Islands of change vs. islands of disaster: Managing pigs and birds in the Anthropocene of the North Atlantic

The offshore islands of the North Atlantic were among some of the last settled places on earth, with humans reaching the Faroes and Iceland in the late Iron Age and Viking period. While older accounts emphasizing deforestation and soil erosion have presented this story of island colonization as yet another social–ecological disaster, recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental research combined with environmental history, environmental humanities, and bioscience is providing a more complex understanding of long-term human ecodynamics in these northern islands. An ongoing interdisciplinary investigation of the management of domestic pigs and wild bird populations in Faroes and Iceland is presented as an example of sustained resource management using local and traditional knowledge to create structures for successful wild fowl management on the millennial scale

Clash of pans: pan-Africanism and pan-Anglo-Saxonism and the global colour line, 1919–1945

The article demonstrates both conceptually and empirically that pan-Anglo-Saxonist knowledge networks reconstructed and reimagined an apparently de-racialised, scientific, sober and liberal world order that outwardly abandoned, but did not eradicate the twin phenomena of racism and imperialism. Rather the new liberal (imperial) internationalists, organised in newly formed “think tanks” such as Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations, and through their increasingly global elite networks, mounted a top-down battle for minds at home and in the wider world. Operating in state-private elite networks, they drove the movement to manage change and develop a new liberal world order particularly to contain pan-Africanists who combatted the domination and exploitation of Africans worldwide. More broadly, we indicate that the pragmatic response to the extremes of Nazi ideology and a countering movement from the cadres of Asian, African and African American intellectuals, anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles within the national and global context, forced the Anglo-centric elites to promote change, albeit limited

420,000 year assessment of fault leakage rates shows geological carbon storage is secure

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is routinely cited as a cost effective tool for climate change mitigation. CCS can directly reduce industrial CO2 emissions and is essential for the retention of CO2 extracted from the atmosphere. To be effective as a climate change mitigation tool, CO2 must be securely retained for 10,000 years (10 ka) with a leakage rate of below 0.01% per year of the total amount of CO2 injected. Migration of CO2 back to the atmosphere via leakage through geological faults is a potential high impact risk to CO2 storage integrity. Here, we calculate for the first time natural leakage rates from a 420 ka paleo-record of CO2 leakage above a naturally occurring, faulted, CO2 reservoir in Arizona, USA. Surface travertine (CaCO3) deposits provide evidence of vertical CO2 leakage linked to known faults. U-Th dating of travertine deposits shows leakage varies along a single fault and that individual seeps have lifespans of up to 200 ka. Whilst the total volumes of CO2 required to form the travertine deposits are high, time-averaged leakage equates to a linear rate of less than 0.01%/yr. Hence, even this natural geological storage site, which would be deemed to be of too high risk to be selected for engineered geologic storage, is adequate to store CO2 for climate mitigation purposes

Getting the measure of brochs: using survey records old and new to investigate Shetland's Iron Age archaeology

NoBrochs are monumental Iron Age (c.400–200 BC) drystone towers or roundhouses. They are only found in Scotland, particularly the Atlantic north and west. Whilst the structural layout of brochs has long been debated, few measured surveys have been conducted. Three significant broch sites form the tentative World Heritage site of “Mousa, Old Scatness and Jarlshof: the Zenith of Iron Age Shetland” (UNESCO in Mousa, Old Scatness and Jarlshof: the zenith of Iron Age Shetland, UNESCO (2019) Mousa, Old Scatness and Jarlshof: the zenith of Iron Age Shetland. http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5677. Accessed 9 Aug 2019). All three sites have undergone new surveys as part of a collaborative doctoral partnership research project. This chapter presents a diachronic perspective using digital documentation techniques to detect stone displacement and weathering at the site of Old Scatness using historic imagery, including photographs from the Old Scatness excavations (1995–2006) and regular condition monitoring undertaken by Shetland Amenity Trust to undertake retrospective digital structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry. Whilst point clouds and 3D meshes were successfully generated from low-resolution digital images, analogue film transparencies without metadata could not produce accurate geospatial data without manually trying to extant reference data. It was possible to detect displacements in stonework over time by comparing two meshes together and measuring the distances between vertex point pairs. The reliability and accuracy of these results were dependent on how well pairs of meshes could be aligned