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The Arctic continental shelves are important reservoirs of methane stored in gas hydrates and deeper geological formations. However, little is known about methane dynamics in deeper oceanic settings such as mid-ocean ridges, mainly due to operational challenges related to their remoteness. This study investigates a recently discovered methane seepage environment at Svyatogor Ridge, a sediment-covered transform fault on the western flank of the Arctic mid-ocean ridge west of Svalbard. Svyatogor Ridge was previously hypothesized to host deep gas hydrates and active fluid flow systems, which is a unique combination for this setting and requires geochemical evidence. Based on sediment and foraminiferal geochemistry, we demonstrate that Svyatogor Ridge hosts a shallow methane cycle with anaerobic oxidation of microbial methane, sustaining chemosynthetic communities at the seafloor. Our geochemical datasets also suggest that methane fluxes were higher in the past than today and long-lasting, with episodes of intense methane oxidation recorded in pre-Holocene sediments. Methane seepage is still ongoing at this location, although no evidence exists that methane is reaching the sea surface. The results provide the first evidence of a methane seepage environment ever reported from the ultra-slow spreading Arctic mid-ocean ridge, thus calling for a reevaluation of the role of this type of ridge in the ocean methane cycle.

AbstractReverend Thomas Bridges’ Yagan-English dictionary (1879) has hitherto been little explored outside of linguistics but is highly valuable as a complementary source to archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic records in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile). The dictionary contains 22,800 entries and yields rich information concerning the marine lifeways of the Yagan and their and intimate knowledge about Fuegian seascapes. The idea behind this paper is that environments have strong bearings on linguistic vocabularies. Treating words as archaeological objects that map onto landscapes, we identify important landforms for Yagan marine foragers and Norwegian fisher-farmers in a comparative study of word frequencies in Bridges’ dictionary and Ivar Aasen’s Norwegian dictionary (1850). Moreover, we explore in detail how marine lifestyles and Fuegian seascapes emerge in Bridges’ dictionary and discuss the dictionary’s relevance for historical archaeology in Tierra del Fuego.

These slides were presented at the HS Academy workshop titled "Working Group on Research Infrastructures and Heritage Science Career Paths," organized jointly by the IPERION HS and E-RIHS projects. The presentation was held in Bologna on January 25, 2024.

Messinian pre-evaporitic seep carbonates outcropping in the Tuscan-Romagna area share a common upward stratigraphic trend: massive seep carbonates rich in large lucinids, modiolids and planktonic foraminifera pass upward to horizontally laminated carbonates free of macrofauna and foraminifera. A transitional macrofauna-free facies marks the passage in some sections, sometimes with faint lamination. Thin section petrography, SEM-EDS analyses, and X-ray diffraction revealed a high textural and mineralogical variability between the studied sections and facies. In general, the upward facies transition is associated with a switch from massive packstone/grainstone with complex carbonate mineralogy to laminated mudstone microfacies with monomineralic, mostly dolomitic, carbonate composition. The δ13C values of all facies indicate domination of methane-derived carbon, thus demonstrating a methane-charged sedimentary setting with precipitation of authigenic carbonates induced by anaerobic oxidation of methane. The transitional and laminated facies contain several structures typical of microbial sediments, such as peloids, filamentous features, clotted micrite, fibrous cement, and frequent fenestrae; web-like structures are remnants of cyanobacterial mats and resemble Entophysalidaceae thriving at the bottom of the Messinian sea. The distinctive depositional and biotic switch (abrupt disappearance of macrofauna and planktonic foraminifera, predominance of dolomite over calcite, absence of aragonite, presence of horizontal lamination) reflects important environmental changes taking place in the basin. The rise of δ18O from the massive, through transitional, to the laminated facies suggests either a drop of bottom-water temperature or an increase of salinity. Nevertheless, other paleoenvironmental changes must have co-occurred in order to account for the dramatic facies shift observed. We hypothesize that this change could reflect the development of water-column stratification with respect to both salinity and oxygen concentration shortly before the Messinian Salinity Crisis

The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 396 to the mid-Norwegian margin recovered > 1300 m of pristinely preserved, volcanic-ash-rich sediments deposited during the late Paleocene and early Eocene from close to the centre of the North Atlantic Igneous Province (NAIP). Remarkably, many of these cores contain glendonites, pseudomorphs after the purported cold-water mineral ikaite, from sediments dated to the late Paleocene and early Eocene. These time intervals span some of the hottest climates of the Cenozoic, including the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Global deep-ocean temperatures are not thought to have dropped below 10 ∘C at any point during this time, making the occurrence of supposedly cold-water (near-freezing temperature) glendonite pseudomorphs seemingly paradoxical. This study presents a detailed sedimentological, geochemical, and microscopic study of the IODP Exp. 396 glendonites and presents an updated model for the ikaite-to-calcite transformation for these glendonites. Specifically, we show that early diagenesis of basaltic ashes of the NAIP appear to have chemically promoted ikaite growth in the sediments in this region. Together with existing knowledge of late Paleocene and early Eocene glendonites from Svalbard to the north and early Eocene glendonites from Denmark to the south, these new glendonite finds possibly imply episodic, short-duration, and likely localized cooling in the Nordic Seas region, which may have been directly or indirectly linked to the emplacement of the NAIP.

Thousands of prospectuses offered shares to British investors at the turn of the twentieth century. We find evidence that there were informed investors who participated in the market at this time. Firms that attracted additional investor demand were more likely to be listed on the London Stock Exchange, survive longer, and achieve better long-run equity returns. We find that the exchange screened lower quality firms away from the main board. The lowest quality firms sorted themselves and did not apply to either the London Stock Exchange main or second board.

The study investigates psycholinguistic mechanisms of sentence parsing and ambiguity resolution by balanced Tatar–Russian bilinguals who learnt English as their additional language. We check the parser’s sensitivity to the selectional properties of the matrix verb and/or social conventions in processing and attachment resolution of ambiguous relative clauses (RCs). We chose English and Russian because they have a documented preference for low attachment (LA) and high attachment (HA), respectively, and Tatar, as we have found out in earlier work, has no attachment ambiguity. We conducted a self-paced reading task in English and Russian which returned 61% HA in Russian, 49% HA in English. It was followed by a pen-and-paper translation task. The translation post-test checked whether an attachment preference demonstrated in either English or Russian showed in RC translations into Tatar. The results return an 80% preference for LA in English–Tatar translations and 61% in Russian–Tatar translations. Both syntactic information and world knowledge influence online RC processing in Russian and English. Therefore, the multilingual parser incorporates information from multiple sources in either L1 or Ln processing. The parser may favor LA as a default parsing option while maintaining sensitivity to individual grammars (Russian), where this preference should be overridden.

This article conducts a critical reading of the British war films Mark of Cain (Munden, 2007) and Battle for Haditha (Broomfield, 2007). Establishing the significance of cultural representations for politics and collective memory, I first locate both films in their historical and cultural contexts before I offer analyses that focus on the representation of US and British soldiers, Iraqi insurgents, and Iraqi civilians. I argue that Mark of Cain dissects how misunderstood loyalty, peer-pressure, and military organization facilitated abuses by British soldiers against Iraqi prisoners, but at the same time narrowly frames the Iraqi other as either largely invisible threat or hyper-visible helpless victim. In contrast, Battle for Haditha draws a more sophisticated picture of the Iraq war focusing on structural aspects of the conflict. In presenting the Iraq theater of war as a complex political economy with shifting allegiances and blurring loyalties, Broomfield offers insights in the backgrounds and rationalities of US soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and insurgents and this way alerts the viewer to structural aspects of evil in war as a system that reduces the paradigm of possible actions on all sides until only wrong decisions can be made. This, I conclude, makes Battle for Haditha an anti-war film proper.