Shackleton Nicholas J (3 results)
OXYGEN ISOTOPE ANALYSIS AND SEASONALITY DETERMINATIONS: LIMITS AND POTENTIAL OF A NEW TECHNIQUE.
Bailey, Geoffrey N. & Margaret R. Deith & Nicholas J. Shackleton.
Language: English
Published by Society for American Archaeology, Washington, D.C.
- Softcover
Seller: Legacy Books, Louisville, KY, U.S.A.Legacy Books
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Add to basketSoft cover. Condition: Very Good. pp390-398, illustrated. Removed from AMERICAN ANTIQUITY. JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY, Volume 48, Number 2, April, 1983. VG. In report covers. May include a first or last copied page. Synopsis: "This paper presents a critical assessment of Killingley's approach (1981) to the d…etermination of month of collection of marine molluscs by prehistoric people. The basis of the method is careful oxygen isotope measurements made in successive growth increments in the shells. The authors have analyzed specimens of Monodonta and Patella collected live on the coast of northern Spain, in conjunction with seasonality studies on molluscs from prehistoric sites in the neighborhood. These studies confirm the necessity of making careful analyses of each species under consideration. Given the significance both of interspecies differences and of climatic variability on timescales from a year upwards (particularly important in Killingley's area), they conclude that his apparent accuracy of (plus or minus) a month is illusory." Also includes: SEASONALITY DETERMINATION BY OXYGEN ISOTOPIC PROFILE: A REPLY TO BAILEY ET AL, by John S. Killingley, pp399-403, tables. This is the author's response to Bailey et al. Synopsis: "Profiles were measured on two species of intertidal mollusks (Tegula funebralis and Collisella limatula) to provide further evidence for the applicability of the technique to seasonality studies.".
More imagesPublished by Macmillan & Sons, London, 1967
- First Edition
Seller: Atticus Rare Books, West Branch, IA, U.S.A.Atticus Rare Books
Contact seller5-star seller1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION, full volume, of the first tentative measurement of a CMB anisotropy, a slightly elevated temperature in the direction of a known quasar cluster. Wilkinson & Partridge's paper presents results "which appear to set rather stringent limits on the magnitude of possible density inhomogeneities in the… universe" (Wilkinson and Partridge, 1967, 719). ALSO included is Nicholas Shackleton's reassessment of Emiliani's conclusions from his 1966 analysis of the oxygen isotope ratios in Caribbean cores as an indicator of variations in total volume of glacier ice sheets. WILKINSON: "The CMB radiation is a direct relic of the early universe. It is a unique and deep probe of both the thermal history of the early universe and the primordial perturbations in the matter distribution" (Tuluie, "Cosmic Microwave Background" AJ, 1996, 15). Following "the discovery of the CMB, early work focused on putting constraints on the isotropy of the radiation field: that would be an important part of establishing its cosmological origin and would put constraints on the peculiar motion of the galaxy relative to the Local Group and the Virgo Supercluster" (ibid). Small "anistropies" (inhomogeneities in directional measurements) of temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) allow scientists to test cosmological and astronomical theories, including cosmic inflation, the geometry of the visible universe, and the distribution of galaxy clusters. Wilkinson and Partridge's paper, again, presents the first attempt to put experimental limits on the level of anistropy. SHACKLETON: Shackleton "concludes that glacial/interglacial variations in foraminiferal oxygen isotope records were primarily influenced by changes in the oxygen isotopic composition of seawater, rather than temperature" (Ravelo, The Use of Oxygen and Carbon Isotopes, 735). CONDITION & DETAILS: London: Macmillian & Sons. Ex-libris with very minimal interior markings and ghosting from the removal of a spine label. Complete volume bound in bright red cloth with red buckram at the spine. Tightly bound and very clean. The interior is bright and exceptionally clean throughout.
More imagesPublished by Pre-publication typescript for Science, [Palisades, New York, 1976
- First Edition
- Signed
Seller: SOPHIA RARE BOOKS, Koebenhavn V, DenmarkSOPHIA RARE BOOKS
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Add to basketFirst edition. Doubting the Proof of the Ice Ages . The pre-publication typescript of the paper that proved the astronomical theory of the ice ages - headed 'Manuscript accepted for publication by Science (as submitted Oct. 12, 1976)' - and the working copy of Stephen Jay Gould, who read it with a sceptic's pencil and did not be…lieve it. Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton demonstrated here, from two deep-sea sediment cores, that the rhythm of the Pleistocene glaciations over the past half-million years matches the slow variations in the geometry of the Earth's orbit - the eccentricity, obliquity and precession cycles calculated by Milutin Milanković - and so revived and confirmed a theory that most geologists had abandoned. Gould, then a Harvard palaeontologist whose own work on Pleistocene land snails tracked exactly these glacial cycles, worked through the typescript in dense pencil annotation on its title page, dissecting the argument into its own four steps and concluding that the orbital signal was 'just an effect for Milank[ovitch]'s, not claims' - that what looks good in direction is, in his own summary phrase, 'a major problem in magnitude (my point).' The copy is unsigned but carries his filing mark and his hand; his verdict lands, as it happens, precisely on the weakness the authors themselves confessed. The provenance rests on the boxed filing mark 'H5' at the head of the title page, which matches Gould's practice elsewhere, together with the pencil hand of the annotations; the document is not signed. What the hand records is a working analysis rather than a formal review: the typescript is a copy of the manuscript already accepted by Science, reproduced and circulated after the editorial decision was taken, and Gould has taken it apart for his own purposes, as an outside reader thinking on paper. The distinction matters, because it fixes what the object is - not a referee's verdict solicited by the journal, but the private reckoning of a working scientist with a result he found important and could not accept. Under a heading he set down as 'My approach' he numbers the paper's logic in four movements. First, the data: the two cores, the oxygen-isotope record in the foraminifer Globigerina bulloides, the summer sea-surface temperatures reconstructed from radiolarian assemblages, and the puzzling abundance of the radiolarian Cycladophora davisiana, beside which he pauses to work out for himself what the species signifies - 'not clear what [it] means, but lots today' where the summer surface is of low salinity and cold water lies beneath, near the Antarctic and its summer melt. Second, the prediction: the twenty-one-thousand-year precession and forty-one-thousand-year tilt cycles, and the sharp question 'why just ecc[entricity]', with a note on the tenth-of-a-percent insolation difference and a reference to 'Broecker's curve'. Third, the raw curves and their calibration, where the assumption of constant accumulation rates and the radiocarbon anchoring draw the flat marginal verdict '120,000 correlation (problem)'. And fourth, the results, where he sets the paper's own variance figures against one another - twenty-three-thousand years at ten percent, forty-two-thousand at twenty-five, 'but 50% ? 100,000' - and writes 'OK but not match prediction of 1 to 1 response.' The objection is exact. The dominant hundred-thousand-year cycle of climate corresponds to eccentricity, which is by far the feeblest of the three orbital forcings, and the effect is far larger than any linear, one-to-one response to that forcing could produce. It is a problem of magnitude, not of direction, and it is the one weakness Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton had themselves confessed, in a section of their paper headed 'The 100,000-year cycle.' A lesser reader might have missed it under the weight of the result; Gould went straight to it. Gould had good contemporary reason to care, and it was not the reason a later reader might assume. Through the late 1960s and 1970s his empirical research was on the Pleistocene land snails of Bermuda and the Bahamas - Poecilozonites, the subject of his doctoral work, and later the West Indian Cerion - whose shell form shifted and then held still across the glacial and interglacial phases this paper was for the first time dating with precision. A rigorous chronology of those phases bore directly on the tempo of the evolutionary change he was documenting, and on the theory of punctuated equilibrium he and Niles Eldredge had proposed in 1972, which held that species change rapidly and then persist unchanged for long stretches rather than transforming gradually. A climate that jumped between states on an orbital beat, rather than drifting smoothly, was the kind of external pattern that bore on whether the stasis he saw in the snails was imposed from without or held from within. The deeper cast of mind that the annotations reveal - a resistance to strong quantitative causal claims, a preference for interrogating an apparent large-scale periodicity rather than accepting it - would find its fullest expression only later, in The Mismeasure of Man (1981), in his part in the fierce debate over the claimed twenty-six-million-year periodicity of mass extinctions, and in Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), his book-length meditation on the tension between cyclical and directional conceptions of geological time. A paper arguing that a repeating astronomical cycle paces the directional history of climate sits exactly on the fault line Gould found most interesting, and his marginal 'just an effect . not claims' is the compressed germ of the later scepticism. No response from him was ever published, and these annotations are his only known record of engaging the result. The problem the three authors solved was more than a century old. Joseph Adhémar had first tied the ice ages to the precession of the equinoxes in his Révolutions de la mer (1842), reasoning wrongly from the length of the seasons alone; James Crol. Signed.
