On the frontier of the Western Shire,British Central Africa

Superficial deposits (residual, colluvial, alluvial) are important as environmental resources in tropical environments. An understanding of their formation through varying time periods is essential to a correct interpretation of their economic and hazard potentials. This requires an integration of process studies with a reconstruction of longer term development. Saprolite formation is considered over 10⁵‐10⁷ yr, while colluvial and alluvial sediments are commonly Late Quaternary (10³‐10⁵ yr) in age. The importance of Quaternary environmental changes in the humid tropics to an understanding of heavy mineral placer deposits in West Africa and Indonesia is illustrated. It is concluded that geomorphologists can often make their most important contributions to developing areas by offering a sound interpretation of landsurfaces and their underlying deposits for engineers, geologists and pedologists, with whom a close working relationship is essential.     

Palestinian Water: Resources,Use, Conservation,Climate Change,and Land Use

This article addresses the future of freshwater resources in the Palestinian West Bank through a discussion of contemporary issues that each plays a vital role in determining the long‐term sustainability of freshwater reserves, such as water resource availability, trans‐boundary water issues, water reuse and conservation, changes in land use, and the potential impact of climate change on long‐term water management. Climate change and changing land use patterns are already altering this region's water resources. Future predictions regarding the long‐term effects of these changes are complex and therefore inherently uncertain. However, the consensus among most studies on this subject indicates that currently water‐poor regions such as the Middle East will experience even greater water stress in the future. Nearly all of the freshwater consumed in the West Bank is obtained from local groundwater supplies that are suffering overdraft as well as decreasing water quality. Climate change will exacerbate water stress by increasing overall temperatures, decreasing and fluctuating precipitation, and reducing overall aquifer replenishment. Expanding urbanization will continue to strain freshwater supplies by negatively impacting the quality and quantity of available freshwater. Water management in the West Bank is further complicated by total Israeli control over water resources, which often causes water delivery to Palestinians in this region to be marginalized. This article finds that Palestinian and Israeli water managers must plan for future water crises, which will likely be a result of the combined effects of increasing urbanization and climate change coupled with exponential population growth.     

Monuments on a migrating Nile

River courses migrate, but many Egyptologists plot the present-day River Nile on maps of the valley in archaeological times. This may have misled interpretations of ancient monuments and settlements. We show a river migrating rapidly on historical timescales in the Luxor region, sweeping > 5 km across the valley at rates on the order of 2–3 km per 1000 years. Satellite elevation data (SRTM), processed by a novel method, and Landsat imagery are used to trace ancient river levees and extend trends present in 200 years of archive maps thousands of years into the past. This supplements observations by Ptolemy (121–141 AD) and places local geo-archaeological studies in a wider spatial and temporal context. Satellite data are demonstrated to be a relatively quick and easy constraint upon ancient river courses, and a basis for investigations along the Egyptian Nile, even in logistically inaccessible regions.     

Turning Point? The Volatile Geographies of Taxation

This article argues that the geographies of taxation offer an important but neglected insight into changes taking place in the nature of the contemporary state in the context of globalisation. Following Schumpeter's analysis of the “tax state”, the paper argues that, historically, the theory and practice of fiscal space are fundamental both to state form and to the possibility of political and social institutions. Despite this, the complexity and fluidity inherent in fiscal space has been obscured by the dominant normative conception of “the” fiscal state. As the concept of “fiscal sovereignty” becomes less and less salient in practice in the context of economic globalisation, it remains a powerful ideological concept for state governance. This paper reviews the primary contemporary accounts of fiscal space across a range of disciplinary contexts and scales of governance. Despite the expectation and or desire for some form of “fiscal globalisation” on the part of commentators, in practice what we see is an increased centralisation of state fiscal control coupled with a creeping individuation and privatisation of fiscal responsibility. This radical respatialisation of fiscal space has profound implications both for the state itself and for any prospect of the creation of a global “public domain” founded on a global fisc.     

Iron precipitation in a natural CO2 reservoir: Jurassic Navajo Sandstone in the northern San Rafael Swell,UT, USA

Diagenetic iron (oxyhydr)oxide minerals are common precipitates expected in CO₂ reservoirs, and these minerals record fluid flow for application to carbon capture and sequestration (CSS). Multiple mineralogy and spectroscopy analyses on a pore to meter scale characterize a well‐exposed, lithologically controlled, iron (oxyhydr)oxides reaction front in the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone. Dolomite is the most prevalent cement (up to 23 area%), followed by only several percent or less of iron (oxyhydr)oxides, kaolinite, illite, and gypsum cements. Bulk geochemistry based on diagenetic mineralogies in the reaction front is compared with the water chemistry from nearby modern spring effluent emanating from the Navajo Sandstone to conclude that similar fluids (i.e., CO₂‐charged, saline waters containing hydrocarbons) are responsible for the precipitation. A second comparison of bulk geochemistry and diagenetic mineralogies of the reaction front with data from other abundant Navajo Sandstone concretions in the Spencer Flat region (in south central Utah) shows that reservoir fluids likely vary spatially and temporally in the porous and permeable Navajo Sandstone. CO₂ injection into porous and permeable, quartz arenite, saline aquifers will likely result in minor clay and abundant dolomite precipitation that will significantly decrease porosity.     

Experimentation as infrastructure: Enacting transitions differently through diverse economy-environment assemblages in Aotearoa New Zealand

Radically new economic arrangements are needed for just and sustainable transitions to a more environmentally and ecologically resilient world. Yet little progress is being made to imagine the new economy-environment relations around which resources, actors, and ethics might be configured to enact the novel economic forms needed. This article uses a Social Studies of Economisation and Marketisation (SSEM) approach to examine a suite of differently scaled and structured environmentally focused economic development initiatives in New Zealand. We explore how the initiatives have assembled diverse actors and investment projects into experimental economy-environment relations. Our account highlights experimentation as a pivotal mode of economisation, and we argue that the initiatives studied by us expose a new experimentation-led agenda for transitioning to more environmentally and economically just futures. Working with the idea of experimentation in an SSEM framework, we also argue that the diverse initiatives are creating an experimentation infrastructure that provides a more generative platform for novel economy-environment relations than top–down models of change such as transition pathways. The article opens up a critical politics of environmental economy that focuses attention on emergence, agency, and practice and allows us to reimagine processes of transitioning.