Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / It is only in recent decades that marine scientific research has begun to reveal the true physical characteristics and resource potential of the open ocean and deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction. A combination of factors such as the depletion of inshore fish stocks and an increase in global maritime trade has led to greater usage of the vast maritime area beyond the territorial sea and exclusive economic zone limits of the coastal states. Human activities in this area of the ocean, which covers approximately 50% of the world’s surface, have expanded to include bioprospecting, exploration for deep seabed minerals, more sophisticated marine scientific research and deep sea tourism. This rise in human activities beyond the offshore zones of coastal states poses actual and potential threats to the physical characteristics and biodiversity of the open ocean and deep sea environments. Arbitrary human intrusions into this largely unexplored marine domain have the potential to harm the intricate links between complex marine ecosystems and to erode components of marine biodiversity. This thesis examines the global and regional provisions which have been put in place to regulate the environmental impacts of human activities that occur beyond national jurisdiction. An analysis of these instruments and their implementation reveals that the current international law framework provides only minimal levels of protection for the marine environment beyond national jurisdiction. It explores several options based on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to establish a cohesive environmental protection system for the marine environment beyond national jurisdiction.

Between 1829 and 1917, over 1.3 million men, women and children travelled from India to the sugar colonies of the British, French, Dutch and Danish empires as indentured labourers. They worked on sugar plantations deprived of labour following the abolition of slavery. I propose that two conceptual innovations can help us understand the historical geographies of indenture and of imperialism more broadly. The first is that the indenture system created an indentured archipelago encompassing colonies not geographically located together but which had a shared experienced of indenture. This thesis focuses on two colonies of the indentured archipelago between 1871 and 1916, Mauritius and Fiji. Mauritius was the first British colony to begin recruiting Indian indentured labourers (over 450,000) and Fiji the last (over 60,000). The second conceptual innovation is that of subaltern careering, which examines the hitherto unexplored re-migration amongst Indian indentured labourers between sugar colonies and the wider colonial world. This phenomenon challenges the spatiality of empire and brings to the fore questions of subaltern agency. Analysing the lived spaces of Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius and Fiji and their movements within the indentured archipelago, avoids the colonial compartmentalisation of the Indian indenture experience that has characterised scholarship to date. In doing so, this thesis radically alters the accepted geography of the Indian indenture system. The thesis considers a period that begins with the appointment of Arthur Hamilton-Gordon as Governor of Mauritius in 1871 and concludes with the end of indentured transportation to Fiji in 1916. Gordon’s transfer from Mauritius to become Governor of Fiji in 1875 connected the two colonies. In Fiji he initiated the use of Indian indentured labour to support the colony’s burgeoning sugar industry. He oversaw the start of an era of connection between Mauritius and Fiji as colonial officials, ordinances, ideas and practices and indentured labourers themselves travelled between the two. In focusing on two colonies, the thesis enables a broader understanding of the varied experiences of indenture. The thesis re-orders the way in which historical geography has engaged with movements through empire by focusing on trans-oceanic subaltern mobility. The archipelagic framework used, inverts the notion of core-periphery and places Mauritius and Fiji, seemingly peripheral parts of empire, firmly at the core of the late 19th and early 20th century Indo-Pacific.

The Nordic Seas region marks a transitional zone between the temperate North Atlantic Ocean and the polar Arctic Ocean. The influence of contrasting fluxes of organic matter on benthic community structure and function within the deep waters of the region were investigated. Samples of the macrofaunal community were collated throughout the region employing a standardised method. In the summer of 2002, during the RRS James Clark Ross 75 cruise, replicated samples were obtained with the SMBA multiple corer and the USNEL boxcorer from four stations located at similar sampling depths along a latitudinal transect at the Norwegian Sea continental margin. Additional replicated samples were obtained with a megacorer at six stations located along two bathymetric transects across the Norwegian Sea continental margin in the summer of 2005 during the RRS James Clark Ross 127 cruise. Contrasting fluxes of organic matter influenced benthic community structure, functional ecology and bioturbation potential. Species known to adopt the feeding strategy of the sub-surface storage of organic matter occurred in areas characterised by a seasonal input of organic matter. Species richness and diversity was highest at the Svalbard Margin, located within the marginal ice zone. Bathymetric patterns of macrofaunal biomass were comparable with previously reported global patterns. However, bathymetric patterns of macrofaunal abundance were higher than global patterns. The previously reported rapid subduction of organic matter by the sipunculan Nephasoma sp. and associated deep burrow networks on the Voring Plateau was linked to the species Nephasoma lilljeborgi. It is proposed that N. lilljeborgi is an ecosystem engineer.

Wind and waves play a major role in important ocean dynamical processes, such as the exchange of heat, momentum and gases between atmosphere and ocean, that greatly contributes to the earth climate and marine lives. Knowledge on wind and wave weather and climate is crucial for a wide range of applications, including oceanographic studies, maritime activities and ocean engineering. Despite being one of the important world shipping routes, the wind-wave characteristics in the Red Sea are yet to be fully explored. Because of the scarcity of waves data in the Red Sea, numerical models become crucial and provide very powerful tools to extrapolate wind and wave data in space, and backward and forward in time. Unlike open oceans, enclosed basins wave have different characteristics, mainly because of their local generation processes. The complex orography on both sides of the Red Sea makes the local wind, and consequently wave, modeling very challenging. This thesis considers the modeling of wind-wave characteristics in the Red Sea, including their climate variability and trends using state-of-the-art numerical models and all available observations. Different approaches are investigated to model and understand the general and unusual wind and wave conditions in the basin using standard global meteorological products and customised regional wind and wave models. After studying and identifying the main characteristics of the wind-wave variability in the Red Sea, we demonstrate the importance of generating accurate atmospheric forcing through data assimilation for reliable wave simulations. In particular, we show that the state-of-the-art physical formulation of wave models is not suitable to model the unique situation of the two opposing wind-waves systems in the Red Sea Convergence Zone, and propose and successfully test a modification to the input and white-capping source functions to address this problem. We further investigate the climate variability and trends of wind and waves in the Red Sea using high-resolution wind and wave reanalyses that have been generated as part of this thesis. An innovative spectral partition technique is first applied to distinguish the dominant wave systems. Our analysis demonstrates that winds, and consequently waves, exhibit a decreasing trend in the Red Sea. This is mainly attributed to a remarkable weakening of the winds protruding from the Mediterranean Sea. We also use these highresolution reanalyses to assess the potential for harvesting wind and wave energy from the Red Sea.

Titan is an important planetary body for aeolian research because of the vast equatorial sand seas that span 20% of its surface. Previous studies have determined the general margins of sand and sand seas on Titan, and have speculated about the source of Titan's sand. Little research has been done concerning where sand collects in the sand seas. Additionally, the relationships be-tween material distributions as observed by the Cassini Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) and the history of erosion and transportation of sediments across equatorial latitudes is not fully understood. This work focuses on an in depth evaluation of sand distribution and abundance across the sand seas, and presents evidence for an alternative sand source. This work also addresses a potential stratigraphy for the equatorial regions based on the excavation of materials from impact craters. We mapped the extent of relative sand abundances by comparing different Cassini image datasets, largely by mapping where the Imaging Science Subsystems (ISS) regions were darkest, in-dicating the presence of more sand. Our results revealed that greater abundances of sand accumu-late near the eastern margins of sand seas. This is in agreement with previous studies that demon-strated general W to E transport, and fits a general model of sand transport across the sand seas to collect at the downwind margins, perhaps ahead of topographic obstacles that mark the eastern ends of the sand seas. Additionally, we found that the largest continuous expanse of abundant sand de-posits lie across Belet, a large sand sea that occupies a broad equatorial lowland. Another sand sea of interest is Shangri-La, which has a recessed SE margin adjacent to the broad, albedo-bright de-pression Xanadu. We also found abundant sand deposits within Shangri-La across a corridor be-tween highlands and along the SE boundary of the sand sea. Dune crest orientations across eastern Shangri-La indicate WNW to ESE transport in the region. We propose that the low topography of Xanadu, coupled with the strong gradient in albedo between Shangri-La and Xanadu would gener-ate atmospheric disturbances similar to those responsible for transporting sand across positive changes in elevation on Mars, and may be responsible for the distinct boundary. VIMS-blue materials are generally associated with water ice mixed with organic com-pounds. We found that VIMS-blue surfaces across equatorial latitudes tend to be directly adjacent to and upwind of sand seas. This, coupled with geomorphological observations of erosional charac-teristics and examination of material properties, suggests that sand could at least in part be derived from VIMS-blue materials. We propose 3 environments (alluvial fans, dry lakebeds, and ejecta from impact craters) for sand production using this interpretation and making comparisons with SAR, ISS, and VIMS imagery. Modeling suggests that Titan's lithosphere significantly thickened 500 m.y. ago. We inter-pret an elongate exposure of VIMS-blue materials adjacent to Aztlan to be a rift caused by a thick-ening of the lithosphere, similar to many of the other icy bodies of the solar system. Our interpreta-tion is further supported by the distribution of cryovolcanic features alongside the proposed rift. Anomalous VIMS-blue and bright regions within eastern Xanadu are distributed in a pattern that resembles a multi-ringed impact basin. Additionally, when a value threshold was applied to ISS imagery, a bright circular feature was revealed within western Xanadu. These observations suggest two large impacts may have been significantly responsible for creating Xanadu. Comparisons of impact crater models with VIMS imagery of Paxsi, Menrva, Sinlap, Selk, and other craters suggest alternating layers of VIMS-bright and VIMS-blue cover much of the equatorial latitudes of Titan. We completed ground penetrating radar (GPR) and global positioning system (GPS) surveys across margins of the Kelso Dunes to evaluate the effects of fluvial interaction on sand depth. Our terres-trial model was compared to sand seas on Titan that appear to also have interactions with fluvial channels. Distributions of sand suggest that in both the Kelso Dunes and on Titan, fluvial obstruc-tion is temporary and on Titan isolated across small regions. This work leads to a better understanding of sand production, accumulation and transport on Titan and in sand seas in general, and reveals a basic stratigraphy of the equatorial regions of Titan. This region is of particular interest because it is the landing site of the Dragonfly mission, now in design.

No description available.

Previous studies have identified δ¹³C events in the Carboniferous that imply major shifts in the carbon cycle. However, inherent in this interpretation is the assumption that epicontinental seas are chemically representative of the global ocean. Our study uses stable isotope and trace element analyses of brachiopod shells to examine changes in climate and circulation of the North American epeiric sea. Formations were selected for study to provide shallow marine environments with geographic coverage of North America. These units include the Grove Church and Mattoon Formations (Illinois Basin), Glenshaw Formation (Appalachian Basin), Bird Spring Formation (Bird Spring Basin), and Oread Formation (US midcontinent). In all, 98 brachiopod shells were found to be well preserved based on screening with plane light and cathodoluminescence microscopy of thin-sections, and trace element analyses. Upper Chesterian Grove Church (Illinois Basin) samples have δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O averages of 1.1% and -3.1% respectively. These low values are interpreted as a local or regional effect caused by terrestrial runoff. Terrestrial influences are also suggested by the depositional environment: nearshore marine. Chesterian samples from the Bird Spring Formation at Arrow Canyon, Nevada average 3.7% and -1.4% for δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O respectively. The higher δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O values, compared with samples from the time equivalent Grove Church, likely reflect the freer exchange with the Panthalassa Ocean at this most western edge of North America, and best represent open-ocean conditions. Samples from the Virgilian Ames-Shumway-Plattsmouth cyclothem show a progression of δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O enrichment moving west from near the Appalachians (1.9% and -3.8%) to the Illinois Basin (3.2% and -2.4%) and finally to the US midcontinent (4.2% and -1.5%). This is interpreted as the transition from nearshore, terrestrial influence with enhanced organic matter oxidation and lower salinity to well-mixed conditions with normal salinities and potential for seafloor ventilation and upwelling. This is supported by published sediment ΣNd(t) values from the Appalachian Basin (ΣNd(t) = -9) that increase further westward (ΣNd(t) = -6) due to higher influence from the eastern Panthalassa Ocean. Mass balance calculations based on the δ¹⁸O of the brachiopod shells suggest salinities of 25 and 31 psu for the Appalachian and Illinois Basins, respectively, assuming salinities of 34.5 psu for the US midcontinent. Trace element analyses do not show a systematic east-west trend similar to stable isotopes. In both time slices, spiriferids from the intermediately-located Illinois Basin are enriched in Mg/Ca and Sr/Ca relative to those in other basins. This Mg and Sr enrichment in Illinois Basin brachiopods suggests delivery of Sr-rich fresh waters and restricted circulation in that basin.

This thesis examines a variety of theoretical issues relating to ethnicity, multiculturalism and racism in New Zealand. It is argued that whilst the country’s history has been replete with anti-Asiatic racisms, it is necessary to transcend the timeless notion of racism as colour discrimination and to instead, situate past and present anti-Asiatic racisms within the nation’s temporally specific positions in modernity. Through an orientation to time and diachrony, the research considers if a liberal policy of multiculturalism is conducive for contemporary New Zealand society. In view of academic debates suggesting that a ‘practical’ version of multiculturalism exists alongside the country’s constitutional biculturalism, it is argued that the de facto version of multiculturalism exhibits the characteristics of commercial and conservative multiculturalisms which fail to address the problem of racism. A liberal form of multiculturalism, it is maintained, will not produce the best outcome for New Zealand because it is insensitive to indigenous rights and will remain mutually exclusive from biculturalism. This research then concludes with a discussion on the likely future of cosmopolitanism in New Zealand, both as a theory and how it might possibly work in practice without immolating the hegemony of biculturalism.

The frequent use of two or more closely positioned vessels during offshore operations makes the study of multi-body hydrodynamics an important topic, especially for the design of deepwater offshore systems. This research investigation studies the response behavior of a coupled mini-TLP / barge system in both head and beam sea conditions. The design sea conditions were selected to represent the combined wind, wave and current conditions for a target location off the coast of West Africa. Both the mini-TLP and the barge were designed to have independent mooring systems. Coupling between the two vessels is introduced through a connection consisting of two breast lines and a fender system. This connection is designed to restrain the horizontal movements of the two vessels while keeping a constant distance between them and avoiding collisions. The main focus of this study is to analyze the experimental data obtained during the model testing, especially the motions of the two bodies and the values related to the fender system, in order to characterize the behavior of the uncoupled and coupled system configurations. A statistical approach is used for the data analysis and interpretation. Statistical parameters are used to provide an overall characterization of system behavior, and Gaussian and Weibull distribution functions are utilized to detect the importance of non-linearity in the data with particular attention to extreme values. Correlations between the two vessels in time domain and frequency domain are investigated. In addition, auto and cross spectrum analyses of the data are used to contrast the motion behavior of the uncoupled and coupled configurations. It is shown that the connection system reduces the horizontal vessel motions; however the forces exerted on the fender system show significant variation depending on sea heading conditions.

Since most of the inhabitants in West Africa is working with, or are dependent on agricultural work, accurate weather forecasts are important in their daily work. Knowledge of when to start to sow is one of the most important features from a farmer’s point of view. It can be devastating for the farmers if the soil is not moist enough when planting since the crops risks to dry out, but also planting too late needs to be avoided since it will affect the growing time and therefore might reduce the production. In this thesis, investigations whether the start of the rainy season in Ghana and parts of Burkina Faso is predictable, only with the use of patterns in rainfall and changes in sea surface temperature in the Gulf of Guinea. The region of interest has been divided into four equally sized areas with a latitudinal width of 2  from south to north. The models are first of all predicting the start of the rainy season in the southernmost area by use of four different methods, three that are based on precipitation patterns and one based on changes in sea surface temperature. Thereafter, the three northerly areas are predicted with a linear function based on when the rainy season started in the southernmost area. The results shows that the model is acceptable in its predictability but is very good in indicating if the rainy season will start earlier or later than the year before. This is of major benefits for the farmers in the region. On a long‐range average, the rainy season starts in the southernmost area first and then it starts further north, but this is not always the case in individual years, which makes the models complicated to use in some years. In order to give reliable forecasts to the farmers, the rainy season needs to be defined so it fulfils the conditions that are needed for plants to grow. Therefore, the start of the rainy season is defined as when 40 mm of precipitation is received during a five‐day period with at least 16 mm in one of these five days. Thereafter, the next 30 days cannot contain more than 18 days without precipitation. / Eftersom de flesta invånarna i Västafrika arbetar med, eller är beroende av jordbruksarbete så är väderprognoser till stor hjälp i det dagliga arbetet. Att ha kännedom om när det är lämpligt att börja så är en av de viktigaste aspekterna ur böndernas perspektiv. Att börja så innan marken är tillräckligt fuktig kan leda till förödande konsekvenser för bönderna då grödorna riskerar att torka ut och dö, men även att vänta för länge med att så bör undvikas eftersom det påverkar längden på skördesäsongen och därmed också produktionen. I den här studien har det gjorts undersökningar om det är möjligt att göra prognoser för när regnperioden börjar i Ghana och delar av Burkina Faso med hjälp av nederbördsfördelningen och förändringar i ytvattentemperaturen i Guineabukten. Regionen har delats in i fyra lika stora områden med latitudinell bredd på 2 ° från söder till norr. Modellerna börjar med att göra en prognos för regnperiodens början i det sydligaste området med hjälp av fyra olika metoder, tre som är baserade på nederbördsfördelningen och en som är baserad på ändringar i ytvattentemperaturen. Därefter görs prognoser för de tre nordligare områdena med hjälp av en linjär funktion baserad på när regnperioden började i det sydligaste området. Resultaten visar att modellen är acceptabel när det gäller att komma så nära den verkliga starten som möjligt, men är väldigt bra på att indikera om regnperioden kommer att börja tidigare eller senare än året innan. Detta är till stor nytta för bönderna i området. Över ett längre perspektiv så börjar regnperioden först i det sydligaste området för att sedan börjar längre norrut, men så ser det inte ut i varje enskilt år, vilket gör att modellerna inte är användbara alla år. För att kunna ge bönderna så bra prognoser som möjligt så behöver regnperioden definieras så att den uppfyller de villkor som krävs för att de ska kunna börja så. Därför har regnperiodens början definierats som när 40 mm nederbörd mottagits under en femdagarsperiod med minst 16 mm under en av dessa fem dagar. Därefter får de närmaste 30 dagarna inte innehålla mer än 18 dagar utan nederbörd.