Terrane evolution of the paratectonic Caledonides of northern Britain

A stratigraphically constrained re-evaluation of terrane amalgamation in the Caledonides of northern Britain allows the development of a new orogenic scenario which accounts for many of the outstanding problems in the paratectonic Caledonides and includes a new terrane template which correlates well with that proposed for Newfoundland. The Arenig Grampian Orogeny resulted from the accretion of two arc terranes to Laurentia: the Midland Valley (=Notre Dame Arc in Newfoundland) and a terrane of probable Avalonian/Gondwanan origin, here termed 'Novantia' (= Annieopsquotch Accretionary Tract (partim)), now hidden beneath the Southern Uplands allochthon. The Tyrone and Ballantrae ophiolites mark the northern boundary of Novantia within the composite Midland Valley Terrane. The Popelogan-Victoria Arc-Grangegeeth Terrane accreted to the amalgamated Midland Valley Terrane during the late Ordovician and initiated the Southern Uplands thrust duplex. A brief period of northward subduction during the Silurian followed, is ascribed to the northerly drift of the amalgamated Avalon-Baltica plate, and a final Wenlock (Scandian) collision and caused underplating of the Midland Valley Terrane. Caledonian deformation had ceased by the Emsian, the age of the undeformed Cheviot lavas that overlie the uplifted and peneplaned Southern Uplands

Structural adjustment and the contemporary sub-Saharan African city

Although it has been suggested that structural adjustment policies have slowed Third World urban growth and have stimulated a spatial deconcentration of economic activity, this paper argues that African cities continue to grow and mainly through peri-urban development. This investment comes mainly from domestic sources and migrants' remittances, and tends to he in consumption rather than production. Reasons include cultural factors lack of confidence in the national economy and in the state's long-term economic objectives, an increasing demand for housing, improvements in intraurban transport, and a desire to spread investment risk among a range of alternatives including housing

Rare earth geochemistry of Arenig cherts from the Ballantrae Ophiolite and Leadhills Imbricate Zone, southern Scotland: implications for origin and significance to the Caledonian Orongeny

Rare earth element (REE) data from low to mid-Arenig cherts are used to test competing models for the early Ordovician evolution of the Laurentian margin in the northern British Isles. Cherts from the Ballantrae Ophiolite Complex have chondrite-normalized REE patterns typical of continental margin settings with LREE enrichment, a slight negative Eu(anom) and shale and chondrite-normalized La/Yb values of 0.97-1.41 and 7.78-11.4 respectively. This pattern, together with a large positive chondrite-normalized Ce(anom) (1.44-1.70), is virtually identical to that found in radiolarian chert of the Gascoyne Abyssal Plain, in the Timor Sea. Cherts from the Raven Gill Formation within the Leadhills Imbricate Zone, Northern Belt, Southern Uplands have typical continental margin REE patterns, chondrite-normalized Ce(anom) (0.9-1.21) and Eu(anom) (0.61-0.79) values indicating that they formed closer to the continental margin than those from Ballantrae. Shale and chondrite-normalized and La/Yb values of 0.95-1.27 and 4.92-13.88 respectively confirm this interpretation. It is concluded that the Ballantrae ophiolite formed in a rifted-arc basin above a northwards dipping, intra-oceanic subduction zone. The modest depth of burial of the Raven Gill Formation precludes it being part of a marginal basin which was subsequently trapped as the Ballantrae Ophiolite was obducted in the late Arenig. The Arenig rocks of the Leadhills Imbricate Zone represent an allochthonous terrane accreted to the western extension of the Midland Valley in Ireland in pre-Caradoc times. Here it formed the basement to the Southern Uplands basin. Palaeontological evidence places this basin adjacent to Pomeroy, Co. Tyrone in the early Caradoc. Sinistral strike-slip faulting, from the late Ashgill transported the Southern Uplands Terrance to its present location, a distance of less than 250 km

An electron backscatter diffraction study of geesops: a broader view of trilobite vision?

The calcite eyes of trilobites have been studied for over 100 years using methods including light microscopy (e.g. Clarke 1889; Campbell 1975; Towe 1973; Clarkson 1979 and Bruton and Haas 2003) and more recently cathodoluminescence (CL) imaging coupled with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of samples etched in EDTA (Miller and Clarkson 1980). This work has provided a great deal of information on the mechanisms by which lenses collected light, drawing attention to the importance of the crystallographic orientation of lens calcite for focusing, and leading to sophisticated models of trilobite vision (Clarkson and Levi-Setti, 1975; Gál et al., 2000). The morphology and mode of life of phacopids, in particular Geesops, are well understood (Bruton and Haas, 2003a; 2003b) but observations on the internal structure of their lenses contradict the generally accepted models for image formation by schizochroal eyes. Recent technological advances have given new impetus to the analysis of crystalline materials and especially important has been electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD). This is a SEM-based technique that can be used to accurately ‘map’ variations in the crystallographic orientation of a sample down to the sub-micrometre scale by recording on a sensitive camera Kikuchi patterns that are formed by diffraction of an electron beam when focused on a polished sample tilted at 70°. Although this technique has been understood for over 50 years (Alam et al., 1954) and has been extensively used in disciplines such as metallography (Humphreys, 2001), until recently its Earth Science applications were limited to studies of structural geology and petrology (Nuchter and Stockhert, 2007). Recent applications of EBSD to biomineralisation research (Dalbeck and Cusack, 2006; Griesshaber et al., 2007) have mapped the crystal orientation and microstructure of calcite shells and in 2006 Lee et al. were able to apply this technique to investigating the microstructure of lenses in the schizochroal eye of Dalmanites. This paper describes results of an EBSD study of eyes of Geesops schlotheimi (Bronn, 1825) combined with more traditional microscopy techniques to reveal new aspects of trilobite lens structure

Discriminating faunal assemblages and their palaeoecology based on museum collections : the Carboniferous Hurlet and Index limestones of western Scotland

Historical collections of Scottish Carboniferous macrofossils stored at the British Geological Survey (BGS), Edinburgh include the sole remaining sources of palaeontological data from numerous localities. Exploratory numerical analyses of such collections from the Hurlet and Index limestones of Ayrshire compare favourably with published qualitative assessments of faunal assemblages and palaeoenvironments; demonstrating that old collections can still be used in modern palaeoecological investigations. Macrofaunas from these formations comprise mainly brachiopods and molluscs and were collected from 67 localities that yielded 20 and 94 samples from the Hurlet and Index limestones respectively. Limitations of the presence/absence data were partly overcome by consolidation and restriction of aspects of the data set. Seriation indicates the lithological and environmental gradients of taxa. Cluster analysis reveals groups of samples linked to lithofacies. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) of diversity data derived from the data set in terms of numbers of genera in higher taxa highlights differences in gross taxonomic composition in terms of trophic structure, lithology and environment. Supplementary material: lists of localities taxa and sample lithologies used in this study are available at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP1840

Empirical Phi-Discrepancies and Quasi-Empirical Likelihood: Exponential Bounds

We review some recent extensions of the so-called generalized empirical likelihood method, when the Kullback distance is replaced by some general convex divergence. We propose to use, instead of empirical likelihood, some regularized form or quasi-empirical likelihood method, corresponding to a convex combination of Kullback and χ2 discrepancies. We show that for some adequate choice of the weight in this combination, the corresponding quasi-empirical likelihood is Bartlett-correctable. We also establish some non-asymptotic exponential bounds for the confidence regions obtained by using this method. These bounds are derived via bounds for self-normalized sums in the multivariate case obtained in a previous work by the authors. We also show that this kind of results may be extended to process valued infinite dimensional parameters. In this case some known results about self-normalized processes may be used to control the behavior of generalized empirical likelihood

Homogeneous shear flow of a hard-sphere fluid: Analytic solutions

Recently, a solution for collision-free trajectories in an N particle thermostatted hard-sphere system undergoing homogeneous shear (the so-called "Sllod" equations of motion) led to a kinetic theory of dilute hard-sphere gases under shear. However, a solution for collisions, necessary for a complete theory at higher densities, has been missing. We present an analytic solution to this problem, which provides surprising insights into the mechanical aspects of thermostatting a system in an external field. The equivalence of constant temperature and constant energy ensembles in the thermodynamic limit in equilibrium, the conditions for the nature of heat exchange with the environment (entropy creation and reduction) in the system, and the condition for appearance of the artificial string phase follow from our solution

CP violation and CKM predictions from Discrete Torsion

We present a supersymmetric D-brane model that has CP spontaneously broken by discrete torsion. The low energy physics is largely independent of the compactification scheme and the kahler metric has `texture zeros' dictated by the choice of discrete torsion. This motivates a simple ansatz for the kahler metric which results in a CKM matrix given in terms of two free parameters, hence we predict a single mixing angle and the CKM phase. The CKM phase is predicted to be close to Pi/3.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, 1 Table. Significant modifications and generalisation. Version to be publishe

Uniform in bandwidth exact rates for a class of kernel estimators

Given an i.i.d sample $(Y_i,Z_i)$, taking values in \RRR^{d'}\times \RRR^d, we consider a collection Nadarya-Watson kernel estimators of the conditional expectations \EEE(+d_g(z)\mid Z=z), where $z$ belongs to a compact set H\subset \RRR^d, $g$ a Borel function on \RRR^{d'} and $c_g(\cdot),d_g(\cdot)$ are continuous functions on \RRR^d. Given two bandwidth sequences h_n<\wth_n fulfilling mild conditions, we obtain an exact and explicit almost sure limit bounds for the deviations of these estimators around their expectations, uniformly in g\in\GG,\;z\in H and h_n\le h\le \wth_n under mild conditions on the density $f_Z$, the class \GG, the kernel $K$ and the functions $c_g(\cdot),d_g(\cdot)$. We apply this result to prove that smoothed empirical likelihood can be used to build confidence intervals for conditional probabilities \PPP(Y\in C\mid Z=z), that hold uniformly in z\in H,\; C\in \CC,\; h\in [h_n,\wth_n]. Here \CC is a Vapnik-Chervonenkis class of sets.Comment: Published in the Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics Volume 63, p. 1077-1102 (2011

Backward pion-nucleon scattering

A global analysis of the world data on differential cross sections and polarization asymmetries of backward pion-nucleon scattering for invariant collision energies above 3 GeV is performed in a Regge model. Including the $N_\alpha$, $N_\gamma$, $\Delta_\delta$ and $\Delta_\beta$ trajectories, we reproduce both angular distributions and polarization data for small values of the Mandelstam variable $u$, in contrast to previous analyses. The model amplitude is used to obtain evidence for baryon resonances with mass below 3 GeV. Our analysis suggests a $G_{39}$ resonance with a mass of 2.83 GeV as member of the $\Delta_{\beta}$ trajectory from the corresponding Chew-Frautschi plot.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure