Book Description

Physical Oceanography of the Dying Aral Sea describes the background, present crisis state, and possible future of this peculiar inland water body from the physical oceanographic standpoint. Based on a wide range of material, a large part of which was published in Russian and has not been previously available to the international reader, the book first provides an historical overview of this unique system, which possesses both lake and sea properties.

Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Historical Geography, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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In drawing attention to how 'place' situates and configures scientific practice, recent scholarship examining historical geographies of science tends to overlook how natural places shape scientific ideas, practices and institutions. This paper suggests that environmental factors may be conceived in terms of the interplay of 'site and situation' in environmental science. It examines the pioneering marine pollution research program developed at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada's Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Beginning with an analysis of pulp mill effluent in Alberni Inlet on Vancouver Island, oceanographers at the station undertook studies aimed at minimizing threats to commercial fisheries from aquatic pollution on the B.C. coast. As a key site of pollution research, Alberni Inlet was situated within a variety of environmental, institutional and social contexts: the politics of resource exploitation in B.C., institutions of fisheries research and regulation, and the disciplinary practices of marine pollution science on the Pacific coast. By the 1960s, the board's Pacific Oceanographic Group had developed a leading research program in marine pollution science, and the Alberni experience formed the basis for a coast-wide inventory of environments receiving industrial wastes. Oceanographers framed pollution control in terms of 'assimilative capacity,' or the ability of natural waters to dilute, disperse and absorb industrial wastes without harm to valuable commercial fish species. As subsequent pollution problems revealed, however, this instrumental approach to environmental management tended to ignore ecological complexity and variability, and the unforeseen consequences of engineering natural systems as waste sinks. ... Read more

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Essays from the third Maury Workshop held in June 2001 at the facilities of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute on the role of technology in advancing and shaping our understanding of the marine environment. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Historical Geography, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The first comprehensive map of any ocean basin-covering the North Atlantic region-was created in the US in the 1950s. Compiled by Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp, researchers at Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory, the Heezen-Tharp physiographic map of 1957 was significant in several respects. It defined the large-scale physiological provinces of the seafloor, and highlighted its major physical features (including the Rift Valley of mid-oceanic ridge, which Tharp discovered). Military funding for oceanographic research in the early Cold War made possible extensive sea voyages that provided these Columbia researchers sea-floor depth profiles and other critical information; military secrecy persuaded Heezen and Tharp to adopt the physiographic approach when national security restrictions made new bathymetric maps 'born classified'. But overlooked until now is that the Heezen-Tharp map also deeply depended on extensive support from Bell Labs, then laboring to install the first transatlantic telephone lines. Heezen's hope that the map would support the theory of the expanding earth over the resurrected theory of continental drift did not succeed. But the 1957 North Atlantic Physiographic Chart did reaffirm that representations of the seafloor, mediated by new technologies, fundamentally reflected changing motivations for studying the oceans. ... Read more

Book Description
This marine-geological approach to the structure and function of the earth is unique in its presentation of how a practicing earth scientist actually studies the earth. Exposition begins under the oceans and ends up on the continents, covering a far-reaching range of topics, from the history of geology under the sea to the examination of the driving force of the lithospheric plates. Illustrated. ... Read more

Book Description
The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. Sea Changes re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a historical site deserving close study. ... Read more

Book Description
The fragile Antarctic environment consists of a closely linked system of the lithosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. Changes in this system have influenced global climate, oceanography and sea level for most of Cenozoic time. The geological history of this region therefore provides a special record of important interactions among the various components of the Earth System. Antarctic Marine Geology is the first comprehensive single-authored book to introduce students and researchers to the geological history of the region and the unique processes that occur there. Research literature on the region is widely disseminated, and until now no single reference has existed that provides such a summary. The book is intended as a reference for all scientists working in Antarctica, and will also serve as a textbook for graduate courses in Antarctic marine geology. ... Read more

Book Description

This is the first book to cover Holocene geology and geomorphology of the entire 8,500 kilometers of the Brazilian coast. It is aimed at third and fourth year undergraduates, post-graduate students, scientists and managers. It characterizes the coast in terms of holoecne geology, geomorphology, oceanographic conditions and the location of the barrier types. Separate chapters outline the types of barrier in each state, beginning in the south and proceeding to the north. Special emphasis is placed on the strecthes of coast where the detailed morphology and stratigraphy of barriers has been previously determined.

Book Description
Rifted Ocean-Continent Boundaries covers a widerange of topics, from quantitative modelling to current knowledge ofthe structure and evolution of specific margins around the world.Special emphasis is placed on the structure and evolution of variousAtlantic margins.
After an introduction to volcanic margin concepts, the first articlesreport the results of numerical models of the mechanics of riftpropagation, melt generation and sources of extensional stresses thatmay cause break-up. One part of the book is dedicated to currentknowledge of the structure and evolution of various Atlantic margins.After a brief incursion into the Mediterranean, succeeding articlesreport on the transform and active margins of the Ivory Coast-Ghanatransform margin and the Sea of Japan.
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Book Description
Talk of the human-enhanced greenhouse effect and the ways in which it may affect our lives has made many people more aware of environmental change. We have come to realize that the environment is and has always bean in a state of continuous change, and that we and other organisms have had to adjust our lifestyles accordingly. This book focuses on the Pacific Basin, a vast region which can be considered a microcosm of the entire surface of the Earth and which has suffered from being marginalized in most accounts of Earth-surface processes and phenomena. In this book, the Pacific Basin includes the Pacific Ocean and Islands and also the Pacific Rim which is divided into the subregions of Antarctica, South America, Central America, North America, Beringia, East Asia and Australasia. Professor Nunn begins by outlining the distant origins of the modern Pacific Basin more than 1000 million years ago, then traces its development through the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic into the Cenozoic Era. For this timethe last 66 million years - the history of environmental change becomes progressively better known. For the last 1.8 million years (the Quaternary period), the Earths climate has oscillated between warm and cool, producing synchronous environmental changes throughout most of the Pacific Basin. The importance of volcanism and tectonics (land-level movements)for which the Pacific Basin is well knownas causes of environmental change is explained in detail. The effects of human activities on most Pacific Basin environments began to be registered only during the Holocenethe last 12 000 yearsculminating in the environmental crisis which currently afflicts many parts of this region. While the role of humans in altering Pacific Basin environments is discussed in detail, considerable attention is also given to the ways in which environmental change caused changes to human lifestyles which had far-reaching consequences. ... Read more