Temporalnost, razvoj i propadanje na otočju Whitsundays (Queensland, Australija)

The Whitsundays comprises an archipelago of 74 islands and an adjacent coastal strip located in the north-east corner of the Australian state of Queensland. The region has been occupied for (at least) 9000 years, initially (for 98.5% of that duration) by Indigenous Australians. In the early 1900s European settlers arrived and rapidly depleted, dispossessed and displaced the local population and introduced tourism as a major local industry. These developments occurred in synchrony with (and contributed to the ascension of) the Anthropocene. Any overview of human inhabitation of the region, and of related senses of history and temporality, thereby has to acknowledge two distinct moments, one of a major duration and the other, the briefest contemporary flicker. This article attempts to explore patterns of contrast and similarity across these two very different time scales and the populations involved and to consider how the contemporary epoch reflects humans’ role in shaping the (rapidly changing) environment. Temporality is thereby a key concern, and the article explores various notions of time and of cyclicity, including those concerning patterns of climatic development and of human responses to these. The research informing the paper also has a temporal dimension, having occurred over a thirty-year period during which many changes have occurred in the region and its weather patterns. The speeds of development and decay observed in some areas and the relative stasis of others provide key motifs for the discussions that follow.Otočje Whitsundays je arhipelag sastavljen od 74 otoka te obližnjeg obalnog pojasa na sjeveroistoku australske države Queensland. Područje je nastanjeno (barem) 9 000 godina, a isprva (prvih 98,5% tog vremena) nastanjivali su ga autohtoni Australci. Početkom 1900-ih stigli su europski doseljenici i ubrzo razvlastili i raselili lokalno stanovništvo te turizam uspostavili kao vodeću granu gospodarstva u tom području. To se dogodilo istodobno s dolaskom antropocena te je pridonijelo njegovu jačanju. Sve navedeno znači da se pri opisu ljudskog nastanjivanja na ovom području kao i osjećaja za povijest i za temporalnost moraju uzeti u obzir dva odvojena vremenska opsega: jedan izrazito dugog trajanja i drugi – najkraći mogući trenutak sadašnjosti. U ovom se članku istražuju sličnosti i razlike između ovih dviju posve različitih vremenskih skala i s njima povezanih populacija. Nadalje, ispituje se kako se u suvremenom razdoblju očituje uloga ljudi u oblikovanju okoliša (koji je podložan brzim promjenama). Stoga je temporalnost od ključnog značaja, a u članku se istražuju različita shvaćanja vremena i cikličnosti, primjerice u odnosu na klimatske obrasce i reakcije ljudi na njih. Istraživanje koje je u podlozi rada ima i temporalnu dimenziju, jer se odvijalo u razdoblju od trideset godina, tijekom kojih su se u istraživanome području i njegovim klimatskim obrascima dogodile mnoge promjene. Brzina razvoja i propadanja zamjetna u nekim dijelovima nasuprot relativnoj stagnaciji u drugima ključni su elementi koji se ističu u raspravi

“A place of inexhaustible mysteries”: The modern legendry of Skull Island in the King Kong films and related media texts

Abstract: The 1933 film King Kong established its giant ape as an enduring cultural figure. It also introduced the public to a strange tropical island where prehistoric animals existed alongside a giant primate and a small human community sheltering behind a wall on a tiny peninsula. During the 20th century the island was essentially a sub-feature within a number of King Kong-themed films and, indeed, was referred to under various names. In recent decades, this position has shifted. De Vito’s 2004 illustrated novel, Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of the original film and associated print and video texts, have significantly enhanced the island’s profile, establishing it definitively as ‘Skull Island’, and have provided contextual rationales for its geology, biology and society. These, in turn, spurred the production of related texts that have embroidered Skull Island into popular culture as an entity in its own right. Most recently, the 2017 remake, Kong: Skull Island, has offered a significant re-imagining that reinstates elements of texts that preceded and influenced the imagination of the original 1933 film. This article charts the shifts in representation of the island, the geo-cultural imaginaries played out in its representation and the concepts of islandness and island biogeography involved

Under the Mermaid Flag: Achzivland and the performance of micronationality on ancestral Palestinian land

This article considers the relationship between symbolism, interpretation and grounded reality with regard to “Achzivland,” a small area on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean that was declared an independent micronation in 1972. The article commences by identifying the principal geo-political and military factors that created the terrain for the enactment of fantasy utopianism, namely the forced removal of the area’s Palestinian population in 1948 and the nature of Israeli occupation and management of the region since. Following this, the article shifts to address related symbolic/allusive elements, including the manner in which a flag featuring a mermaid has served as the symbol for a quasi-national territory whose founder — Eli Avivi — has been compared to the fictional character Peter Pan, and his fiefdom to J.M. Barrie’s fictional “Never Never Land”. Consideration of the interconnection of these (forceful and figurative) elements allows the discourse and rhetoric of Achzivland’s micronationality to be contextualised in terms of more concrete political struggles in the region

A Simple Non-equilibrium Feedback Model for Galaxy-Scale Star Formation: Delayed Feedback and SFR Scatter

We explore a class of simple non-equilibrium star formation models within the framework of a feedback-regulated model of the ISM, applicable to kiloparsec-scale resolved star formation relations (e.g. Kennicutt-Schmidt). Combining a Toomre-Q-dependent local star formation efficiency per free-fall time with a model for delayed feedback, we are able to match the normalization and scatter of resolved star formation scaling relations. In particular, this simple model suggests that large ($\sim$dex) variations in star formation rates (SFRs) on kiloparsec scales may be due to the fact that supernova feedback is not instantaneous following star formation. The scatter in SFRs at constant gas surface density in a galaxy then depends on the properties of feedback and when we observe its star-forming regions at various points throughout their collapse/star formation "cycles". This has the following important observational consequences: (1) the scatter and normalization of the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation are relatively insensitive to the local (small-scale) star formation efficiency, (2) but gas depletion times and velocity dispersions are; (3) the scatter in and normalization of the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation is a sensitive probe of the feedback timescale and strength; (4) even in a model where $\tilde Q_{\rm gas}$ deterministically dictates star formation locally, time evolution, variation in local conditions (e.g., gas fractions and dynamical times), and variations between galaxies can destroy much of the observable correlation between SFR and $\tilde Q_{\rm gas}$ in resolved galaxy surveys. Additionally, this model exhibits large scatter in SFRs at low gas surface densities, in agreement with observations of flat outer HI disk velocity dispersion profiles.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted by MNRAS (04/25/2019

Extraordinarily hazardous : fog, water, ice and human precarity in the aquapelagic assemblage of the Grand Banks (northwest Atlantic)

This article examines the disruptive role that fog and associated weather conditions play in human livelihood activities undertaken on and around the Grand Banks of the north-western Atlantic, the affective atmosphere they create and their effect on human participants. After an introduction to the position and nature of the Grand Banks, relevant weather systems, ocean currents and iceberg trajectories through the region, the article profiles the nature of fishing (and, subsequently, oil extraction) in the area, of the precarity of livelihood activities undertaken and their reflection and inscription in various media. This approach identifies the manner in which aquapelagos (integrated terrestrial and marine systems) are not necessarily safe or stable entities – even in the shortest of terms – and can, indeed, represent assemblages in which humans are stressed and threatened. Within this, the case study examines the manner in which fog is not so much an uncomfortable intrusion into an otherwise manageable industrial operation as a key characteristic to be accommodated. The experience of fog is crucial to the social experience of the Grand Banks and of the aquapelago that is constituted around it. Substantial consideration is also given to the atmospherics of Grand Banks fog in literature and visual art and of the imaginative space created for it

Why are active galactic nuclei and host galaxies misaligned?

It is well established observationally that the characteristic angular momentum axis on small scales around active galactic nuclei (AGN), traced by radio jets and the putative torus, is not well correlated with the large-scale angular momentum axis of the host galaxy. In this paper, we show that such misalignments arise naturally in high-resolution simulations in which we follow angular momentum transport and inflows from galaxy to sub-pc scales near AGN, triggered either during galaxy mergers or by instabilities in isolated discs. Sudden misalignments can sometimes be caused by single massive clumps falling into the centre slightly off-axis, but more generally, they arise even when the gas inflows are smooth and trace only global gravitational instabilities. When several nested, self-gravitating modes are present, the inner ones can precess and tumble in the potential of the outer modes. Resonant angular momentum exchange can flip or re-align the spin of an inner mode on a short time-scale, even without the presence of massive clumps. We therefore do not expect that AGN and their host galaxies will be preferentially aligned, nor should the relative alignment be an indicator of the AGN fuelling mechanism. We discuss implications of this conclusion for AGN feedback and black hole (BH) spin evolution. The misalignments may mean that even BHs accreting from smooth large-scale discs will not be spun up to maximal rotation and so have more modest radiative efficiencies and inefficient jet formation. Even more random orientations/lower spins are possible if there is further unresolved clumpiness in the gas, and more ordered accretion may occur if the inflow is slower and not self-gravitating

The origins of active galactic nuclei obscuration: the ‘torus’ as a dynamical, unstable driver of accretion

Recent multiscale simulations have made it possible to follow gas inflows responsible for high-Eddington ratio accretion on to massive black holes (BHs) from galactic scales to the BH accretion disc. When sufficient gas is driven towards a BH, gravitational instabilities generically form lopsided, eccentric discs that propagate inwards from larger radii. The lopsided stellar disc exerts a strong torque on the gas, driving inflows that fuel the growth of the BH. Here, we investigate the possibility that the same disc, in its gas-rich phase, is the putative ‘torus’ invoked to explain obscured active galactic nuclei (AGN) and the cosmic X-ray background. The disc is generically thick and has characteristic ∼1–10 pc sizes and masses resembling those required of the torus. Interestingly, the scale heights and obscured fractions of the predicted torii are substantial even in the absence of strong stellar feedback providing the vertical support. Rather, they can be maintained by strong bending modes and warps/twists excited by the inflow-generating instabilities. A number of other observed properties commonly attributed to ‘feedback’ processes may in fact be explained entirely by dynamical, gravitational effects: the lack of alignment between torus and host galaxy, correlations between local star formation rate (SFR) and turbulent gas velocities and the dependence of obscured fractions on AGN luminosity or SFR. We compare the predicted torus properties with observations of gas surface density profiles, kinematics, scale heights and SFR densities in AGN, and find that they are consistent in all cases. We argue that it is not possible to reproduce these observations and the observed column density distribution without a clumpy gas distribution, but allowing for simple clumping on small scales the predicted column density distribution is in good agreement with observations from NHH ∼ 10²⁰–10²⁷ cm⁻² . We examine how the NH distribution scales with galaxy and AGN properties. The dependence is generally simple, but AGN feedback may be necessary to explain certain trends in obscured fraction with luminosity and/or redshift. In our paradigm, the torus is not merely a bystander or passive fuel source for accretion, but is itself the mechanism driving accretion. Its generic properties are not coincidence, but requirements for efficient accretion

Social and economic effects of spatial distribution in island communities: Comparing the Isles of Scilly and Isle of Wight, UK

AbstractThere has been increasing awareness that communities based on islands are subject to particular island-related factors (the so-called ‘island effect’). This paper sheds empirical light on how the island effect differs in different kinds of island communities, specifically solitary islands on the one hand and archipelagos on the other. It does so by comparing two subnational island jurisdictions (SNIJs) in England: the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. By analysing census statistics, we show how the spatial distribution in the Isles of Scilly (an archipelago) and the Isle of Wight (a solitary island) is interrelated with patterns of population and employment. Although the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight are both tourism economies, the data indicates that, in social and economic terms, the Isles of Scilly benefits while the Isle of Wight suffers as a result of their different patterns of spatial distribution. We conclude that an island community’s spatial distribution has a significant influence on its societal development and that the island effect differs among islands with different patterns of spatial distribution