Geographical distributions of terrestrial or freshwater taxa that are broken up by oceans can be explained by either oceanic dispersal or vicariance in the form of fragmentation of a previously contiguous landmass. The validation of plate-tectonics theory provided a global vicariance mechanism and, along with cladistic arguments for the primacy of vicariance, helped create a view of oceanic dis...

How rapidly can animal populations in the wild evolve when faced with sudden environmental shifts? Uplift during the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake abruptly created freshwater ponds on multiple islands in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska. In the short time since the earthquake, the phenotypes of resident freshwater threespine stickleback fish on at least three of these islands have cha...

The boundary between the crust and the mantle was discovered by Mohorovicic in 1909 under the European continent. Subsquent research in this century established the major differences between the continental and oceanic crust; a typical thickness for the continental crust is 30-50 km while a typical thickness for me oceanic crusts is 6 km. In terms of history the continental crust contains a muc...

Climate modes, such as the El Ni~ no Southern Oscillation (ENSO), influence Tropical Cyclones (TCs) interannual activity through their effect on large-scale atmospheric environment. These climate modes also induce interannual variations of subsurface oceanic stratification, which may also influence TCs. Changes in oceanic stratification indeed modulate the amplitude of TCs-induced cooling, and ...

[1] Two main mechanisms can potentially explain the spread in the magnitude of global warming simulated by climate models: deep ocean heat uptake and climate feedbacks. Here, we show that deep oceanic heat uptake is a major source of spread in simulations of 21st century climate change. Models with deeper baseline polar mixed layers are associated with larger deep ocean warming and smaller glob...

Introduction: Jupiter’s moon Europa is a differentiated body that consists of a Fe-rich core, a silicate mantle, and a water shell, which could contain an ocean [1]. The presence of sulfate-bearing compounds on the moon’s icy surface has been interpreted in terms of frozen oceanic water [2]. However, evaluations of oceanic chemistry from surface observations are limited because of radiolysis [3...

Oligotrophic oceanic waters of the central ocean gyres typically have extremely low dissolved fixed inorganic nitrogen concentrations, but few nitrogen-fixing microorganisms from the oceanic environment have been cultivated. Nitrogenase gene (nifH) sequences amplified directly from oceanic waters showed that the open ocean contains more diverse diazotrophic microbial populations and more divers...

the kasian volcanic body is located in the eastern margin of the zagros thrust belt, close to the sanandaj-sirjan metamorphic zone. these volcanic rocks are mainly composed of andesite and andesite-basalt rocks with porphyritic, hypocrystalline porphyritic, hyalo-porphyritic and hyalo-microlitic porphyritic textures. analyses of the distributions of major, rare earth and trace elements reveal a...