Values At Sea

The human impact on vast areas of the oceans remains relatively unregulated. Sometimes, in fact, the only controls over our exploitation of marine resources lie in our environmental consciousness. While the field of environmental ethics has explored rights and duties for land use, stewardship, and policy, relatively little attention has been given to comparable issues of marine environments. Values at Sea makes an important step toward moving environmental ethics discussions into a broader framework. Gathered here are fifteen papers by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including ethicists, marine scientists, anthropologists, economists, geographers, lawyers, and activists. From the Great Lakes to the Pacific Islands, from the open sea to coastal areas, the papers cover a broad array of ethical issues and policy matters related to such topics as the valuation of marine life, indigenous peoples’ knowledge and environmental stewardship, endemic and exotic species, aquaculture, oil spills, and species protection.

Social Values and Identities in the Black Sea Region focuses on the nexus between geopolitical challenges and cultural framework in the Black Sea region. The volume shows how the common inheritance interferes with different religious and political institutional backgrounds, fostering the formation of a particular cultural area. The interdisciplinary approach combines contributions from the domains of sociology, political science, international relations, and security studies and employs qualitative and quantitative analyses.

Reconciling the diversity of political cultures, values and national identities with the European integration project is one of the most fundamental challenges contemporary Europe is facing. This challenge is readily apparent in the Baltic Sea region with its mosaic of peoples, cultures and identities. The impact of the ongoing process of European integration on the post-Communist societies on the Eastern rim of the Baltic Sea is indisputable. The negotiations between the European Union and the East European candidate countries were in fact accompanied by a large scale transfer of organization.

Advances in Geophysics

The papers and research results presented here have been prepared as part of the Integrated Basin Studies project. This project had the objective of studying the lithospheric and upper crustal processes governing the formation and evolution of extensional and foreland basins and to decipher the role of tectonics, sea level and sedimentary processes in the filling of such basins. The Dynamics of the Norwegian Margin module focused on the rifted sedimentary basins of the northern North Sea and off Mid-Norway. This prolific hydrocarbon province has an extensive industry and scientific database and offers a unique opportunity to study fundamental earth processes, from failed rifting to crustal breakup and accretion of oceanic crust. A set of new models for basin formation and filling has been derived, including linking of sedimentary basin faulting to lower crustal deformation, signature and variability of syn-rift infill, correlation of mineralogy to seismic signature, nature and characteristics of volcanic margin formation and distribution of present-day stress field.