Sea-level rise research and dialogue in North Carolina: Creating windows for policy change

Coastal areas are among the world's most vulnerable landscapes to impacts related to climate change, including inundation from sea-level rise (SLR), increased exposure to shoreline erosion, and greater frequency and intensity of storms. The status of research on the physical, ecological, and socio-economic effects of vulnerability to SLR and progress toward planning for its consequences varies from region to region worldwide. Here, we synthesize the results of three decades of SLR research and the development of coastal management policies in North Carolina, USA. We identify the major factors responsible for opening new policy ‘windows’ that address SLR, including how stakeholders have developed an increased understanding of the risks, the extent of public dialogue about potential response strategies, and advances in political receptivity to policy change. Research and policy progress in North Carolina continue to provide a model for other regions to help guide and evaluate the development of coastal policies.     

The convergence of Integrated Coastal Zone Management and the ecosystems approach

The primary role of the Integrated Coastal Zone Management model was to arbitrate conflicts between stakeholders in a living and natural resource environment characterized by a common property and open access doctrine. A chronology of events describes how the development and acceptance of an ecosystems approach policy began to converge and coincide with the spread and development of Integrated Coastal Zone Management. Those organizations that gave representation to the conservation ethic became internationally recognized as surrogate natural resource ‘users’, the interests of which possessed commonality with all stakeholder interests in general. The tenants of conservation policy were therefore largely employed to decide the merits of disputes over ocean and coastal resources.In the 1990s, scientists created a forum to debate, better define, and institutionalize a sound basis for ecosystem management theory and practice. Protocols were developed that embedded science in living and natural resources planning and management. These protocols were shaped and adopted to serve an evermore contemporary Integrated Coastal Zone Management model. Improvements in methodology include the use of adaptive management, ecological modeling and monitoring, appropriate temporal and spatial scales, salient indicators, and stakeholder participation. This contemporary approach is dependent upon recognizing the benefits inherent in utilizing instruments capable of managing resources on a holistic level.Bioregional planning and zoning accommodate the successful management of resources on this level. It is a direct outcome of the convergence of Integrated Coastal Zone Management and the ecosystems approach. Bioregional zoning schemes are capable of traversing the private property and common property doctrines that define the respective terrestrial and aquatic environments of the coastal zone.A comparative case study of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the Belize Marine Protected Area Program is included as an annex, the analysis of which is predicated upon the principles espoused in the literature.     

XMM-Newton observations of the isolated neutron star 1RXS J214303.7+065419/RBS1774

We report XMM-Newton observations of the isolated neutron star RBS1774 and confirm its membership as an XDINS. The X-ray spectrum is best fit with an absorbed blackbody with temperature kT=101 eV and absorption edge at 0.7 keV. No power law component is required. An absorption feature in the RGS data at 0.4 keV is not evident in the EPIC data, but it is not possible to resolve this inconsistency. The star is not seen in the UV OM data to m _AB ∼21. There is a sinusoidal variation in the X-ray flux at a period of 9.437 s with an amplitude of 4%. The age as determined from cooling and magnetic field decay arguments is 10⁵–10⁶ yr for a neutron star mass of 1.35–1.5 M_⊙.      

The Monitor project: JW 380 – a 0.26-, 0.15-M⊙, pre-main-sequence eclipsing binary in the Orion nebula cluster

We present a general recipe for constructing N -body realizations of galaxies comprising near spherical and disc components. First, an exact spherical distribution function for the spheroids (halo and bulge) is determined, such that it is in equilibrium with the gravitational monopole of the disc components. Second, an N -body realization of this model is adapted to the full disc potential by growing the latter adiabatically from its monopole. Finally, the disc is sampled with particles drawn from an appropriate distribution function, avoiding local-Maxwellian approximations. We performed test simulations and find that the halo and bulge radial density profile very closely match their target model, while they become slightly oblate due to the added disc gravity. Our findings suggest that vertical thickening of the initially thin disc is caused predominantly by spiral and bar instabilities, which also result in a radial re-distribution of matter, rather than scattering off interloping massive halo particles.     

Grenville age of basement rocks in Cape May NJ well: new evidence for Laurentian crust in u.s. Atlantic Coastal Plain basement Chesapeake terrane

The Chesapeake terrane of the U.S. mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain basement is bounded on the northwest by the Salisbury positive gravity and magnetic anomaly and extends to the southeast as far as the Atlantic coast. It underlies the Coastal Plain of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey. Rubidium/ Strontium dating of the Chesapeake terrane basement yields an age of 1.025±0.036 Ga. This age is typical of Grenville province rocks of the Middle to Late Proterozoic Laurentian continent. The basement lithologies are similar to some exposed Grenville-age rocks of the Appalachians. The TiO₂ and Zr/P₂O₅ composition of the metagabbro from the Chesapeake terrane basement is overlapped by those of the Proterozoic mafic dikes in the New Jersey Highlands. These new findings support the interpretation that Laurentian basement extends southeast as far as the continental shelf in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. The subcrop of Laurentian crust under the mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain implies unroofing by erosion of the younger Carolina (Avalon) supracrustal terrane. Dextral-transpression fault duplexes may have caused excessive uplift in the Salisbury Embayment area during the Alleghanian orogeny. This extra uplift in the Salisbury area may have caused the subsequent greater subsidence of the Coastal Plain basement in the embayment. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.     

ITERA: IDL tool for emission-line ratio analysis

We present a new software tool to enable astronomers to easily compare observations of emission-line ratios with those determined by photoionization and shock models, ITERA, the IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis. This tool can plot ratios of emission lines predicted by models and allows for comparison of observed line ratios against grids of these models selected from model libraries associated with the tool. We provide details of the libraries of standard photoionization and shock models available with ITERA, and, in addition, present three example emission-line ratio diagrams covering a range of wavelengths to demonstrate the capabilities of ITERA. ITERA, and associated libraries, is available from http://www.brentgroves.net/itera.html.