“Men who can last”: Mountaineering Endurance, the Lake District Fell Records and the Campaign for Everest, 1919-1924

This paper examines the post-First World War reconstruction of masculinity around notions of endurance in the British outdoor movement. From the 1860s onwards, long-distance walking trials in the Lake District became part of the regional mountaineering and rambling culture, offering middle-class mountaineers strenuous physical challenges which were expressions of regional pride and in which the Lake District became a synecdoche of the Alps, a place for excursive rehearsal of Alpine-scale ambitions. Part of a wider cultural turn towards gigantism in sport and exploration prior to the First World War, these challenges increasingly deployed insights from the life-reform and body-management movements of the late nineteenth century, drawing on developments from other endurance sports such as cycling. They culminated in the standardized but largely informal Lake District Twenty-four Hour Fell Record, the pre-war record being established by Dr Arthur Wakefield of Keswick in 1905. Post-war efforts to beat Wakefield's record by Eustace Thomas of the Manchester-based Rucksack Club demonstrated increasingly sophisticated applications of nutritional, body management and training programmes. Thomas's adoption of theoretical models of human vital capacity, based on the work of the Manchester anthropometrist and public health researcher Dr Alfred Mumford suggest that, far from amateur athletes rejecting medical and scientific advice, the adaptive physiological model that emphasized the human ability to endure and to transform itself via habituation was deeply appealing in a post-war context. Innovative experimental physical regimes and recursive strategies pioneered in the regional outdoor movement were understood by participants to have wider implications for imperial mountaineering ambitions, notably the post-war campaign to climb Mount Everest

That Undisclosed World: Eric Shipton’s Mountains of Tartary (1950).

Mountains of Tartary (1950) recounts Eric Shipton’s mountaineering and travels in Xinjiang during his two postings as British Consul-General in Kashgar in the 1940s. An accomplished Himalayan mountaineer of the 1930s, Shipton was a successful author of mountaineering travel books. During the 1930s his work with the Survey of India saw him increasingly drawn into the workings of the imperial security state in the geopolitically sensitive border regions of the Karakoram. Shipton’s proven ability to travel in arduous mountain terrain and gather geographical intelligence led to his posting to Kashgar. Details of his diplomatic work are almost entirely absent from Mountains of Tartary and only became known in outline in 1969, with the publication of his autobiography. With unparalleled knowledge of the geo-political situation in Xinjiang in the 1940s, Shipton was prevented from publishing anything that revealed the details of his role in Great Game politics in 1950, not least by the fact that he still held a consular position in Kunming, Yunnan. Thus at the heart of Mountains of Tartary is an occlusion. This paper will examine the rhetorical strategies Shipton employed in writing a book in which so much had to remain undisclosed. He was aware that the roles he played, as mountaineer, explorer and traveller had multiple meanings on the borders of British India, that to situate his narrative within an Orientalist and Great Game tradition risked unwanted disclosure. The essential unreliability of the narrative emerges as a consequence of writing under such constraints. Intentionally aporetic, the text is riven by chronological and biographical voids, unintentionally reveals the strain of inhabiting multiple personas and keeping track of the competing demands of different audiences. Shipton’s failure of self-censorship erupts in transgressive revelations, concealed messages to certain sections of his readership able to read between the lines, revealing Mountains of Tartary to be a steganographic text, one that needs not just decoding but looking beyond, to what is undisclosed and unsaid

Repurposing of disused shale gas wells for subsurface heat storage: preliminary analysis concerning UK issues

Development of many wells is envisaged in the UK in coming decades to exploit the abundant shale gas resource as fuel and petrochemical feedstock. Forward planning is therefore warranted regarding reuse of the resulting subsurface infrastructure after gas production has ceased. It is shown that this infrastructure might be repurposed for borehole thermal energy storage (BTES). Preliminary calculations, assuming an idealized cycle of summer heat storage and winter heat extraction, indeed demonstrate annual storage of c. 6 TJ or c. 2 GWh of energy per BTES well. Summed over the anticipated well inventory, a significant proportion of the UK's future heat demand might thus be supplied. This form of BTES technology has particular relevance to the UK, where the shale resource is located in relatively densely populated areas; it is especially significant for Scotland, where the resource coincides with a particularly high proportion of the population and heat demand

Higher Deformations of Lie Algebra Representations I

In the late 1980s, Friedlander and Parshall studied the representations of a family of algebras which were obtained as deformations of the distribution algebra of the first Frobenius kernel of an algebraic group. The representation theory of these algebras tells us much about the representation theory of Lie algebras in positive characteristic. We develop an analogue of this family of algebras for the distribution algebras of the higher Frobenius kernels, answering a 30 year old question posed by Friedlander and Parshall. We also examine their representation theory in the case of the special linear group.Comment: 30 pages. Version 2: Minor corrections. Version 3: Changes to Sections 4 and 7 and corrections throughout. Version 4: Changes to Section 7 and other edits throughout. Accepted for publication by the Journal of the Mathematical Society of Japa

How local crustal properties influence the amount of denudation derived from low-temperature: Comment

No abstract available

Higher Deformations of Lie Algebra Representations II

Steinberg's tensor product theorem shows that for semisimple algebraic groups the study of irreducible representations of higher Frobenius kernels reduces to the study of irreducible representations of the first Frobenius kernel. In the preceding paper in this series, deforming the distribution algebra of a higher Frobenius kernel yielded a family of deformations called higher reduced enveloping algebras. In this paper we prove that Steinberg decomposition can be similarly deformed, allowing us to reduce representation theoretic questions about these algebras to questions about reduced enveloping algebras. We use this to derive structural results about modules over these algebras. Separately, we also show that many of the results in the preceding paper hold without an assumption of reductivity.Comment: 21 pages. Version 2: Minor corrections and clarification

K2K_2 of Kac-Moody Groups

Ulf Rehmann and Jun Morita, in their 1989 paper "A Matsumoto-type theorem for Kac-Moody groups", gave a presentation of $K_2(A,F)$ for any generalised Cartan matrix $A$ and field $F$. The purpose of this paper is to use this presentation to compute $K_2(A,F)$ more explicitly in the case when $A$ is hyperbolic. In particular, we shall show that these $K_2(A,F)$ can always be expressed as a product of quotients of $K_2(F)$ and $K_2(2,F)$. Along the way, we shall also prove a similar result in the case when $A$ has an odd entry in each column.Comment: 25 page

Integration of Modules II: Exponentials

We continue our exploration of various approaches to integration of representations from a Lie algebra \mbox{Lie} (G) to an algebraic group $G$ in positive characteristic. In the present paper we concentrate on an approach exploiting exponentials. This approach works well for over-restricted representations, introduced in this paper, and takes no note of $G$-stability.Comment: Accepted by Transactions of the AMS. This paper is split off the earlier versions (1, 2 and 3) of arXiv:1708.06620. Some of the statements in these versions of arXiv:1708.06620 contain mistakes corrected here. Version 2 of this paper: close to the accepted version by the journal, minor improvements, compared to Version

Integration of Modules I: Stability

We explore the integration of representations from a Lie algebra to its algebraic group in positive characteristic. An integrable module is stable under the twists by group elements. Our aim is to investigate cohomological obstructions for passing from stability to an algebraic group action. As an application, we prove integrability of bricks for a semisimple algebraic group.Comment: Version 2: Some changes in terminology, examples of over-restricted modules are added. Version 3: mistakes in tables are corrected. Version 4: major revision, the paper is split into two parts, the exponential part is published separately (see arXiv:1807.08698). Version 5: minor corrections. Version 6: final, minor correction