Traversing Fantasies,Activating Desires: Economic Geography,Activist Research,and Psychoanalytic Methodology

In this article I recount the ways that key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—the relationship between language and desire, fantasy and subject formation, ethics and the traversal of fantasy—have enabled a novel methodological approach to activist research. Psychoanalysis allows us to recast research as a process of encountering and traversing fantasies, which is simultaneously a process of engendering new representations, desires, subjectivities, and societies.     

Climatic Change and Desert Vegetation Distribution: Assessing Thirty Years of Change in Southern Nevada's Mojave Desert

A major theme in physical geography and biogeography is understanding how vegetation changes across geographic gradients during climate change. We assess shifts in distributions of fifteen Mojave Desert plant species based on a 2008 resurvey of 103 vegetation transects that were established in 1979. We model changes in species distributions using Maximum Entropy (Maxent) with environmental and climate variables to predict probability of species’ occurrences. Climate during the ten-year period preceding the 2008 vegetation survey was 1.5°C warmer and 3 cm per year of precipitation drier than the ten years preceding 1979. Species inhabiting the highest elevations and strongly correlated with precipitation displayed areal reductions from 1979 through 2008.     

A Bayesian Approach to Establishing a Reference Particle Size Distribution in the Presence of Outliers

The presence of observations or measurements that are unlike the majority is fairly common in studies conducted to establish particle size (or weight fraction) distributions. Therefore, there is a need to develop methods that are capable of producing estimates of particle size distributions that are not overly sensitive to the presence of a few observations that might be considered outliers. This article proposes a type of contamination mixture model that probabilistically allocates each observation to either a majority component or a contamination component. Observations that are allocated to a contamination component are down-weighted when estimating the particle size distribution (while the uncertainty of contamination classification is automatically accounted for in estimation). Computational methods are developed and the utility of the proposed methodology is demonstrated via a simulation study. The method is then applied to data produced from an inter-laboratory study conducted to establish a particle size distribution in cement.     

Cool,wet conditions late in the Younger Dryas in semi-arid New Mexico

A thick alluvial sequence in central New Mexico contains the Scholle wet meadow deposit that traces upstream to a paleospring. The wet meadow sediments contain an abundant fauna of twenty-one species of freshwater and terrestrial mollusks and ten species of ostracodes. The mollusks and ostracodes are indicative of a local high alluvial water table with spring-supported perennial flow but without standing water. Pollen analysis documents shrub grassland vegetation with sedges, willow, and alder in a riparian community. Stable carbon isotopes from the wet meadow sediments have δ¹³C values ranging from ? 22.8 to ? 23.3‰, indicating that 80% of the organic carbon in the sediment is derived from C₃ species. The wet meadow deposit is AMS dated 10,400 to 9700 ¹⁴C yr BP, corresponding to 12,300 to 11,100 cal yr BP and overlapping in time with the Younger Dryas event (YD). The wet meadow became active about 500 yr after the beginning of the YD and persisted 400 yr after the YD ended. The Scholle wet meadow is the only record of perennial flow and high water table conditions in the Abo Arroyo drainage basin during the past 13 ka.     

Mapping bedrock lithologies through in situ regolith using retained element ratios: a case study from the Agnew-Lawlers area,Western Australia

Large, high-quality multi-element geochemical datasets are becoming widely available in the exploration industry, and afford excellent opportunities to investigate geochemical processes. A dataset of over 2500 analyses of unweathered and variably weathered mafic and ultramafic rocks for over 50 elements has been collected by Gold Fields Ltd. in the auriferous Agnew-Lawlers area of the eastern Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia. This dataset is used to investigate changes in element abundances and inter-element ratios through varying degrees and styles of weathering in an area of thick regolith characterised by deep in situ weathering. Systematic interrogation of the data, using lithostratigraphic controls derived from regional mapping and geophysics, reveals that a suite of elements, including Ti, Al, Zr, Th, La, Sc and Nb, and to a lesser extent Cr and Ni, behave as essentially immobile components during saprolite formation. In some cases diagnostic element ratios persist into siliceous duricrust. Ratios of these elements are used as reliable discriminants of bedrock type, and delineate features such as cryptic layering within fractionated sills and subtle geochemical variants in a sequence of tholeiitic and komatiitic basalts. Mapping on the basis of discriminant element ratios greatly extends previous trace-element ratio-based schemes for rock type discrimination. The potential to determine several of these elements with adequate precision and accuracy using portable XRF technology opens a potentially useful technique for rapid geochemical bedrock mapping in residual terrains.     

Shallow seismicity, triggered seismicity, and ambient noise tomography at the long-dormant Uturuncu Volcano, Bolivia

Using a network of 15 seismometers around the inflating Uturuncu Volcano from April 2009 to 2010, we find an average rate of about three local volcano-tectonic earthquakes per day, and swarms of 5–60 events a few times per month with local magnitudes ranging from −1.2 to 3.7. The earthquake depths are near sea level, more than 10 km above the geodetically inferred inflation source and the Altiplano Puna Magma Body. The Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake on 27 February 2010 triggered hundreds of earthquakes at Uturuncu with the onset of the Love and Rayleigh waves and again with the passage of the X2/X3 overtone phases of Rayleigh waves. This is one of the first incidences in which triggering has been observed from multiple surface wave trains. The earthquakes are oriented NW–SE similar to the regional faults and lineaments. The b value of the catalog is 0.49, consistent with a tectonic origin of the earthquakes. We perform ambient noise tomography using Love wave cross-correlations to image a low-velocity zone at 1.9 to 3.9 km depth below the surface centered slightly north of the summit. The low velocities are perhaps related to the hydrothermal system and the low-velocity zone is spatially correlated with earthquake locations. The earthquake rate appears to vary with time—a seismic deployment from 1996 to 1997 reveals 1–5 earthquakes per day, whereas 60 events/day were seen during 5 days using one seismometer in 2003. However, differences in analysis methods and magnitudes of completeness do not allow direct comparison of these seismicity rates. The rate of seismic activity at Uturuncu is higher than at other well-monitored inflating volcanoes during periods of repose. The frequent swarms and triggered earthquakes suggest the hydrothermal system is metastable.     

One-year along-beach variation in the maximum depth of erosion resulting from irregular shoreline morphology

Beach erosion and accretion occur across multiple time scales. Over long time scales (decades to millennia) the shoreface ravinement surface, which is recognized as a coarse lag deposit, forms at the shoreface toe as a result of wave- and current-induced erosion during shoreline transgression. Over short time scales (hours to days) the depth of sediment disturbance, which is recognized as coarse lamina and measured at the foreshore by devices and monitoring tracer beds, forms as a result of wave- and current-induced reworking during a tidal cycle. The maximum depth of erosion (MDOE), quantified here over 1 year, is modulated by processes that operate over a time scale that is between the drivers of short-term (e.g. tides and waves) and long-term (e.g. sea-level rise) beach erosion. The MDOE integrates the erosion that occurs over a discrete time interval and records the maximum depth of erosion that is likely principally induced by storms, which is difficult to quantify by other methods that rely on discrete observations (e.g. changes in elevation or movement of the mean high-water line). A novel technique for quantifying the MDOE, based on comparing the bedding and stratigraphy between cores collected at the same locations over a discrete time interval, is presented here and applied at Onslow Beach, NC, USA. This 12 km-long barrier island has irregular shoreline morphology, characterized by two embayments separated by a central headland. This shape is largely the result of variations in the depth of underlying rock strata and produces a steeper beachface at the headland than at the embayments. At each of the six sites examined along the barrier, the MDOE is found to increase from the backshore to the middle intertidal zone and is higher at the sites closer to the headland. These variations in the MDOE are likely due to the increase in average wave energy impacting the beachface from an offshore direction and steeper beaches (intermediate beach state) at the headland. Where the MDOE is within the beach facies, it is not associated with a coarsening, which is due to the heterolithic nature of the Onslow-beach strata. Where the MDOE is the contact between back-barrier and beach facies it is always associated with a coarsening and a gravel-rich lag deposit because in this case, the MDOE is an amalgamation of multiple erosional events, which is similar to the shoreface ravinement surface. Along-beach variation in the MDOE does not correspond with discrete observations of beach change over the same period and is likely a better indicator of erosion potential than long-term discrete observations, such as changes in surface elevation or the position of the mean high-water line.