THE LEGENDARY “REDISCOVERY” OF GEORGE PERKINS MARSH

The conventional narrative regarding the American reception of George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864), is that his work and ideas were “lost,”“forgotten,” or “neglected” until Lewis Mumford “rediscovered” him and introduced him to geographers at the University of California‐Berkeley through The Brown Decades (Mumford [1931] 1955) and until Carl Sauer made him known to the profession at large beginning in 1938. This article upends the conventional narrative by looking at earlier references to Marsh's later versions of Man and Nature, which were published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action from 1874 to 1907. Analysis reveals that a number of geographers and historians cited these editions between 1875 and the early 1950s. Examining the legend of loss and rediscovery suggests the value of methods utilized in reception studies for research on the history of geography.     

Detectives and geology in fiction - 1: Holmes and Thorndyke

In the early years - the so called 'Golden Age' - of mystery fiction, there were a number of towering figures - the 'great detectives'. However, only two of them included geology among their concerns. Their abilities and achievements are here compared and assessed.     

Assessing the completeness of the deglacial-marine stratigraphic record on west Spitsbergen by accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating

The record of Quaternary glaciations of coastal areas is frequently preserved as a raised deglacial-emergence sequence. Detailed radiocarbon dating of foraminifera and marine macrofossils from a representative deglacial sequence on west Spitsbergen document two periods of sedimentation at c . 11,400 BP and at 9500 BP that together span < 500 years. The incompleteness of this record (< 25%), the highly episodic nature of sedimentation, the dominance of local glacial and environmental effects and the presence of allochthonous foraminifera inhibits ascertaining the relation between deglaciation of Svalbard/Barents Sea and changes in thermohaline circulation in the Norwegian Sea. The Late Weichselian and older deglacial sequences on west Spitsbergen have a similar sedimentologic succession. Thus, one possibility is that older raised-marine deglacial sequences on Svalbard and other Arctic areas may represent similar brief intervals, potentially confounding correlations across the Arctic and with well established events (i.e. the Eemian Interglacial) at lower latitudes.     

Evolution of Crystallizing Interstitial Liquid in an Arc-Related Cumulate Determined by LA ICP-MS Mapping of a Large Amphibole Oikocryst

High-resolution chemical mapping of a large, single, oikocrysticamphibole grain from the Eriksberg gabbro, by laser ablationinductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA ICP-MS), documentsthe progressive evolution of interstitial liquid in a hydrousbasaltic system. The amphibole has a nearly constant mg-numberand only minor variations in most major elements, in part becauseof the resorption of olivine buffering the liquid composition.However, non-buffered trace elements including Sc, V, Nb, Zr,Th, U, and the rare earth elements (REE) show at least an orderof magnitude variation. For example, V varies from <1 to>1000 ppm, Zr from 4·3 to >1000 ppm, Nb from 0·14to 12·3 ppm, and the REE patterns range from bowed upwith a negative Eu anomaly to bowed down with a positive Euanomaly—all within a single crystal. The distributionof amphibole compositions indicates that the interstitial liquidwas not uniformly distributed as crystallization proceeded.Rather, the compositional variations reflect progressively morechannelized flow of interstitial liquid during compaction. Whenthe interstitial liquid evolved so that the crystallizing amphibolehad