Commercial Arctic shipping through the Northeast Passage:routes, resources, governance, technology, and infrastructure

The Russian and Norwegian Arctic are gaining notoriety as an alternative maritime route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and as sources of natural resources. The renewed interest in the Northeast Passage or the Northern Sea Route is fueled by a recession of Arctic sea ice coupled with the discovery of new natural resources at a time when emerging and global markets are in growing demand for them. Driven by the expectation of potential future economic importance of the region, political interest and governance has been rapidly developing, mostly within the Arctic Council. However, this paper argues that optimism regarding the potential of Arctic routes as an alternative to the Suez Canal is overstated. The route involves many challenges: jurisdictional disputes create political uncertainties; shallow waters limit ship size; lack of modern deepwater ports and search and rescue (SAR) capabilities requires ships to have higher standards of autonomy and safety; harsh weather conditions and free-floating ice make navigation more difficult and schedules more variable; and more expensive ship construction and operation costs lessen the economic viability of the route. Technological advances and infrastructure investments may ameliorate navigational challenges, enabling increased shipping of natural resources from the Arctic to global markets.Albert Buixadé Farré, Scott R. Stephenson, Linling Chen, Michael Czub, Ying Dai, Denis Demchev, Yaroslav Efimov, Piotr Graczyk, Henrik Grythe, Kathrin Keil, Niku Kivekäs, Naresh Kumar, Nengye Liu, Igor Matelenok, Mari Myksvoll, Derek O'Leary, Julia Olsen, Sachin Pavithran.A.P., Edward Petersen, Andreas Raspotnik, Ivan Ryzhov, Jan Solski, Lingling Suo, Caroline Troein, Vilena Valeeva, Jaap van Rijckevorsel and Jonathan Wightin

Independent monitoring of heat schedules of furnaces with use of pattern recognition theory

Translated from Russian (Izv. Vyssh. Uchebn. Zaved., Chern. Metall. 1986 (10) p. 157)SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:5828.4(M--37192)T / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Low-Temperature Luminescence of Lead Silicate Glass

The temperature quenching of intrinsic luminescence of a lead silicate glass of the 20PbO · 80SiO2 composition has been investigated in the temperature range 7-200 K. It has been found that the temperature behavior of the intensity of intrinsic luminescence does not obey the well-known Mott's law for intracenter quenching of luminescence but is adequately described by the empirical Street's formula. It has been dem-onstrated that, with allowance made for the disorder of the atomic structure, the experimental temperature dependence of the luminescence intensity of the glass can be represented as a superposition of Mott's depen-dences for an ensemble of local luminescence centers. The obtained distribution of luminescence centers over the activation energies of quenching has an asymmetric form with prevailing low-energy states. It has been assumed that this feature has a general character and, at low temperatures, determines the specificity of the processes of nonradiative relaxation of the electronic subsystem for many oxide glasses. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2010.This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project nos. 09-02-00493 and 08-02-01072)