaternary Science Journal has put its back issues from 1951 to 2010 into a freely-available archive. It’s located at http://quaternary-science.publiss.net/issues.

(I had to look “Quaternary” up — now I’m just trying to remember it for my next game of Lexulous — it means “of, relating to, or being the geological period from the end of the Tertiary to the present time or the corresponding system of rocks”.)

On the front page, you’ll see a lot of German, but actually articles in the archive are available in German, English, and sometimes French — articles are sometimes translated into multiple languages but sometimes now. You can either browse through individual back issues or do a keyword search. I did a keyword search for sedimentary and got something over 40 results. Google Chrome offered to translate the page results for me, which were mostly in German.

Page results included article title, list of tags, and the date it was published. The article titles were generally meaningful enough that I didn’t lack for a summary (“Stratigraphic and geomorphic analysis of rubble limestone layer ceiling before combing and layer stages in Lower Saxony’s mountain country” — this is translated.) You have the option of downloading the article as a PDF file or viewing it onscreen. You can also order printed copies but this costs — the ones I saw costs for were €10, about $13.90 USD at this writing.

The only downer to this site is that the article viewer is a Flash device which apparently doesn’t allow Google Chrome to work its translating magic. So while you can read the article titles and summaries, when it comes to the full article you can’t get an automatic translation via Google Chrome. It seems the only workaround would be to download the PDF of the article, pull out the text, and use a different tool to translate it.