Reply to Comment on “Analyses of Seismic Deformation at the Kibyra Roman Stadium,Southwest Turkey”

In their comment, Elitez and Yaltırak (2013) criticize our paper (Karabacak et al. 2013 ) by arguing that it contains misinterpretations and unreliable data for a fault cutting the Roman Stadium in the ancient city of Kibyra. However their comments are not based on strong arguments to disprove our geological and archeological field observations or previous data. Here we present additional data supported by new figures which validate the faulting both in the bedrock and in the stadium floor. We reject their comments and uphold our original viewpoint on the faulting at the Stadium.     

Response to Thrift's “The future of geography”

Reviews and observations about the status of the discipline of geography, no matter how positive, invariably raise programmatic concerns. These concerns have a long history that arise from geography's struggles to find an identity that embraces its many parts and yet are consistent with the logic by which the academy partitions knowledge. Pedagogy and research historically claimed by geography is currently being reinvented and relabeled under such headings as “integrated environmental science” and “spatial science”, and these developments have the potential to change the breadth of the “geographic imagination”. Several observations about dominant explanatory perspectives and substantive domains of geographic enquiry are also provided.     

A reply to “On the age of the Hoxnian Interglacial” by N. R. Page

The recent paper by Dr. N. R. Page (1972) proposes a time scale for Pleistocene events in East Anglia and southwest Britain which most workers on this subject find incredible and which results in a suggested correlation with other regions, particularly the English Midlands, which completely negates the many years of patient work of stratigraphers and palaeontologists. This paper is intended to show that the claims to the absolute ages of the East Anglian deposits cannot be sustained and that the resulting correlations with the Pleistocene of other parts of Britain and abroad are quite unacceptable.     

The role of “excess” CO2 in the formation of trona deposits

The prevailing theory for the formation of trona [Na₃(CO₃)(HCO₃) · 2(H₂O)] relies on evaporative concentration of water produced by silicate hydrolysis of volcanic rock or volcaniclastic sediments. Given the abundance of closed drainage basins dominated by volcanics, it is puzzling that there are so few trona deposits and present-day lakes that would yield dominantly Na–CO₃ minerals upon evaporation. Groundwater in the San Bernardino Basin (southeastern Arizona, USA and northeastern Sonora, Mexico) would yield mainly Na–CO₃ minerals upon evaporation, but waters in the surrounding basins would not. Analysis of the chemical evolution of this groundwater shows that the critical difference from the surrounding basins is not lithology, but the injection of magmatic CO₂. Many major deposits of trona and Na–CO₃-type lakes appear to have had “excess” CO₂ input, either from magmatic sources or from the decay of organic matter. It is proposed that, along with the presence of volcanics, addition of “excess” CO₂ is an important pre-condition for the formation of trona deposits.