ALBERT

Description / Table of Contents: The discovery of large petroleum reserves in northern Alaska prompted the US National Research Council to recommend priorities for ecological research on disturbance effects in the Arctic. Subsequently, this led to the implementation of a field study by the Department of Energy in a small watershed on the North Slope of Alaska. This volume describes results by a research team charged with seeking answers to a number of questions related to disturbance in tundra regions: will short-term disturbances have long-term ecological consequences? Will localized effects be transferred to adjacent systems, e.g., from terrestrial to aquatic? Is it possible to extrapolate understanding of impacts from one landscape to another? The results reported in this volume are an important contribution towards the goal of implementing ecosystem-based management in arctic tundra landscapes. Landscape function and disturbance in Arctic Tundra covers a broad array of topics, from ecosystem physiology to landscape modeling. It is an important source for researchers and students interested in arctic ecology, as well as for environmental managers concerned with practical issues of disturbance.

Description / Table of Contents: PREFACE The aim of this volume is two-fold. At the more pragmatic level, it is to help answer the many questions about the structure of the Pacific continental margin of North America, which have arisen over the years as a result of continuing field mapping and geophysical surveys. The second objective is methodological - to illustrate the irreplaceable role of geological information among the various data sets used in earth-science studies. The need to address these issues became apparent to the author during the several years he spent taking part in geological and geophysical studies on the west coast of Canada. All too often, results of geologic field mapping disagreed with tectonic predictions from too-straightforward local applications of global plate reconstructions, which due to their generality do not always take a full account of specific character of particular regions. To be sure, the global approach has during the last q~/artercentury greatly expanded the vision of geoscientists, previously restricted to continental regions. However, a negative by-product of this expansion has been a decline of attention paid to local information, as tectonic studies have increasingly relied on simply fitting the development of a particular region into this or that prefabricated tectonic template. Direct geological observations have limitations of their own. The observer in most cases deals with products of geologic processes, rather than with the processes themselves. Field mapping provides local information, and many years of effort are needed before a regional overview becomes possible. Geologic mapping is restricted to the ground surface, and even the deepest drillholes cannot sample more than the outermost shell of the Earth. The factual side of geologic mapping is usually limited to determination of rock types and their relationships in areas of exposure. Conclusions about the three-dimensional structure of a region and its evolution are still mostly inferential. Broad incorporation into geological studies of geophysical data, assisted by ever-more-sophisticated modern computers, provides a huge volume of information unobtainable in other ways. Geophysical methods quickly afford regional coverage or images of the Earth's deep interior. Geophysical methods have prompted the application in geological sciences of methodologies borrowed from exact sciences, such as mathematics and physics. Particularly important has been quantitative modeling, which allows a scientist to use the known parameters of a system to predict others. But in taking this approach too far, one encounters a dangerous pitfall. A model is a simplified representation of a natural phenomenon. The quality of this or that representation is relative, and a representation is never perfect. To incorporate all characteristics of a geologic phenomenon, in a parametrized form, into a numerical or physical imitation is impossible. This requires one to rely on simplifying assumptions, and a model is no better than the assumptions at its base. Unrealistic assumptions lead to unrealistic models. When a disagreement arises between model predictions and observations - such as those from geologic field mapping - a modeler may be tempted to downplay the differences or the significance of the offending observations. It becomes tempting to underestimate the role of an experienced geologist as a principal arbiter of the realism of a model. But it is geological data and geological control that provide the ultimate means of testing abstract models. From this methodological position, the present study of the western North American continental margin is organized as follows: 1. Geological information, available from field mapping and drilling, is gathered and summarized. 2. Current geophysical models for this region are considered, with particular attention to their underlying assumptions. 3. The available data, geological and geophysical, are synthesized into an internally consistent geologic-evolution concept. 4. This concept is tested by comparison with direct geological observations from field mapping and drilling. Because most current data sets and models cover northwestern Washington and western British Columbia, particular attention was paid to these areas. Fortunately, these areas contain many keys that help understand the structure of the entire western North American continental margin, which has baffled scientists for decades. The author does not claim to have resolved all these problems, but he does believe he has made a useful contribution to understanding continental-oceanic plate interrelations at this continental margin. Rigidity of lithospheric plates is a critical assumption in current models of plate evolution. The lithophere of a plate is created at spreading centers manifested in the global system of mid-ocean ridges. It moves away from the place of its birth towards boundaries with other plates, with which it can interact in a variety of ways. Some interactions are of strike-slip type, with two plates simply sliding past each other. However, to compensate for the creation of new lithosphere at spreading centers, older lithosphere at some plate boundaries descends into the mantle as it is overriden by other plates. At such plate boundaries lie subduction zones. If both regimes occur along a single plate boundary, the transition between them must be abrupt. Unless it can be tied to a change in orientation of the boundary, it must be associated with a junction of not two, but three different plates. Such a template was used to interpret the structure and tectonic evolution of the western North American continental margin in the late 1960s and thereafter (Atwater, 1970; McManus et al., 1972; Barr and Chase, 1974; Riddihough and Hyndman, 1976). To satisfy the principles of rigid-plate tectonics, both regimes have to exist along this continental margin. Also needed in rigid-plate reconstructions is a plate triple junction somewhere between the areas of proven ongoing subduction (in Oregon and southern Washington) and transform plate motion (along the southeastern Alaska margin; Atwater, 1970; McManus et al., 1972). Such a triple junction has been placed off Queen Charlotte Sound offshore British Columbia (Keen and Hyndman, 1979; Riddihough et al., 1983), where a spreading center has been postulated between the Pacific and Explorer oceanic plates (Hyndman et al. 1979; Riddihough, 1984). Off northern Vancouver Island, a transform boundary between the Explorer and Juan de Fuca oceanic plates has been postulated, but both these plates are assumed to be subducting beneath Vancouver Island (Hyndman et al., 1979; Riddihough and Hyndman, 1989)o With the assumed universality of the rigid-plate model, "broad similarity" has been suggested between the geology of western Oregon and that of western British Columbia, and the Cascadia zone of active subduction has been extended as far north as the mouth of Queen Charlotte Sound (Riddihough, 1979, 1984). An accretionary sedimentary prism (Yorath, 1980) - or even an accretionary complex containing several exotic "terranes" (Davis and Hyndman, 1989) - has been postulated off Vancouver Island. Geological observations onshore and offshore (Shouldice, 1971; Tiffin et al., 1972) have come to be considered too "surficial" to be of major consequence for large-scale tectonic modeling (Yorath et al., 1985a,b; Yorath, 1987). Variants of the principal geophysical model for this area during the last decade (Clowes et al., 1987; Hyndman et alo, 1990; Spence et al. 1991; Yuan et al., 1992; Dehler and Clowes, 1992) have become increasingly distant from geological observations. As new model variants emerged, they were checked for internal consistency, compatibility with neighboring local models and fidelity to the overall assumed tectonic picture. However, detailed geological work continued, and many of its results proved incompatible with the conventional wisdom (Gehrels, 1990; Babcock et al., 1992, 1994; Allan et al., 1993; Lyatsky, 1993a). Importantly, questions arose about the applicability in this region of the conventional, simple rigid-plate assumption, as it was shown to be unable to account for all the geological and geophysical peculiarities in some areas (Carbotte et al., 1989; Allan et al., 1993; Davis and Currie, 1993). New solutions were made necessary by new findings and by rediscovery of forgotten old data (see Lyatsky et al., 1991; Lyatsky, 1993b). Without aiming to resolve all the outstanding debates, tectonic implications of the geologic mapping and drilling results in this region are considered in the following chapters. These results are integrated with geochemical and geophysical data. Interpretations of these data, made by this author and by other workers, are verified by geological observations and by geologically plausible extrapolations from these observations. In searching for solutions consistent with all the information, the author has restricted himself to analyzing continental-crust structures along this continental margin. He believes, however, that future models for the offshore regions of the northeastern Pacific should consider the results obtained herein.

Description / Table of Contents: The subject of the book is an indepth description of the theory and mathematical models behind the application of the Global Positioning System in geodesy and geodynamics. The text has been prepared by leading experts in the field, contributing their particular points of view. Unlike a collection of disjoint papers, the text provides a continous flow of ideas and developments. The mathematical models for GPS measurements are developed in the first half of the book, followed by the description of GPS solutions for geodetic applications on local, regional and global scales.

Description / Table of Contents: PREFACE The objective of this book is to introduce the practitioner as well as the more theoretically interested reader into the integration problem of spatial information for Geo-lnformation Syslems. Former Get-Information Systems are restricted to 2D space. They realize the integration of spatial information by a conversion of vector and raster representations. This, however. leads to conceptual difficulties because of the two totally different paradigms. Furthermore, the internal topology of the get-objects is not considered. In recent years the processing of 3D information has played a growing role in Get-Information Systems. For example, planning processes for environmental protection or city planning are dependent on 3D data. The integration of spatial reformation will become even more impoaant in the 3D context and with the development of a new generation of open GISs. This book is intended to respond to some of these requirements. It presents a model for the integration of spatial information for 3D Geo-lnformation Systems (3D-GISs). As a precondition for the integration of spatial information, the integration of different spatial representations is emphasized. The model is based on a three-level notion of space that likewise includes the geometry, metrics and the topology of get-objects. The so called extended complex (e-complex) is introduced as a kernel of the model. Its internal basic geometries are the point, the line, the triangle and the tetrahedron. It is shown how a convex e-complex (ce-complex) is generated by the construction of the convex hull and the "'filling" of lines, triangles and tetrahedra, respectively. As we know from computer geometry, this results in substantially simpler geometric algorithms. Additionally, the algorithms gain by the explicit utilization of the topology of the ce-complex. This book also builds a bridge from the GIS to the object-oriented database technology, which will likely become a key technology for the development of a new generation of open Geo-lnformation Systems. In the so-called GEtmodel kernel "building blocks" are introduced that s~mplify the development of software architectures for geo-applications. A geological application in the Lower Rhine Basin shows the practical use of the introduced geometric and topological representation for a 3D-GIS...

Description / Table of Contents: PREFACE Through the last few decades inversion concepts have become an integral past of experimental data interpretation in several branches of science. In numerous cases similar inversion-like techniques were developed independently in separate disciplines, sometimes based on different lines of reasoning, and sometimes not to the same level of sophistication. This fact was realized early in inversion history. In the seventies and eighties "generalized inversion" and "total inversion" became buzz words in Earth Science, and some even saw inversion as the panacea that would eventually raise all experimental science into a common optimal frame. It is true that a broad awareness of the generality of inversion methods is established by now. On the other hand, the volume of experimental data varies greatly among disciplines, as does the degree of nonlinearity and numerical load of forward calculations, the amount and accuracy of a priori information, and the criticality of correct error propagation analysis. Thus, some clear differences in terminology, philosophy and numerical implementation remain, some of them for good reasons, but some of them simply due to tradition and lack of interdisciplinary communication. In a sense the development of inversion methods could be viewed as an evolution process where it is important that "species" can arise and adapt through isolation, but where it is equally important that they compete and mate afterwards through interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. This book was actually initiated as a proceedings volume of the "Interdisciplinary Inversion Conference 1995", held at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The aim of this conference was to further the competition and mating part of above-mentioned evolution process, and we decided to extend the effect through this publication of 35 selected contributions. The point of departure is a story about geophysics and astronomy, in which the classical methods of Backus and Gilbert from around 1970 have been picked up by helioseismology. Professor Douglas Gough, who is a pioneer in this field, is the right person to tell this success story of interdisciplinary exchange of research experience and techniques [1-31] (numbers refer to pages in this book). Practitioners of helioseismology like to stress the fact that the seismological coverage on the Sun in a sense is much more complete and accurate than it is on Earth. Indeed we witness vigorous developments in the Backus & Gilbert methods (termed MOLA/SOLA in the helioseismology literature) [32-59] driven by this fortunate data situation. Time may have come for geophysicists to look into helioseismology for new ideas. Seismic methods play a key role in the study of the Earth's lithosphere. The contributions in [79 - 130,139 - 150] relate to reflection seismic oil exploration, while methods for exploration of the whole crust and the underlying mantle axe presented in [131 - 138, 151 - 166]. Two contributions [167 - 185] present the application of inversion for the understanding of the origin of petroleum and the prediction of its migration in sedimentary basins. Inversion is applied to hydrogeophysical and environmental problems [186 - 222], where again developments are driven by the advent of new, mainly electromagnetic, experimental techniques. The role of inversion in electromagnetic investigations of the lithosphere/astenosphere system as well as the ionosphere axe exemplified in [223 - 238]. Geodesy has a fine tradition of sophisticated linear inversion of large, accurate sets of potential field data. This leads naturally to the fundamental study of continuous versus discrete inverse formulations found in [262-275]. Applications of inversion to geodetic satellite data are found in [239 - 261]. General mathematical and computational aspects are mainly found in [262 - 336]. Nonlinearity in weakly nonlinear problems may be coped with by careful modification of lineaxized methods [295 - 302]. Strongly nonlinear problems call for Monte Carlo methods, where the cooling scedule in simulated annealing [303 - 311,139 - 150] is critical for convergence to a useful (local) minimum, and the set of consistent models is explored through importance sampling [89 - 90]. The use of prior information, directly or indirectly, is a key issue in most contributions, ranging from Bayesian formulations based a priori covariances e.g. [98 - 112,122 - 130, 254 - 261], over more general but also less tractable prior probability densities [79 - 97], to inclusion of specific prior knowledge of shape [284 - 294, 312 - 319]. Given the differences and similarities in approach, can we benefit from exchange of ideas and experience? In practice ideas and experience seldom jump across discipline boundaries by themselves. Normally one must go and get them the hard way, for instance by reading and understanding papers from disciplines far from the home ground. Look at the journey into the interdisciplinary cross-field of inversion techniques as a demanding safari into an enormous hunting ground. This book is meant to provide a convenient starting point.

Description / Table of Contents: PREFACE The ocean has always been reluctant to reveal its secrets. Its size and the inaccessibility of its deeper regions have made their safeguard a reasonably simple matter with the result that significant misconceptions persisted for many years. Two of the most widespread of these concerned the featureless nature of the sea floor and the silence of the deep ocean. Underwater acoustics has played a key role in discrediting both and in so doing introduced new and exciting developments in oceanography and geophysics. In the years following World War II, echosounders and subbottom profilers based on new active sonar technology, revealed the true nature of the seafloor topography and led to the major advances represented by plate tectonics. Research driven by the requirements of passive sonar, on the other hand, was to demonstrate that the sea was not silent but was characterised by a complex noise spectrum. Many individual mechanisms and sources ranging from man-made, biological and geophysical activity to the intrinsic noise of the sea itself were found to contribute to this spectrum. A major component, which is the subject of this book, was to remain unrecognised to underwater acoustics until noise measurements could be made effectively at very low frequencies, although its presence had been indicated by seismology long before these measurements were possible. By virtue of its geographical isolation in the Southern Ocean, New Zealand has provided an ideal environment for long-range propagation and ambient noise investigations and numerous studies have been reported. Our interest in the subject of this book was aroused initially in the course of one such experiment in 1966. For the first time it had been possible to extend the recording bandwidth to 1 Hz and the improved performance of this new system was anticipated eagerly. However the main purpose of the experiment was nearly aborted by the appearance of a new and unsuspected noise component at frequencies below 10 Hz. Due primarily to technical limitations in the equipment then available, a subsequent programme, designed to identify the properties and origin of the source more clearly, was not productive and was soon abandoned. An opportunity to revisit the problem arose some 10 years later, when the University of Auckland became involved in a major environmental study in support of the development of an offshore gas field in Cook Strait. The technology then available provided an opportunity to examine afresh the relationship between sea state and the seismo-acoustic response generated. An initial trim demonstrated the potential of the site. Accordingly a long-term programme, involving the parallel measurement of the oceanwave field and acoustic response, was undertaken in a series of student research theses. The data so gathered were of sufficiently high quality to ultimately establish wave-wave interactions as the source of the acoustic effects observed and to identify many of its characteristics. This result was soon to be confirmed by other studies. As the noise data accumulated, however, it became apparent that certain refinements to the theories describing the mechanism were required. Our attempts to provide these refinements have been reported in a number of contributions in recent years. The accounts of these and similar contributions by others have unfortunately appeared in the literature in a somewhat disjointed manner, with the result that the evolution of the subject has not been easy to follow. This book attempts to present a more coherent account of the subject and its development. Most of the early experimental and theoretical results from our group have arisen from two key Ph.D. theses, due to Dr. K.C. Ewans and Dr. C.Y. Wu. The painstaking and careful instrumentation development and data analysis provided by Dr. Ewans were critical to the definitive correlation which we were able to establish between wind field, seastate and the acoustic response so generated. Dr. Wu's thesis presented the first phase of our attempt at the resolution of certain key theoretical issues, which were identified in the course of the experimental programme. Both studies owe much to the support of Shell BP Todd Oil Services Ltd., acting for Maui Development Ltd., and to the University of Auckland. The support of the Electricity Corporation of New Zealand Ltd. during a later experimental investigation of the Southern Ocean wave field is also acknowledged...

Description / Table of Contents: This book contains revised refereed papers selected from the presentations at the First International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, held in University Park, PA, USA, in August 1995. The 23 full papers included are divided into sections on low-level processing, vectorization and segmentation of scanned graphics documents; symbol and diagram recognition, map processing, interpretation of engineering drawings. Each section contains both survey articles to assess the state of the art, and research papers presenting novel results. One section is devoted to a contest held to determine the best algorithm for detection of dashed lines in drawings. The final chapter summarizes the conclusions and recommendations of the discussions held during the workshop.