Review of Electric and Magnetic Fields Accompanying Seismic and Volcanic Activity

New observations of magnetic, electric and electromagnetic field variations, possibly related to recent volcanic and seismic events, have been obtained on Mt. Unzen in Japan, Reunion Island in Indian Ocean, the Long Valley volcanic caldera in California, and for faults in China and Russia, California and several other locations. For volcanic events, contributions from different physical processes can be identified during the various eruption stages. Slow processes (weeks to months) include near-surface thermal demagnetization effects, piezomagnetic effects, and effects from rotation/displacement of magnetized material. Rapid processes (seconds to days) include piezomagnetic effects from instantaneous stress redistribution with explosive eruptions and electrokinetic effects from rupture of high pressure fluid compartments commonly encountered in volcanic regions. For seismic events, the observed coseismic offsets are instantaneous, provided care has been taken to ensure sensors are insensitive to seismic shaking and are in regions of low magnetic field gradient. Simple piezomagnetic dislocation models based on geodetically and seismically determined fault parameters generally match the observed signals in size and sign. Electrokinetic effects resulting from rupture of fluid filled compartments at hydrostatic to lithostatic pore pressures can generate transient signals in the frequency band 100 Hz to 0.01 Hz. However, large-scale fluid driven processes are not evident in near-field measurements in the epicentral region minutes to weeks before large earthquakes. The subset of ionospheric disturbances generated by trapped atmospheric pressure waves (also termed gravity waves and/or acoustic waves, traveling ionospheric disturbances or TID's) that are excited by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are common and propagate to great distances. These are known and expected consequences of earthquakes, volcanic explosions (and other atmospheric disturbances), that must be identified and their effects removed from VLF/ULF electromagnetic field records before associating new observations of ionospheric disturbances with earthquake activity.     

Sleaze, constituency and dissent: voting on Nolan in the House of Commons

Summary Dissension has become increasingly common within the UK House of Commons in recent decades. In November 1995, the government's position on recommendations regarding the disclosure of MPs' financial interests linked to their Parliamentary position was defeated because 22 of its backbenchers voted for a Labour amendment, which was carried. This paper looks at the pattern of voting on that issue, with particular reference to the constituency situation of MPs at a difficult time for many of them, just after a major review of boundaries had been promulgated. It shows that those backbenchers with unchanged seats were much more likely to dissent.     

Material versus isobaric internal boundaries in the Earth and their influence on postglacial rebound

Most previous earth models used to calculate viscoelastic relaxation after the removal of the Late Pleistocene ice loads implicitly assume that there is no exchange of mass across the mantle density discontinuities on periods of tens of thousands of years (the material boundary formulation). In the present study, simple incompressible models are used to determine the Earth's behaviour in the case where the density discontinuity remains at a constant pressure rather than deforming with the material (the isobaric boundary formulation). The calculation of the movement of the boundary is more rigorous than in earlier studies and uses the local incremental pressure calculated at the depth of the boundary and allows for the vertical deformation caused by the change in volume as material changes phase. It is shown that the buoyancy modes associated with the density discontinuities decrease in strength and increase in relaxation time analogous to what results when the density contrast is reduced. Also, two viscoelastic modes arise from an isobaric boundary, which is also predicted when there is a contrast in rigidity or viscosity across a material boundary. The difference in predicted radial deformation between the isobaric boundary model and the material boundary model is largest for long-wavelength loads for which the material incremental pressure at depth is largest. If the isobaric boundary model is appropriate for the treatment of the mineral phase changes in the mantle on glacial rebound timescales, then previous inferences of the deep-mantle to shallow-mantle viscosity ratio based on large-scale deformation (spherical harmonic degree < 10) of the Earth and including data from the early part of the glacio-isostatic uplift are too small.     

Australian geography seen from afar: through a glass darkly

Having been invited to contribute an external view of Australian geography, I concluded that such a task was impossible—that geographers elsewhere do not have a general view of Australian geography. I maintain that this is neither surprising nor significant, setting the argument within the context of a discipline fragmented along four major cleavage lines. Because of these cleavages, most geographers (like most other academics) work in small intellectual communities which are necessarily ‘parochial’: as a consequence, the discipline is characterised by a series of parts that do not make a coherent whole.