Changes in Imja Tsho in the Mount Everest Region of Nepal

Imja Tsho, located in the Sagarmatha ( Everest) National Park of Nepal, is one of the most studied and rapidly growing lakes in the Himalayan range. Compared with previous studies, the results of our sonar bathymetric survey conducted in September of 2012 suggest that its maximum depth has increased from 90.5 to 116.3 +/- 5.2 m since 2002, and that its estimated volume has grown from 35.8 +/- 0.7 to 61.7 +/- 3.7 million m(3). Most of the expansion of the lake in recent years has taken place in the glacier terminus-lake interface on the eastern end of the lake, with the glacier receding at about 52 m yr(-1) and the lake expanding in area by 0.04 km(2) yr(-1). A ground penetrating radar survey of the Imja-Lhotse Shar glacier just behind the glacier terminus shows that the ice is over 200 m thick in the center of the glacier. The volume of water that could be released from the lake in the event of a breach in the damming moraine on the western end of the lake has increased to 34.1 +/- 1.08 million m(3) from the 21 million m(3) estimated in 2002.USAID Climate Change Resilient Development (CCRD) projectFulbright FoundationNational Geographic SocietyCenter for Research in Water Resource

Public-Private Concord through Divided Sovereignty: Reframing societas for International Law

Grotius is the father of modern international law. The indivisibility of sovereignty was the sine qua non of early-modern conceptual innovation in law. Both statements are axiomatic in the mainstream literature of the last two centuries. Both are profoundly and interestingly wrong. This paper shows that Grotius’ systematisation of public and international law involved defining corporations as potentially (and the VOC actually) integral to reason of state, and able to bear and exercise marks of sovereignty under certain conditions. For Grotius, some corporations were not subsumed under the state’s legal authority, nor were they hybrid ‘company-states’. Instead, states and such corpo

Vesalius' fabrica: A report on the worldwide census of the 1543 and 1555 editions

This article provides a listing of known copies of the first two folio editions of Andreas Vesalius’ $\textit{De humani corporis fabrica}$ (1543 and 1555), revising earlier estimates. It shows that the $\textit{Fabrica}$ survives in much higher numbers than previously reported, and has a much wider geographical distribution, as well. The authors discuss the methodologies for conducting census in the digital age, provide an estimate of the print runs, and compare the survival rate of the two folio editions. It is argued that cultural politics explains the circulation patterns and current locations of Vesalius’ $\textit{Fabrica}$. Throughout history, this luxurious atlas of anatomy could only be afforded by the wealthy, and, as a result, surviving copies tend to concentrate in areas that have traditionally been associated with the development of Western economic power structures

Response time to flood events using a social vulnerability index (ReTSVI)

Current methods to estimate evacuation time during a natural disaster do not consider the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the population. This article develops the Response Time by Social Vulnerability Index (ReTSVI). ReTSVI combines a series of modules that are pieces of information that interact during an evacuation, such as evacuation rate curves, mobilization, inundation models, and social vulnerability indexes, to create an integrated map of the evacuation rate in a given location. We provide an example of the application of ReTSVI in a potential case of a severe flood event in Huaraz, Peru. The results show that during the first 5&thinsp;min of the evacuation, the population that lives in neighborhoods with a high social vulnerability evacuates 15&thinsp;% and 22&thinsp;% fewer people than the blocks with medium and low social vulnerability. These differences gradually decrease over time after the evacuation warning, and social vulnerability becomes less relevant after 30&thinsp;min. The results of the application example have no statistical significance, which should be considered in a real case of application. Using a methodology such as ReTSVI could make it possible to combine social and physical vulnerability in a qualitative framework for evacuation, although more research is needed to understand the socioeconomic variables that explain the differences in evacuation rate.</p

Neptune to the Common-wealth of England (1652): the republican Britannia and the continuity of interests

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant

Varieties of secularisation in English and Dutch public and international law

This Thesis aims to show the necessity and benefits of historically self-aware legal theory and practice in preventing and resolving conflicts that have a religious dimension. Contrary to Iberian and French colonial projects, early modern Dutch and English thinkers developed ways to encounter non-European legal systems without having to take a position on issues like missionary obligation, forcible conversion, or non-Christians’ right to property and sovereignty. This colonial advantage was a corollary of secularising ideas and steps to improve domestic stability in a time of religious conflict, including the deprioritisation of divine laws, refuting chosen nation ideologies, and subverting theology’s claim to epistemic supremacy. The new system reduced the economic and ideological costs of imperialism. Understood as a contingent, cumulative and incomplete process, and partially the unintended consequence of limited designs for stability and peace, secularisation is a useful concept in legal historiography. The examination of Dutch and English secularisation and soft imperialism offers a new perspective on the decline of French and Iberian early modern empires, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century exceptionalisms. Further, it sheds light on why, when and how public international law became desensitised to the contingency of secularisation as a process, and secularism as a normTrias Europea: de verhoudingen tussen de overheidsmachten in de EU en de lidstaten in een bewegend constitutioneel landscha