Matching Items (4)
Description
The legal infrastructures of nations are built on sociocultural attitudes regarding the function, purpose, appropriate sources, and means of conceptualizing law. The discipline of legal anthropology aims to study conceptions of law cross-culturally. This study aims to understand the systems of social attitudes toward law which serve in constructing the socio-legal frameworks on which legal traditions and the types of legal institutions they beget are based. This examination is made through a case study of the ongoing formation of intergovernmental administrative infrastructure in the Arctic, through the lenses of three of its most influential stakeholders. By analyzing the actions of the governments of Canada, the United States, and the Russian Federation in regards to ratification of multilateral administrative instruments, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, rationales surrounding the implementation of a bilateral treaty to ameliorate Arctic disputes, as well as other tactics used to resolve said disputes, this study hopes to understand how sociocultural attitudes drive the formation of legal institutions. Analysis of the sociocultural attitudes which inform domestic and intergovernmental legal institutions will be done through historical examination of the legal traditions that underpin the standing legal institutions of each of these three states. This examination has demonstrated that Canada and the United States, which are members of the common law legal tradition, that prioritizes use of established precedent in legal decision making, appear more reticent to ratify measures of international law in the Arctic, which do not have substantial precedent. Meanwhile, the Russian Federation, which is rooted in the civil law tradition, which primarily utilizes direct application of legislative enactments and legal scholarship as its means of determining legal action, has ratified and implemented measures on the solely principles of international law in the Arctic more readily.
ContributorsLivingston, Noah Shawn (Author) / Bowman, Diana (Thesis director) / York, Abigail (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Buried under ice and snow in Greenland, the abandoned Camp Century holds the remnants of a Danish-American Cold War-era operation left to achieve final disposal beneath a tomb of ice. Nearly 50 years later, climate projections hypothesize that snowmelt will exceed snowfall in 2090—releasing the trapped hazardous wastes at Camp Century. This thesis examines the mechanisms through which the international community is able to remediate climate change impacts on Camp Century wastes. The wastes are characterized and examined as either a problem of transboundary pollution, as an issue of military accountability, or as an issue of climate change policy. As revealed, the wastes are unable to be classified as transboundary pollutants. Though classified as a point-source transboundary risk, they are neither a traded or public risk. Furthermore, no international or domestic transboundary pollution agreements incorporate provisions encompassing the specific attributes of Camp Century’s waste. Camp Century is also not an issue of military accountability as U.S. base cleanup laws and environmental regulations do not apply abroad and as the original bilateral agreement governing the site is insufficient in addressing potential ice melt. Finally, as examined through institutions such as the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, Camp Century is, again, unable to be incorporated in current frameworks such as adaptation as adaption efforts are concentrated on developing nations. This thesis reveals the inability of current frameworks, institutions, and agreements to effectively remediate Camp Century wastes which is a case utilized as a microcosm through which to examine international capacity in addressing climate-change induced impacts.
ContributorsKilker, Natalie Angelina (Author) / Klinsky, Sonja (Thesis director) / Bodansky, Daniel (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Recent satellite and remote sensing innovations have led to an eruption in the amount and variety of geospatial ice data available to the public, permitting in-depth study of high-definition ice imagery and digital elevation models (DEMs) for the goal of safe maritime navigation and climate monitoring. Few researchers have investigated texture in optical imagery as a predictive measure of Arctic sea ice thickness due to its cloud pollution, uniformity, and lack of distinct features that make it incompatible with standard feature descriptors. Thus, this paper implements three suitable ice texture metrics on 1640 Arctic sea ice image patches, namely (1) variance pooling, (2) gray-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCMs), and (3) textons, to assess the feasibly of a texture-based ice thickness regression model. Results indicate that of all texture metrics studied, only one GLCM statistic, namely homogeneity, bore any correlation (0.15) to ice freeboard.
ContributorsWarner, Hailey (Author) / Cochran, Douglas (Thesis director) / Jayasuria, Suren (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2024-05
Description
Sea ice algae dominated by diatoms inhabit the brine channels of the Arctic sea ice and serve as the base of the Arctic marine food web in the spring. I studied sea ice diatoms in the bottom 10 cm of first year land-fast sea ice off the coast of Barrow, AK, in spring of 2011, 2012, and 2013. I investigated the variability in the biomass and the community composition of these sea-ice diatoms between bloom phases, as a function of overlying snow depth and over time. The dominant genera were the pennate diatoms Nitzschia, Navicula, Thalassiothrix, and Fragilariopsis with only a minor contribution by centric diatoms. While diatom biomass as estimated by organic carbon changed significantly between early, peak, and declining bloom phases (average of 1.6 mg C L-1, 5.7 mg C L-1, and 1.0 mg C L-1, respectively), the relative ratio of the dominant diatom groups did not change. However, after export, when the diatoms melt out of the ice into the underlying water, diatom biomass dropped by ~73% and the diatom community shifted to one dominated by centric diatoms. I also found that diatom biomass was ~77% lower under high snow cover (>20 cm) compared to low snow cover (<8 cm); however, the ratio of the diatom categories relative to particulate organic carbon (POC) was again unchanged. The diatom biomass was significantly different between the three sampling years (average of 2.4 mg C L-1 in 2011, 1.1 mg C L-1 in 2012, and 5.4 mg C L-1 in 2013, respectively) as was the contribution of all of the dominant genera to POC. I hypothesize the latter to be due to differences in the history of ice sheet formation each year. The temporal variability of these algal communities will influence their availability for pelagic or benthic consumers. Furthermore, in an Arctic that is changing rapidly with earlier sea ice and snowmelt, this time series study will constitute an important baseline for further studies on how the changing Arctic influences the algal community immured in sea ice.
ContributorsKinzler, Kyle (Author) / Neuer, Susanne (Thesis advisor) / Juhl, Andrew (Committee member) / Hartnett, Hilairy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014