scholarly journals II. On the deflection of the plumb-line in India, caused by the attraction of the Himalayan Mountains

1859 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 701-702

Since transmitting his Paper “On the deflection of the Plumb-line in India caused by the attraction of the Himalaya Mountains," the author has had the advantage of seeing the pages of Major R. Strachey’s work on the physical geography of the Himalayas, now passing through the press ; and being permitted to make use of them, he availed himself of the important information therein contained to add a postscript to his former communication. Major Strachey thinks that none of the numerous ranges commonly marked on maps of Thibet, have any special definite existence as mountain chains, apart from the general mass of the table-land; and that this country should not be considered to be as if in the interval between the two so-called chains of the Himalaya and Kouenlun, but that it is in reality the summit of a great protuberance, above the general level of the earth’s surface, of which the supposed Kouenlun and Himalaya are nothing more than the north and south faces, while the other ranges are but corrugations of the table-land more or less marked. The plains of India which skirt the foot of the table-land, to an extent of 1500 miles, nowhere have an elevation exceeding 1200 feet above the sea, the average being much less; and there is reason to think that the northern plateau of Yarkend and Khotan, like the country about Bukhara, lies at a very small eleva­tion, probably not more than 1000 or 2000 feet above the sea, while on the borders of the Caspian the surface descends below the sea-level.

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-74
Author(s):  
Jessica Donahue ◽  
Steven Hoehner ◽  
Ben Li

This article focuses on the problem of analytically determining the optimal placement of five points on the unit sphere {\bb S}^{2} so that the surface area of the convex hull of the points is maximized. It is shown that the optimal polyhedron has a trigonal bipyramidal structure with two vertices placed at the north and south poles and the other three vertices forming an equilateral triangle inscribed in the equator. This result confirms a conjecture of Akkiraju, who conducted a numerical search for the maximizer. As an application to crystallography, the surface area discrepancy is considered as a measure of distortion between an observed coordination polyhedron and an ideal one. The main result yields a formula for the surface area discrepancy of any coordination polyhedron with five vertices.


Author(s):  
William B. Meyer

One of the earliest historians of the Civil War saw it as a fundamental clash between the peoples of different latitudes. Climate had made the antebellum North and South distinct societies and natural enemies, John W. Draper argued, the one democratic and individualist, the other aristocratic and oligarchical. If such were the case, the future of the reunited states was hardly a bright one. But Draper saw no natural barriers to national unity that wise policy could not surmount. The restlessness and transience of American life that many deplored instead merited, in his view, every assistance possible. In particular, he wrote, Americans needed to be encouraged to move as freely across climatic zones as they already did within them. The tendency of North and South to congeal into hostile types of civilization could be frustrated, but only by an incessant mingling of people. Sectional discord was inevitable only if the natural law that "emigrants move on parallels of latitude" were left free to take its course. These patterns of emigration were left free, for the most part, but without the renewed strife that Draper feared. After the war as before it, few settlers relocating to new homes moved far to the north or south of their points of origin. As late as 1895, Henry Gannett, chief geographer to the U.S. Census, could still describe internal migration as "mainly conducted westward along parallels of latitude." More often as time went on, it was supposed that race and not merely habit underlay the pattern, that climatic preferences were innate, different stocks of people staying in the latitudes of their forbears by the compulsion of biology. Thus, it was supposed, Anglo-Saxons preferred cooler lands than Americans of Mediterranean ancestry, while those of African descent preferred warmer climates than either. Over time, though, latitude loosened its grip and exceptions to the rule multiplied. As the share of the population in farming declined, so did the strongest reason for migrants to stay within familiar climates. Even by the time Gannett wrote, the tendency that he described, though still apparent, was weaker than it had been at mid-century. It weakened because a preference for familiar climates was not a fixed human trait but one shaped by experience and wants, and capable of changing as these variables changed.


1992 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 324-324
Author(s):  
Keith Young

In northeastern Chihuahua and Trans-Pecos Texas, in the early Late Albian zone of Hysteroceras varicosum occurs the Boeseites romeri (Haas) fauna with B. romeri (Hass), B. perarmata (Hass), B. aff. barbouri (Haas), B. cf. howelli (Haas), B.proteus (Haas), Prohysteroceras cf. P. hanhaense Haas, Elobiceras sp., and Dipoloceras (?) sp. B. perarmata has also been collected at Cerro Mercado, near Monclova, Coahuila. Haas originally described this fauna from Angola. Now, from rocks in the same zone in the Sierra Mojada, Coahuila, Mexico, there is a form related to if not identical with Hysteroceras famelicum Van Hoepen, also originally described from Angola and also from the zone of Hysteroceras varicosum.These fossils are known only from southern North America and Angola; they have not been described from the European Tethys. In 1984 I suggested that during the highstand of sea level of the early Late Albian (Hysteroceras varicosum zone) these ammonites migrated from Angola to Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas via an epeiric seaway extending across the sag between South America and Africa proposed by Kennedy and Cooper. This would be twelve to fifteen million years prior to an oceanic connection between the North and South Atlantic.I would now ask, can similar epeiric seas and highstands of sea level explain the migration of successive European, Tethyan, Jurassic ammonite faunas down the Mozambique Channel and around the horn of Africa into the Neuquen Basin of Argentina before Africa and Antarctica separated, as proposed by Spath.


1904 ◽  
Vol 1 (10) ◽  
pp. 504-505
Author(s):  
Edward Greenly

The bare and rocky hill known as Holyhead Mountain is of considerable interest in connection with recent geological events, standing as it does some thirty miles out from the highlands of Carnarvonshire into the Irish Sea Basin; and in such remarkable isolation, for it is much the highest of the five hills which rise above the general level of the platform of Anglesey.Its height is only 721 feet, but so strongly featured is it, especially towards the west, that one feels the term ‘mountain’ to be no misnomer, and can hardly believe it to be really lower than many of our smooth wolds and downs of Oolite and Chalk. Being composed, moreover, of white quartzite (or more properly of quartzite-schist), and being so bare of vegetation, it recalls much more vividly certain types of scenery in the Scottish Highlands than anything in those Welsh mountains that one sees from its sides. Towards the east it slopes at a moderate angle, but a little west of the summit it is traversed by a very strong feature, due to a fault, running nearly north and south, along which is a line of great crags, facing west, and prolonged northwards into the still greater sea cliffs towards the North Stack. Beyond this the land still remains high, but is smoother in outline, a somewhat softer series of rocks extending from the fault to the South Stack, where the high moors end off in great cliffs above the sea.


1950 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 261-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Cook ◽  
R. V. Nicholls

The village of Kalývia Sokhás lies against the base of one of the massive foothills in which Taygetus falls to the plain three or four miles to the south of Sparta (Plate 26, 1). It is bounded by two rivers which flow down in deep clefts from the mountain shelf. The hillside above rises steeply to a summit which is girt with cliffs on all but the west side and cannot be much less than four thousand feet above sea level; this von Prott believed to be the peak of Taleton. Its summit is crowned by the ruins of a mediaeval castle which was undoubtedly built as a stronghold to overlook the Spartan plain; the only dateable object found there, a sherd of elaborate incised ware, indicates occupation at the time when the Byzantines were in possession of Mystra. The location of the other sites mentioned by Pausanias in this region remains obscure, but fortunately that of the Spartan Eleusinion has not been in doubt since von Prott discovered a cache of inscriptions at the ruined church of H. Sophia in the village of Kalývia Sokhás. In 1910 Dawkins dug trenches at the foot of the slope immediately above the village and recovered a fragment of a stele relating to the cult of the goddesses and pieces of inscribed tiles from the sanctuary. The abundance of water in the southern ravine led von Prott to conclude that the old town of Bryseai with its cult of Dionysus also lay at Kalývia Sokhás; but no traces of urban settlement have come to light at the village, and the name rather suggests copious springs such as issue from the mountain foot at Kefalári a mile to the north where ancient blocks are to be seen in the fields.


1878 ◽  
Vol 5 (7) ◽  
pp. 305-310
Author(s):  
Townshend M. Hall

The Meeting of the British Association at Plymouth has not unnaturally been the means of directing attention to some of the most complex points of Devonshire geology, and of reviving the discussion as to the age and position of the Devonian series in North and South Devon. Mr. Jukes, it will be remembered, died in 1869. Had he lived longer, his energy of purpose would doubtless have led him to carry on the work he had begun, until he could either prove the correctness of his views, or satisfy himself that the generally accepted classification was, after all, the right one. The followers of Jukes seem to confine themselves to those portions only of the district which he had more specially studied—North Somerset, Lynton and Pickwell Down; searching in almost hopeless despair amongst the lower rocks, instead of beginning at the other end of the scale, with the Millstone-grit, and tracing the beds downwards. As a result, the fossiliferous beds of the Upper Devonian have been almost entirely neglected, and their relation to the Carboniferous slates passed over.


1957 ◽  
Vol 3 (21) ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
E. H. Muller ◽  
H. W. Coulter

AbstractAn unusual opportunity for the study of glaciers in the process of development is afforded in Katmaicaldera in south-western Alaska. A violent eruption in 1912 destroyed the summit of glacier-clad Mount Katmai, creating a caldera 4 km. wide and 800 m. deep. Ice cliffs produced by beheading of the glaciers have since thinned and shrunk away from the rim of the caldera, except in the south-west. There, local reversal of direction of movement has resulted in an ice fall which descends part way down the crater wall. In the past thirty years two small glaciers have formed, near 1525 m. above sea level, within the caldera on large masses of slumped wall-rock below the north and south rims respectively. Elsewhere the sheer walls of the crater descend so steeply to the level of the caldera lake that permanent snowbanks cannot accumulate. The lake, which continues to rise at a rate of more than five meters per year, is at present the primary deterring factor in glacier development in the caldera.


Author(s):  
Henrich Neumann

The Ballachulish slates, exposed to the north and south of Loch Leven in Argyllshire, contain, in most places, cubes of pyrite up to half an inch in diameter. During a visit to the area in the spring of 1949 the writer's attention was attracted by the dark colour of the 'pyrite' cubes in the North Ballaehulish slate quarry a little more than a mile east of Onich. On examination these proved to consist of a mass of haphazardly orientated crystals of pyrrhotine with irregular outlines. Slates collected from the main working quarry on the south shore of Loch Leven, on the other hand, contain cubes which are single crystals of unaltered pyrite.


Author(s):  
Berry Craig

Historians have devoted considerable ink to Yankee and rebel newspapers published during the Civil War. While they have examined Northern and Southern papers, they have written almost nothing about the press in Kentucky and the other border states. There, the press was unique, in that it operated in a vast region where loyalties were divided to one extent or another. There were Southern sympathizers in the North and unionists in the South. Both groups were minorities in their regions. But in the borderland, and especially in Kentucky, the war divided communities, friends, and families. Most border-state citizens wanted to stick with the old Union, although a vocal minority favored the new Confederacy. Kentucky was mainly pro-Union, but its vocal rebel press made support for the secessionist cause appear stronger than it was.


C. Vann Woodward’s lecture compares two commemorations of the Civil War fifty years apart, one in 1911 and the other in 1961. The first one reflected sectional reunification predicated on a shared understanding of the tragic nature of war but also a sense that the conflict had solved the problem of sectional animosity. In so doing Woodward notes that whites in the North and South could only accomplish this by excluding meaningful African-American participation. The lecture then outlines the cycles of Reconstruction historiography, and looks at the dual psychological traumas the North and South experienced in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Woodward maintains that after the North emerged victorious from the war it failed to live up to its ideals, leaving wracked guilt, self-criticism, and remorse. The South emerged with a predilection for extortion, indignation, and extreme bellicosity, consistently blaming its own weaknesses on Reconstruction. Woodward suggests that historians should act as therapists, enabling the nation to come to terms with the psychological traumas triggered by the past.


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