STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE There are two hematologically and morphologically distinct bottlenose dolphin ecotypes (Duffield et al. 1983; Duffield 1986) which correspond to a shallow water ecotype and a deep water ecotype; both ecotypes have been shown to inhabit waters in the western North Atlantic Ocean (Hersh and Duffield 1990; Mead and Potter 1995; Curry and Smith 1997). Bottlenos...

The effects of wind-forced upwelling and downwelling on the continental shelf off Duck, North Carolina, are studied through experiments with a two-dimensional numerical primitive equation model. Moored and shipboard measurements obtained during August–November 1994 as part of the Coastal Ocean Processes (CoOP) Inner Shelf Study (ISS) are used for model–data comparisons. The model is initialized...

The Antarctic continental shelves and slopes occupy relatively small areas, but, nevertheless, are important for global climate, biogeochemical cycling and ecosystem functioning. Processes of water mass transformation through sea ice formation/melting and ocean-atmosphere interaction are key to the formation of deep and bottom waters as well as determining the heat flux beneath ice shelves. Cli...

Peat layers 2 to 30 cm in thickness, 22 to 46 m below present sea level, are found along the inner shelf of India, up to 27 km from the coast. They are rich in plant debris, organic carbon and sulfur. These organic-rich layers are not sedimentary deposits. Lack of favourable substrates, absence of sheltered habitats, high energy physical enVironments, and a very rapid sea level rise during earl...

Acoustic clutter is the primary problem encountered by active sonar systems operating in Continental Shelf environments. Clutter is defined as any return from the environment that stands prominently above the diffuse and temporally decaying reverberation background and so can be confused with or camouflage returns from an intended target such as an underwater vehicle. Many environmental factors...

A methodology is proposed to facilitate the construction of gridded bathymetry data for the use of hydrodynamic models on the continental shelf. It relies on the carrying out of three successive tasks:  Automatic selection of records of better quality among multiple sets of overlapping data;  Elimination of data points located on land;  Taking into account of the shoreline as bathymetric dat...

The first broad program of scientific shallow drilling on the U.S. Atlantic continental shelf has delineated rocks of Pleistocene to Late Cretaceous age, including phosphoritic Miocene strata, widespread Eocene carbonate deposits that serve as reflective seismic markers, and several regional unconformities. Two sites, off Maryland and New Jersey, showed light hydrocarbon gases having affinity t...

The two-branched inflow of warm and saline Atlantic Water to the Arctic is the major contributor of oceanic heat to the Arctic climate system. However, while the Atlantic Water entering the Arctic through the Fram Strait retains a large part of its heat as it flows along the Arctic continental slope, the branch flowing through the shallow Barents Sea releases a substantial amount of heat to the...

STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE White-sided dolphins are found in temperate and sub-polar waters of the North Atlantic, primarily in continental shelf waters to the 100m depth contour. The species inhabits waters from central West Greenland to North Carolina (about 35 ̊N) and perhaps as far east as 43 ̊W (Evans 1987; Hamazaki 2002). Distribution of sightings, strandings and incidental takes...

[1] Radioisotope evaluation of a cold-core, anticyclonic eddy surveyed in September 2004 on the Chukchi Sea continental slope was used to determine its age since formation over the shelf environment. Because the eddy can be shown to have been generated near the shelf break, initial conditions for several age-dependent tracers could be relatively well constrained. A combination of Ra/Ra, excess ...