Ocean State

Set in a working-class town on the Rhode Island coast, O’Nan’s latest is a crushing, beautifully written, and profoundly compelling novel about sisters, mothers, and daughters, and the terrible things love makes us do. In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister Marie, who reflects on that doomed autumn of 2009 with all the wisdom of hindsight. Angel and Birdy love the same teenage boy, frantically and single mindedly, and are compelled by the intensity of their feelings to extremes neither could have anticipated. O’Nan’s expert hand paints a fully realized portrait of these women, but also weaves a compelling and heartbreaking story of working-class life in Ashaway, Rhode Island. Propulsive, moving, and deeply rendered, Ocean State is a masterful novel by one of our greatest storytellers.

This is the first comprehensive study on archipelagic regimes published since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. The book traces the historical evolution of the archipelagic concept in international law and examines the definition of archipelagos and archipelagic states. The nature, status and regime of the waters of different types of archipelagos is examined and analysed from the perspective of archipelagic states and is based on the requirement of such states for territorial integrity and self-determination. The book introduces the concept of `Ocean States' and links Ocean States with the archipelagic concept. The archipelagic concept is viewed as a practical as well as a functional basis for the determination of the territorial limits of Ocean States.

The past 20 years have provided us with an unprecedented ability to observe, monitor, and forecast the oceans. In situ and remotely sensed ocean observations in combination with ocean general circulation models using data assimilation and state estimation methods underpin climate applications. State estimation aims to provide a dynamically consistent estimation of ocean fields, of errors of these fields, and of certain model parameters such as mixing coefficients. Conversely, data assimilation tools have been developed predominantly for ocean prediction applications and ocean reanalyses. This chapter describes approaches used by state estimation and data assimilation systems in synthesizing observations and model dynamics. We highlight some applications, including their limitations for climate research, and address the challenges ahead in relation to the ocean observing system.