This thesis is composed of three Chapters. Chapter 1 is a preface that outlines the degree program and components of my thesis. Chapter 2 is the main body of the thesis; it is an investigation into pore pressures in the Auger basin and how they are related to fluid venting at the seafloor. I map the distribution of subsurface pressures in thick interconnected sand bodies that are present across...

Ecological succession is one of the most important concepts in ecology. However for microbial community succession, there is a lack of a solid theoretical framework regarding succession in microorganisms. This is in part due to microbial community complexity and plasticity but also because little is known about temporal patterns of microbial community shifts in different kinds of ecosystems, in...

The northern piedmont of the western Kunlun mountains (Xinjiang, China) is marked at its easternmost extremity, south of the Hotan-Qira oases, by a set of normal faults trending N50E for nearly 70 km. Conspicuous on Landsat and SPOT images, these faults follow the southeastern border of a deep flexural basin and may be related to the subsidence of the Tarim platform loaded by the western Kunlun...

the purpose of this study is the analysis of the farmers economic behavior to reduce the adverse environmental effects of agricultural chemical inputs by using contingent valuation approach and tobit model by heckman's two stage. to achieve the desired goal, 100 questionnaires collected by a random sampling from farmers of kashaf- rood basin in mashhad city in 2013. results showed that variable...

In dynamical systems examples are common in which two or more attractors coexist, and in such cases the basin boundary is nonempty and the basins often have fractal basin boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to describe the structure and properties of unbounded basins and their boundaries for two-dimensional diffeomorphisms. Frequently, if not always, there is a periodic saddle on the bound...