Mississippi River

Les deltas du Rhône et du Mississippi sont le théâtre d’intenses enjeux écologiques, historiques, industriels, sociologiques, politiques. Territoires intensément hybrides, ces deltas sont emblématiques des enjeux contemporains de la Terre.
De cette enquête au long cours, l’auteur revient avec une série de 31 récits, placés sous le signe d’espèces animales et végétales. Entre théorie et narration, cet ouvrage invente une forme d’écriture originale, attentive aux entrelacs des vivants. Un grand récit des paysages contemporains.

Andrew Clemens (1857-1894) was a self-trained American artist, who was born in Iowa, and grew up in McGregor, on the banks of the Mississippi. As a child, he lost his hearing to severe illness, and thereafter was considered "deaf and dumb." As a young man, he began to build highly detailed images inside of bottles, by arranging naturally colored grains of sand. This essay talks about his life and his meticulous artwork.

Near-bed hydrodynamic conditions were recorded for almost one year in the Viosca Knoll area (lease block 826), one of the most well-developed cold-water coral habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. Here, a reef-like cold-water coral ecosystem, dominated by the coral Lophelia pertusa, resembles coral habitats found off the southeastern US coast and the North East Atlantic. Two landers were deployed

Of the more than 3,000 photographers active in New Jersey in the nineteenth century, a number of them were itinerant camera workers at some point during their careers, operating with a horse-drawn wagon. Some photographers, especially those taking views, circulated locally even when they had a gallery where they did portraits and sold other kinds of photographs. Like many other American photographers who did not always wait for customers, John P. Doremus began working in the medium during the Civil War, when there was a strong market for portraits. Doremus is distinguished in that, for much of the latter 1870s and 1880s, he lived and worked on a floating gallery on the Mississippi River while his business back home in Paterson, Passaic County, was managed by his family. For this remarkable episode in his career, he was inducted into the National Rivers Hall of Fame in 1991. He is also exceptional in that he kept a journal in which he recorded fascinating details about his experience...

Ten years of research has gone into this group of essays on the steamboats and boatyards from the Monongahela River. The introduction provides the background. Additional papers to come include: The Boatyards of the mid-Mon, Disasters of the Monongahela Boats, Precious Cargo of the Monongahela Boats, The Mountain Boats, and Mon River Boats and the Civil War.
In every instance the paper revolves around what happened to the boats, where they went, what they did, how they contributed to the expansion of the nation. Lengthy quotes allow the sources to say in their own words, rather than my interpretation of their words, the stories they must tell. And the stories are incredible. The captains and packet companies from all parts of the watershed came to the Mon to build their boats. Orders for shallow hull steamboats flowed into the yards: boats destined for the New Orleans trade, boats for the Red River; boats for the furthest reaches of the Missouri, and even a few boats for South American rivers. Everyone used Mon Valley steamboats: abolitionists, freed slaves, missionaries, and even a young Samuel Clements, who would become famous under the pen name Mark Twain, a term used upon the boats to calculate the depth of the water. 
All of my research on the boats leans heavily on the California yards. That is simply because that is as far as I have researched to date. The legacy is massive and there is room for many serious researchers.

The late-Holocene Mahakam delta, located along the tropical eastern shore of Kalimantan, Indonesia, is considered to be a textbook example of a mixed tide-fluvial dominated delta system. The delta prograded about 60 km during the past 5000 years, which led to the development of a distinct network of distributary and tidal channels. Wave action is low due the limited fetch in the narrow strait of Makassar. Mahakam River discharge is about a quarter of the Mississippi River discharge and is characterized by absence of flood surges. Therefore, natural levees, crevasse splays and avulsions are absent in the delta plain. For the past four decennia, both modern and ancient Mahakam delta deposits have been studied in detail in order to better understand subsurface Miocene and Tertiary Mahakam deposits, which host large volumes of hydrocarbons. This study focuses on the dynamics and stratal patterns of delta plain, delta-front platform deposits and suspended sediments. Due to the predominance of semi-diurnal tides and the associated flow reversals, depositional patterns are highly variable which has resulted in the formation of characteristic sand-mud couplets. The distribution of the sand-mud couplets found in this study differs from previously proposed conceptual models. They are limited to the fluvial domain and form in the distributary channels (lateral channel bar) or at the fluvial dominated delta-front platform, which flanks the mouth bar deposits in offshore direction. The sand-mud couplets which formed as delta-front platform and lateral channel bar deposits are similar and can only be identified based on their 14C age. The sand content decreases significantly towards the tidal dominated areas due to limitation in transport capacity. Turbidity measurements taken in front of the river mouth also show rapid settlement of river plume sediments. Some 22 new AMS 14C dates show that late Holocene sea level history resembles the eustatic sea level curve giving a first approximation of the Late Holocene sea level history for East Kalimantan. The dates suggest that the progradational delta system evolved under conditions of slowly rising sea level, which compares well to the eustatic sea level curve. In addition, calculated averaged deposition rates of the sand-mud couplets indicate that deposition is driven by the spring-neap tide cycles instead of the daily tidal cycle.

Part 1:Prophage induction has been demonstrated to be a sensitive indicator for a wide variety of toxic and mutagenic compounds and, as a consequence, has been utilized for biologically based carcinogen screenings. Fourteen marine bacterial isolates were screened for development into the Marine Prophage Induction Assay (MPIA), for marine samples. The selected isolate (P99-4S3) was identified by 16S rDNA sequencing

The Keathley Canyon DOE/JIP drill sites are located along the southeastern edge of an intraslope minibasin, the Casey Basin, in the northern Gulf of Mexico at 1,335 m water depth. A grid of 2D high-resolution multichannel seismic lines around the drill sites, targeted for imaging depths down to at least 1,000 m subbottom, reveals multiple disconformities that bound 7 mappable seismic stratigraphic units. A major disconformity in the middle of the units stands out for its angular baselapping geometry. From the seismic and drilling data, three episodes of sedimentary deposition and deformation are inferred. The oldest episode consists of fine-grained muds deposited during a period of relative stability in the basin (units e, f, and g). A second episode (units c and d) consists of large vertical displacements associated with infilling and ponding of sediment. This second interval corresponds with intercalated fine and coarse-grained material in the drill hole, which sampled the thin edges of much thicker units. The final episode (units a and b) occurred during much subdued vertical displacement. Hemipelagic drape (unit a) characterizes the modern seafloor deposits. The basin is mostly filled. Its sill is part of a subsiding graben that is only 10-20 m shallower than the deepest point in the basin, indicating that gravity- driven transport would mostly bypass the basin. Contemporary faulting along the basin margins has selectively reactivated an older group of faults. The intercalated sand and mud deposits of units c and d are tentatively correlated with late Pleistocene deposition derived from the western shelf-edge delta/depocenter of the Mississippi River, which was probably most active from 320 ka to 70 ka (Winker and Booth, 2000). Gas hydrate occurs within near-vertical fractures in units e and f of the oldest episode. The presence of sand within the gas hydrate stability zone is not sufficient to concentrate gas hydrate even though dispersed gas hydrate occurs deeper in the fractured mud/clay-rich sections of units e and f. Winker, C.D., and Booth, J., 2000, Sedimentary dynamics of the salt-dominated continental slope, Gulf of Mexico: integration of observations from the seafloor, near-surface, and deep subsurface: GCSSEPM Foundation 20th Ann. Res. Conf., Deep-water Reservoirs of the World, p. 1059-1086 (CD-ROM publication).

I recently read an article in your summer 2020 issue by Richard Gross and Craig P. Howard titled “Colbert, La Salle, and the Search for Empire” in which some of my work was referenced, misinterpreted, and straw-manned. I hope the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society will grant me a few pages to respond. Somebody had deceptively changed the maps and geographical information, and it is hard to believe that this happened without La Salle’s cognizance and/or consent. Gross and Howard must ignore the blatant changes in the maps and documents from 1683 and 1684 in order to absolve their hero La Salle of any chicanery, skullduggery, and deception.

Some 60% of coastal rivers and bays in the U.S. have been moderately to severely degraded by nutrient pollution. Both nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) contribute to the problem, although for most coastal systems N additions cause more damage. Globally, human activity has increased the flux of N and P from land to the oceans by 2-fold and 3-fold, respectively.