Dusty KING Spheres

In order to determine the quantitative influence of small amounts of dust on the luminosity profile of spherical galaxies, we represent an elliptical galaxy by a KING sphere filled with dust. The density of dust particles is assumed to be related to the density of stars according to a simple power law. Assuming that the observed central reddenings in NGC 4874 and NGC 4889 are really caused by dust, we estimate the optical depths in the centres of both galaxies to be about 0.75.     

Are galaxies due to accretion?

Burnt-out Population III remnants are thought to have acted as protogalactic seeds. Once tepid pancakes have formed such seeds (≈10⁶ M⊙) could be subject to considerable growing by quasi-stationary accretion.     

Über Gebirgsbildung und Vulkanismus in den Molukken

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The present flora and vegetation of the moraines of the Klutlan Glacier,Yukon Territory,Canada: A study in plant succession

The flora and vegetation of six ice-cored moraines of the Klutlan Glacier were analyzed in 65 plots by European plant-sociological techniques. The age of each plot was estimated from annual growth rings of shrubs or trees in the plots. Nine major vegetation types are distinguished: Crepis nana, Dryas drummondii, Hedysarum mackenzii, Hedysarum-Salix, Salix-Shepherdia canadensis, Picea-Salix, Picea-Arctostaphylos, Picea-Ledum, and Picea-Rhytidium. These contain plants aged 2–6, 9–23, 10–20, 24–30, 32–58, 58–80, 96–178, 177–240, and >163- >339 yr, respectively. Six other vegetation types are described from windthrow areas, drainage channels, volcanic tephra slopes, lake margins, fens, and drained lakes. The major vegetation types reflect a vegetational succession related to moraine age and stability, with the Crepis nana type as the pioneer vegetation developing through the other vegetation types to the Picea-Rhytidium type on the oldest moraines. Changes in species diversity and soil development, particularly humus accumulation, parallel the vegetational succession. This succession differs from patterns of revegetation of deglaciated landscapes in Alaska and British Columbia today and in Minnesota in late-Wisconsin times because of differences in climate, plant migration, and local ecology.     

The use of slump structures as palaeoslope orientation estimators

The two main methods of estimating palaeoslope direction from slump structure orientation data are reviewed. The mean axis method takes the downslope direction as the perpendicular to the mean slump fold axis. The separation are method estimates the downslope direction by the bisector of a planar separation angle between groups of slump folds with opposite downplunge asymmetry. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are considered in detail, by reference first to idealized slump fold distributions and then to a compilation of sixty natural slump fold axis distributions, mostly from published data. Among the advantages of the mean axis method are the ease of deriving confidence limits for estimates and its applicability where fold asymmetry data are unavailable. The main advantage of the separation are method is its validity for strongly skewed fold axis samples. The statistical robustness of the mean axis method, however, due to its reliance on average properties of data, makes it more generally reliable than the separation arc method which depends on extreme properties of data. A procedure for determining palaeoslope directions is suggested which reflects the respective strengths of the two methods.     

Tectonics and sedimentation a century later

This paper is one of a series that commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists in 1926. At that time, thought about tectonics and sedimentation was dominated by the ruling hypothesis of continental accretion. Marginal geosynclines were thought to have been filled with sediments derived from borderlands of Precambrian rocks, and then welded tectonically to the continent. In the 1930s, the fundamental distinction noted by Bailey and Jones between graded graywacke- graptolitic slate suites and cross-bedded sandstone-shelly carbonate suites provided a prelude to Krynine's petrographic-tectonic sandstone clans. In the 1940s sedimentary petrography finally emerged from its heavy mineral era to broaden its vistas. Prior notions of evolutionary successions of sediment types linked to a supposed tectonic cycle (e.g. the European ophiolite-flysch-molasse sequence) became more explicit. Refinements of sandstone classifications by Folk, Pettijohn, Gilbert and others, coupled with Krynine's tectonic cycle and the stratigraphic syntheses of Krumbein, Sloss, Dapples, and others, led in the 1940s to the belief that tectonics is the ultimate sedimentary control.Meanwhile the geosyncline had been dissected by Stille and Kay (1936–1951). Ideas about sources of geosynclinal sediments and paleogeography were revised to include volcanic islands and tectonic lands raisedwithin geosynclines rather than borderlands of Precambrian rocks standing outside the geosynclines. In the 1950s and 1960s, sedimentologists exploited the turbidity current revolution and the combined paleocurrent-petrographic approach pioneered by Pettijohn to delineate in detail the paleography and provenances of orogenic belts. Provenance studies have recently reached a high level of sophistication thanks to the efforts of many workers (e.g. Blatt, Crook, Dickinson, Füchtbauer, McBride, Schwab, Suttner, etc.). This work has demonstrated clearly that the cratonic, volcanic and tectonic source land types proposed by Kay had all been important, but to varying degrees at different times and places. When plate tectonics arrived in the late 1960s, sedimentologists were all equipped to reinterpret their rocks using petrographic, paleocurrent and sedimentary structure analyses to help diagnose different types of plate boundaries and to aid in making palinspastic plate restorations. Thus the study of tectonics and sedimentation is alive and thriving a century later.