Continental Pronto uni es high availability and disaster resilience at the speci cation and implementation levels. At the speci cation level, Continental Pronto formalizes the client's view of a system addressing local-area and wide-area data replication within a single framework. At the implementation level, Continental Pronto makes data highly available and disaster resilient. The algorithm p...

Global topographic data and the assumption of Airy isostasy have been used to estimate the crustal volumes of the continents and the oceanic and continental submarine plateaus. The calculated crustal volumes are 7182 X lo6 km3 for the continents, 242 x lo6 km3 for continental submarine plateaus, and 369 X lo6 km3 for oceanic plateaus. The Falkland Plateau and the Lord Howe Rise are the two larg...

In a previous paper, we derived plate tectonic models for continental accretion from the early Archaean (3800 m.y.B.P.) until the present. The models are dependent upon the number of continental masses, the seafloor creation rate and the continental surface area. The models can be tested by examining their predictions for three key geological indicators: sea level changes, stable isotopic evolu...

The azure-winged magpie (Cyanopica cyanus), has long presented a puzzle for biologists. The naturalist Alfred Wallace was one of the first to consider it. The puzzle lies in its extraordinary distribution. It exists in two distinct locations: Iberia and eastern Asia, 9,000 kilometres apart. Two alternative theories have been put forward to explain this curious distribution. The first proposes t...

Today the geoid can be conveniently determined by a set of high-degree spherical harmonics, such as EGM08 with a resolution of about 5'. However, such a series will be biased when applied to the continental geoid inside the topographic masses. This error we call the analytical downward continuation (DWC) error, which is closely related with the so-called topographic potential bias. However, whi...

Application of multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS) has led to big breakthrough of analytical methods for metal stable isotopes, resulting in rapid progresses in non-traditional stable isotope geochemistry. As a new geological tracer, Mg isotopes have been widely applied in studies of almost all important disciplines of geochemistry. High precision Mg isotope...

The present-day distribution of centres of endemism is the result of an interplay between historical biogeography and contemporary environmental conditions. The relative importance of these two factors has never been established, however, for want of information on both the distributions themselves and the continental-scale measurement of environmental variables. Recently published maps of avia...

Illegal wildlife trade has reached alarming levels globally, extirpating populations of commercially valuable species. As a driver of biodiversity loss, quantifying illegal harvest is essential for conservation and sociopolitical affairs but notoriously difficult. Here we combine field-based carcass monitoring with fine-scale demographic data from an intensively studied wild African elephant po...

[1] Geodynamic modeling studies have demonstrated that mantle global warming can occur in response to continental aggregation, possibly leading to large‐scale melting and associated continental breakup. Such feedback calls for a recipe describing how continents help to regulate the thermal evolution of the mantle. Here we use spherical mantle convection models with continents to quantify variat...