Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Donald Abenheim, David S. Yost. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.A. in International Security and Civil-Military Relations)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2003. / "March 2003." Includes bibliographical references. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): David S. Yost, James J. Wirtz. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

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Underwater (phreatic) caves are a ubiquitous landform on coastal karst terrain, but the marine geological processes operating in these systems are largely unknown. This dissertation redresses the problem by asking if Bermudian phreatic cave sediments archive sea-level and climate information? An important premise is that coastal cave environments are not identical. They can be categorized based on whether they are terrestrially-influenced (anchialine), completely flooded by saline groundwater (submarine), positioned at sea level (littoral) or in the vadose zone (vadose). For the first time the boundary between modern anchialine and submarine cave environments has been distinguished in Green Bay Cave using a multi-proxy approach (benthic foraminifera, sedimentary organic matter content and carbon isotopic composition - ?13Corg, and grain-size analysis). Twelve push cores were extracted from Green Bay Cave and dated with twenty 14C dates, recovering the first underwater cave succession spanning the Holocene (13 ka to present). Green Bay Cave transitioned through all major cave environments during Holocene sea-level rise (vadose, littoral, anchialine, and submarine), providing a sedimentary model for global cave successions. These relationships provide a novel means to solve Quaternary sea-level and climate problems. For sea level, two examples indicate that the littoral cave can be used as a sea-level indicator, distinguished stratigraphically by microfossil or sedimentary proxies. First, the elevation and timing of when Green Bay Cave was a littoral environment indicates Bermuda experienced an abrupt ~6.4 m sea-level rise at 7.7 ka, coinciding with final collapse of the Labrador sector of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Second, microfossils preserved in elevated caves at +21 m above modern sea level and dated to marine isotope stage 11 (U-series, amino acid racemization) are consistent with modern Bermudian caves and co-stratigraphic sea level. For climate problems, annual temperature monitoring in Walsingham Cave indicates that cave water is thermally comparable to regional oceanographic conditions in the Sargasso Sea. Three sediment cores dated with sixteen radiocarbon dates indicate that Bermuda’s coldest and stormiest conditions of the last 3.2 ka occurred during the Little Ice Age (proxies: ?18Oc, grain size, bulk organic matter).

It has been demonstrated that nitrogen fixation is a source of hydrogen (H2) to the ocean and therefore measurements of H2 concentrations may be used as a possible indicator of nitrogen fixation (Moore, Punshon, Mahaffey, & Karl, 2009). However, the limited number and sparse distribution of measurements of dissolved hydrogen and nitrogen fixation rates made in the open ocean in the past have made it difficult to quantify the relationship between them. Toward this end, a new method of equilibrating seawater samples for H2 measurement was employed along the 13,000 km Atlantic Meridional Transect (AMT20) from UK to Chile, allowing H¬2 to be measured from underway samples every 3.5 minutes and thereby considerably increasing the number and resolution of H2 measurements made in the open ocean.These high-resolution measurements reveal two regions with high H¬2 concentrations, one in the North Atlantic and one in the South Atlantic.

The first two empirical orthogonal functions of the winter (DJF) surface air temperature (SAT) over North America are associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Pacific/North American (PNA) pattern in the NCEP reanalysis. Lagged correlations between the North American SAT structures and the sea surface temperature (SST) were computed. There is a small lag between the tri-pole SST anomaly pattern of the North Atlantic Ocean and the first SAT mode. The second SAT mode lags the eastern Tropical Pacific SST anomaly by two months, associated with ENSO through the winter. A similar analysis is conducted on the seasonal forecasts to see if the forecast models capture the above links. GCM3 captures the ENSO forcing and has the PNA response. GEM captures the link between the SAT and the tripole SST anomaly pattern in North Atlantic. Although GEM captures the ENSO signal, it cannot form the PNA to further this tropical forcing into North America.

A simple linear reduced-gravity ocean model is developed to simulate the North Water polynya located in northern Baffin Bay. The model is an extension of Pease (1987) latent-heat model for a coastal polynya. Both northerly surface wind forcing and coastal upwelling processes are taken into account in modelling the steady state and time-dependent water velocities, upper layer depth, and polynya width measured southward from its northern boundary. Also, both uniform and variable wind forcing are considered. In most of this thesis a semi-infinite domain model is used in which upwelling occurs along the eastern boundary (the Greenland coast). It is found that the steady state polynya width is a strong function of the air temperature, but a weak function of the wind speed. The model results show that in the upwelling region near the Greenland coast, the polynya width is larger than further offshore (distance $>$ 2 Rossby radii), where it is a constant (the limiting Pease width). For a variable wind forcing, the southern ice edge of the North Water has a form that is similar to that of the wind forcing. In a channel, upwelling occurs in the eastern part and downwelling in the western part. Thus the polynya is much wider near Greenland and narrower near the Canadian Islands.

My research examines the degree to which France was able to define an autonomous policy towards Nato in the period 1981-1992. In so doing, it addresses three central questions. What was the nature of French Alliance policy? To what extent did it prove capable of achieving the goals set for it by French policy makers? What constraints, if any, acted upon Alliance policy? My research, therefore, is intended to not only provide a detailed account of French Alliance policies, but also to offer a critical assessment of those policies, and explanation as to why they took the form they did. The thesis argues that French Alliance policy under Mitterrand displayed a marked continuity with the policies of his predecessors. However, whilst de Gaulle in particular had managed to reap substantial benefits from a policy involving non-integration into Nato military commands, a policy of 'independence' proved increasingly inappropriate as a means of achieving the goals set by French officials. A rapidly shifting international situation, along with a deteriorating domestic economic capacity to maintain an autonomous defence posture, rendered the traditional options of French Alliance policy increasingly dysfunctional. Based on this, the thesis goes on to illustrate the fact that the failure of policy to adapt to profoundly altered circumstances can be attributed to factors within France. Both the prevalent belief system in France - the so-called consensus on defence and foreign policy - and the nature of the policy-making process acted in such a way as to restrict the possibility of policy adaptation. Based on these findings, the thesis concludes by making some observations as to the limitations of many of the theories which deal with foreign policy.

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