Autour de l’axis mundi. De la notion théorique à la mise en image littéraire dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne (Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras et Le Sphinx des glaces)

2013 ◽  
pp. 101-107
Author(s):  
Adam Jarosz
Keyword(s):  
Religious Study ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Time Axis ◽  
The North ◽  
Jules Verne ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
Axis Mundi

The symbolism of axis mundi constitutes an integral part of cultural and religious systems across the world. Such symbolism appears clearly and precisely in all forms of religious life. As it is stressed by Eliade, many a time, axis mundi is an intersection of three varied ontological zones (the interior of the Earth, the surface of the Earth, and the Heaven) and creates a contact place of man with sacrum. The axis mundi symbolism, analysed here as a part of literary studies, is reflected also in two important novels by Julius Verne (Adventures of Captain Hatteras, 1864-65 ; An Arctic Mystery, 1897) dedicated to the polar regions. In both novels, such sites (the north-ern and southern poles) become a literary image of axis mundi, while the hypothesis finds its confirmation in the nature of psychological experiences of the heroes cast in the polar regions. The symbolic and religious study of such experiences leads to the conclusion that in both the analysed cases they may be understood as an experience of a contact with sacrum.

Polar Maps

1949 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 219-226
Author(s):  
John Kinsella ◽  
A. Day Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Northern Hemisphere ◽  
Relative Size ◽  
North Pole ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
North Polar

It is time for us to get better acquainted with the top and bottom of the earth. The strategic importance of the North Polar Regions is becoming increasingly evident and recent explorations in Antarctica have focused attention on that part of the world. We are accustomed to looking at maps which either exclude the polar regions or which distort excessively the distances, directions and relative size of areas in these parts of the globe. Many maps in common usage do not indicate clearly that the great circles between many important cities in the Northern Hemisphere pass near the North Pole.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

Effects of Continents and Supercontinents on Climate

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. W. Rogers ◽  
M. Santosh
Keyword(s):  
Global Climate ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
The North ◽  
Rock Types ◽  
Control Climate ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Earth’S Climate ◽  
Geologic Record

Continents affect the earth’s climate because they modify global wind patterns, control the paths of ocean currents, and absorb less heat than seawater. Throughout earth history the constant movement of continents and the episodic assembly of supercontinents has influenced both global climate and the climates of individual continents. In this chapter we discuss both present climate and the history of climate as far back in the geologic record as we can draw inferences. We concentrate on longterm changes that are affected by continental movements and omit discussion of processes with periodicities less than about 20,000 years. We refer readers to Clark et al. (1999) and Cronin (1999) if they are interested in such short-term processes as El Nino, periodic variations in solar irradiance, and Heinrich events. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section describes the processes that control climate on the earth and includes a discussion of possible causes of glaciation that occurred over much of the earth at more than one time in the past. The second section investigates the types of evidence that geologists use to infer past climates. They include specific rock types that can form only under restricted climatic conditions, varieties of individual fossils, diversity of fossil populations, and information that the 18O/16O isotopic system can provide about temperatures of formation of ancient sediments. The third section recounts the history of the earth’s climate and relates changes to the growth and movement of continents. This history takes us from the Archean, when climates are virtually unknown, through various stages in the evolution of organic life, and ultimately to the causes of the present glaciation in both the north and the south polar regions. The earth’s climate is controlled both by processes that would operate even if continents did not exist and also by the positions and topographies of continents. We begin with the general controls, then discuss the specific effects of continents, and close with a brief discussion of processes that cause glaciation. The general climate of the earth is determined by the variation in the amount of sunshine received at different latitudes, by the earth’s rotation, and by the amount of arriving solar energy that is retained in the atmosphere.

Into the Icehouse

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz ◽  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Popular Image

The frozen lands of the north are an unforgiving place for humans to live. The Inuit view of the cosmos is that it is ruled by no one, with no gods to create wind and sun and ice, or to provide punishment or forgiveness, or to act as Earth Mother or Father. Amid those harsh landscapes, belief is superfluous, and only fear can be relied on as a guide. How could such a world begin, and end? In Nordic mythology, in ancient times there used to be a yet greater kingdom of ice, ruled by the ice giant, Ymir Aurgelmir. To make a world fit for humans, Ymir was killed by three brothers—Odin, Vilje, and Ve. The blood of the dying giant drowned his own children, and formed the seas, while the body of the dead giant became the land. To keep out other ice giants that yet lived in the far north, Odin and his brothers made a wall out of Ymir’s eyebrows. One may see, fancifully, those eyebrows still, in the form of the massive, curved lines of morainic hills that run across Sweden and Finland. We now have a popular image of Ymir’s domain—the past ‘Ice Age’—as snowy landscapes of a recent past, populated by mammoths and woolly rhinos and fur-clad humans (who would have been beginning to create such legends to explain the precarious world on which they lived). This image, as we have seen, represents a peculiarly northern perspective. The current ice age is geologically ancient, for the bulk of the world’s land-ice had already grown to cover almost all Antarctica, more than thirty million years ago. Nevertheless, a mere two and a half million years ago, there was a significant transition in Earth history—an intensification of the Earth’s icehouse state that spread more or less permanent ice widely across the northern polar regions of the world. This intensification— via those fiendishly complex teleconnections that characterize the Earth system—changed the face of the entire globe. The changes can be detected in the sedimentary strata that were then being deposited around the world.

Development Requires New Models

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Poor Countries ◽  
Earth Summit ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Sustainable Human Development ◽  
The World ◽  
New Models

In this chapter Haq addresses the leaders of the Earth Summit of 1992, pointing out key areas that Summit leaders should collectively address. According to Haq, the search for new models of sustainable human development with minimal environmental and resource damage could be one of the more enduring legacies of the Summit. He urged the leaders of the world to take the challenge of the North-South divide as a collective threat to sustainable development for both rich and poor countries. For Haq, an unjust and unequal world would inherently be unstable and unsustainable.

The Saga of the Chicxulub Crater

Impact! ◽  
1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit L. Verschuur
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Layer ◽  
North Coast ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Rock Formations ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The World ◽  
Gravity Measurements ◽  
Chicxulub Crater ◽  
Oil Company

When the Alvarez team announced to the world that the K/T boundary clay contained a excess of iridium they suggested that it could only be explained if a comet or asteroid had slammed into the earth 65 million years ago. The iridium was deposited when a cloud of debris created by the vaporization of the object upon impact girdled the earth and fell back to form the so-called fireball layer. Most earth scientists were skeptical when they first heard about this. If an object 10 kilometers across had collided with enough force to trigger a global environmental catastrophe that precipitated the extinction of more than half of the species alive at the time, where was the crater? It didn’t take crater experts long to figure that the scar left by such an impact should be huge hole in the ground about 180 kilometers across and a tenth as deep. If it existed, it shouldn’t be hard to find, unless it was under the ocean somewhere, or covered in vast amounts of sediment. It turns out that when the search for the crater began there were several people, perhaps dozens, who already knew where it was. However, they either didn’t know that the search was on, or weren’t allowed to reveal what they knew. The saga of the discovery of the K/T impact crater beneath the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico began many decades before the discovery of iridium in the K/T boundary layer. The saga goes all the way back to 1947 when a gravity survey was started in the Yucatan by the Mexican national oil company, PEMEX. Surface gravity measurements allow geophysicists to detect the structure of rock formations deep beneath the earth’s surface. The study of gravity maps of a region then helps the scientists to figure out where oil might be found; at least that is the goal. The Yucatan survey turned up some intriguing data, including hints of a circular feature some 1,000 meters deep. In the early 1950s test wells were drilled, but no oil was found.

scholarly journals Analysis of Long-Term Moon-Based Observation Characteristics for Arctic and Antarctic

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 2805 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Sui ◽  
Huadong Guo ◽  
Guang Liu ◽  
Yuanzhen Ren
Keyword(s):  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Earth Observation ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Antarctic

The Antarctic and Arctic have always been critical areas of earth science research and are sensitive to global climate change. Global climate change exhibits diversity characteristics on both temporal and spatial scales. Since the Moon-based earth observation platform could provide large-scale, multi-angle, and long-term measurements complementary to the satellite-based Earth observation data, it is necessary to study the observation characteristics of this new platform. With deepening understanding of Moon-based observations, we have seen its good observation ability in the middle and low latitudes of the Earth’s surface, but for polar regions, we need to further study the observation characteristics of this platform. Based on the above objectives, we used the Moon-based Earth observation geometric model to quantify the geometric relationship between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Assuming the sensor is at the center of the nearside of the Moon, the coverage characteristics of the earth feature points are counted. The observation intervals, access frequency, and the angle information of each point during 100 years were obtained, and the variation rule was analyzed. The research showed that the lunar platform could carry out ideal observations for the polar regions. For the North and South poles, a continuous observation duration of 14.5 days could be obtained, and as the latitude decreased, the duration time was reduced to less than one day at the latitude of 65° in each hemisphere. The dominant observation time of the North Pole is concentrated from mid-March to mid-September, and for the South Pole, it is the rest of the year, and as the latitude decreases, it extends outward from both sides. The annual coverage time and frequency will change with the relationship between the Moon and the Earth. This study also proves that the Moon-based observation has multi-angle observation advantages for the Arctic and the Antarctic areas, which can help better understand large-scale geoscientific phenomena. The above findings indicate that the Moon-based observation can be applied as a new type of remote sensing technology to the observation field of the Earth’s polar regions.

Polar aspects of the Transglobe Expedition

Polar Record ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 22 (136) ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Ranulph Fiennes
Keyword(s):  
Ellesmere Island ◽  
North Pole ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
South Pole ◽  
The South ◽  
Northwest Passage ◽  
The North ◽  
Pack Ice ◽  
Greenwich Meridian ◽  
The World

AbstractThe Transglobe Expedition (leader Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Bt.), circumnavigated the world between September 1979 and 1982, keeping as close as possible to the Greenwich meridian. This involved journeys in both polar regions. During the expedition's southern phase (1979–81) two overwintering bases were established in Antarctica and a party of three crossed the icecap on snowmobiles, via the South Pole. During the northern phase (1981–83) two men traversed the Northwest Passage by boat on foot, sledging across Ellesmere Island to the settlement of Alert, where a party of three overwintered. Two then set out over the pack ice, crossing the North Pole and drifting with the floating ice toward Svalbard, to be picked up by the expedition ship.

scholarly journals Environmental Impacts Assessment of Chromium Minings in Bulqiza Area, Albania

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Elizabeta Susaj ◽  
Enkelejda Kucaj ◽  
Erald Laçi ◽  
Lush Susaj
Keyword(s):  
Local Institutions ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
The City ◽  
North Eastern Part ◽  
Chromite Mining ◽  
Soil And Water

Bulqiza District is the largest chromium source, ranked fourth in the world for chrome reserves. It lays in the north-eastern part of Albania, 330-1800 m a.s.l, with 728 km² area, between 41o30’43.1N and 20o14’56.21E. There are 136 entities with chromium extraction activity and around the city of Bulqiza (2.6 km² and 13000 inhabitants), there are 33 entities. The aim of the study was the identification of the environmental state and environmental impact assessment of chromium extraction (chromite mining) and giving recommendations to minimize the negative effects of this activity. Field observations, questionnaires, chemical analysis of soil and water, meetings and interviews with central and local institutions as well as with residents were used for the realization of the study. The obtained results showed that chromium extraction causes numerous irreversible degradation of the environment in the Bulqiza area, such as the destruction of surface land layers and erosion, destruction of flora and fauna, soil and water pollution, health problems, unsustainable use and reduction of chromium reserves, etc. The inert waste that emerges after the chromium partition is discharged to the earth surface without any regularity, covering the surface of the soil and flora, leading to irreversible degradation of the environment. Most of the mining entities do not respect the contracts and environmental permit issued by the Ministry of Energy and Industry (MEI).

scholarly journals O amianto e seus impactos no município de Minaçu

GeoTextos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Araújo Pietrafesa ◽  
Elielda Aparecida Carvalho Bueno ◽  
Léia Soares Bueno
Keyword(s):  
Human Health ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Mineral Extraction ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Court Of Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Federal Court Of Justice ◽  
The City

A extração mineral do amianto é a principal fonte econômica, do município de Minaçu, localizado na região norte do estado de Goiás, que desde a sua criação desenvolveu-se em função da Mina Cana Brava. Atualmente, em decorrência da declaração de inconstitucionalidade do artigo 2º da Lei federal 9.055/1995 que permitia a extração, a industrialização, a comercialização e a distribuição do amianto na variedade crisotila no país, decisão de 29 de novembro de 2017 pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal, o município vive em ambiente de incertezas quanto ao futuro. O objetivo deste artigo é promover uma reflexão sobre a dependência econômica do município e do seu posicionamento, ao lado da mineradora SAMA, do “uso controlado do amianto”, deixando evidente que os argumentos econômicos e mercadológicos prevalecerão, diante do desenvolvimento de diversos estudos científicos em várias partes do mundo que demonstram os males à saúde humana. Abstract THE EARTH-FLAX AND ITS IMPACTS IN THE CITY OF MINAÇU The mineral extraction of Earth-flax is the main economic source of the city of Minaçu, located in the north of the State of Goiás, since its foundation has developed thanks to the Cana Brava mine. Nowadays, the city is uncertain about the future, due to the declaration of unconstitutionality of the Second article of the federal law 9.055/1995 which permitted the extraction, industrialization, commercialization and the distribution of earth-flax in the variety chrysotile in the country, decision dated of the day 29, November of 2017 from the Federal Court of Justice. This article objective to promote the discussion about the economic dependence of the city and it positioning, facing to the mining SAMA, defending “the controlled use of Earth-flax”, making clear that the economic and market reasons are more important, face to the development of multiple scientific studies in different places around the world showing the malfunctions to the human health.

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