Weather Systems In The South Pacific

ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION OF THE TROPICAL PACIFIC OCEAN: Leslie Curry and R. W. Armstrong, Geografiska Annaler     

The Ethics of Place and Environmental Change: Some Examples from the South Pacific

This paper concerns place and ‘placelessness’, and suggests links between those two and types of environmental ethic. An historical analysis of place based ethics and environmental degradation draws on examples from the Pacific basin. Finally, relationships between environmental ethics and traditional patterns of resource exploitation are proposed for several island societies.     

In Pursuit of Moving Targets: New Zealand Population Geography in the South Pacific

New Zealand population geographers in the South Pacific islands early focused on resource issues, especially in Fiji and the smaller island states politically linked to New Zealand. This later extended into analysis of the structure of village level economic and social development, notably in Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Fiji. These analyses contributed to a clearer understanding of the substance of development at a key turning point in the region's history - the transition to independence. Migration, or mobility, and urbanisation attracted enormous interest throughout the region, with lengthy debates ranging over migration models, urban permanence, the ideology of return and metaphors of mobility, establishing the most distinctive thrust of New Zealand research in the region. Practical research, involving censuses and consultancies, has directly contributed to development. Despite the valuable historical legacy the extent and significance of New Zealand work on the population geography of the Island Pacific has now dwindled.     

Kadavu Island, Fiji: Fluvial Studies of a Volcanic Island in the Humid Tropical South Pacific

This paper examines features of drainage and stream channel form and process on the mountainous volcanic island of Kadavu in the humid tropical South Pacific, and interprets the findings in relation to island environmental characteristics such as geology, regolith soils, topography, vegetation and climate. At island and sub-island scales, drainage patterns are linked to the geographical arrangement and topography of the late Cenozoic volcanoes. Stream channel and bedload characteristics demonstrate the importance of both deep saprolite weathering profiles for supplying sediment into the fluvial system, and the high energy nature of the fluvial transport regimes. Landscape chemical denudation is estimated at 50-85 mm per 1,000 years from baseflow solute concentrations converted from water conductivity readings.
Relative tectonic and sea-level stability during the late Holocene and the largely undisturbed rainforest and savanna vegetation on the island suggest that climatic factors control rates of fluvial processes on Kadavu. Streamflow records show particularly that tropical storms can have a big impact. The effects of possible increasing numbers of cyclones in the South Pacific and human vegetation disturbance on Kadavu are considered.     

The Promise for Geomorphic Discovery in the South

Abstract

Until recently a neglected region, renown for limited exposures, the southern United States is becoming an area of geomorphic discovery. This article presents an overview of current geomorphic research in this region, suggesting that despite past problems, academic geographers have made significant contributions to the geomorphology of the South in recent years. Research topics published on the region are highly varied, with some spatial bias as well as topical bias toward fluvial systems. Yet because of the limited historical work, much is unknown about these unique landscapes and their susceptibility to natural and human disturbances, and much benefit is to be gained from both applied and theoretical study of them.     

The audacity of the ocean: Gendered politics of positionality in the Pacific

Throughout the contemporary Pacific, relationships that indigeneity makes possible are emerging as celebrated resistance to post-colonial development anxieties. In the process, lived experience heightens the commitment to decolonize thinking, language and practice in teaching and research. Not only because these imperatives are highly personalized but also because they are gendered and heavy with generational trauma. These gendered dynamics circulate around popular culture and imaginaries of Pacific paradise but also problematically around the challenges of long-standing intolerances especially around gender and race. The paper asks how a gendered politics of positionality engages with emerging positionalities that uncritically allow for such intolerances. I touch on two ways in which colonial continuities of belittlement are often reinforced, but are also offering hopeful and careful decolonial scholarly futures. The first is the naming of the Pacific and the second is supervising women doctoral candidates from the Pacific. In this paper, the audacity of the ocean offers a metaphorical opportunity to carefully reconcile these tensions and provide trajectories for decolonial knowledge-making. However, it also offers a material way of understanding the on-going work with ‘tensions’ and disruptions in their ever present but changeable forms. Oceanic tropes and a feminist Oceanic audacity of embodied engagement in the Pacific offer dynamic and gendered intellectual agility which runs counter to the tropical imageries of languid indifference.

black/is a state of mind like the colour of an island Teaiwa (2017) we sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood Teaiwa (2008)

     

"Making Place": The "Pacific Solution" and Australian Emplacement in the Pacific and on Refugee Bodies

In September 2001, Australia effected a "Pacific Solution" to its "refugee problem": the interception and transfer of "unauthorised boat arrivals" to processing centres in the Pacific Third World. These centres were agreed to by poor countries that were approached precisely because of their vulnerability and dependence upon Australia, in exchange for increases in aid. Australia thereby created a regional refugee problem and, in so doing, Australian seignorage also demands that the laws of those sovereign countries be placed in stasis so that people not convicted of a crime may be detained indefinitely. The Pacific region, in effect, came to be mapped in terms of its utility to Australia, both downplaying and concealing complex economic, social and political issues. This essay studies the Pacific Solution as a means of Australian "emplacement" in the Pacific and on refugee identity/bodies. Both refugee identity and the Pacific Third World are assessed in terms of their utility in serving as sites for Australian emplacement, whereby and wherein the borders of Australia are reinforced, to the detriment of extant "local" emplacements.     

The Potential for Mixed Methods: Results from the Field in Urban South Africa

With the “cultural turn” in geography, scholars have become more focused on the politics of representation, politics of fieldwork, and politics of the research setting. In human geography, this epistemological shift has been accompanied by a methodological move toward intensive methods at the expense of extensive methods. In this article, I suggest that mixed methods that utilize the strengths of both intensive and extensive methods can offset the weaknesses of each method. Moreover, results from the field suggest that the combination of intensive and extensive methods could produce unique insights only possible from a mixed method approach.     

西北太平洋: 21世纪的地理--政治枢纽

20世纪初,英国著名地理学家麦金德在其名著《历史的地理枢纽》一书中,通过对地理大发现以后世界政治地图,尤其是欧洲政治地图变化的分析,提出了“大陆腹地”的概念,并把中、东欧地区称为国际政治的“枢纽”地区。二战以后,美、英等西方国家正是基于麦金德的这一思路,把围堵“枢纽”地区作为其全球战略的重中之重,拉开了长达半个世纪的“冷战”帷幕。冷战结束以后,世界政治地理格局发生了重大变化,西北太平洋地区以其重要的地理位置、蓬勃发展的经济和急剧增长的军备,成为国际地缘政治中新的“枢纽”地区。本文从政治军事地理角度对这一问题进行了初步研究,供关心西北太平洋地区局势的同仁参考。     

Ultramafic rock weathering and slope erosion processes in a South West Pacific tropical environment

Weathering and erosion processes are investigated using electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) imaging and the quantification of geomorphic patterns at the edges of a lateritic plateau overlying ultramafic rocks in the north western region of the main island of New Caledonia (Southwest Pacific). The obtained ERT images document the structure and long-term evolution of the regolith, while source area parameters such as area (A) local slope above channel head (tanθ) and longitudinal river profiles allow the characterization of contrasting geomorphic patterns around the plateau. The geo-electrical profiles show a succession of hard rock protrusions and weathering troughs, whose depth varies greatly. The area–slope relationship allows the distinction between saprolite- and ferricrete-mantled source areas. The former could result from a regolith erosion process by shallow landslides; the latter from a secondary ferruginization process of reworked lateritic debris. The deepest troughs underlie saprolite-mantled source areas above channel heads, which are characterized by a low permeability saprolite, relatively high slope gradient, and lower area/slope ratios. Such source areas generate fairly high runoff, sustaining rivers and creeks with relatively high erosion power. The ferricrete-mantled source areas are characterized by higher permeability and area/slope ratios, leading to lower runoff and less erosion but further chemical rock weathering. The ferricrete of those source areas acts as a protective hardcover against mechanical erosion of the underlying regolith. This ferricrete reworks, at least partly, allochtonous lateritic materials inherited from a previous disaggregated ferricrete that suggests past erosion processes driven by hydro-climatic condition changes.