As the potential for enhancement technologies migrates from the theoretical to the practical, a difficult and important decision will be imposed upon human civilization, namely the issue as to whether or not we are morally obligated to biologically enhance nonhuman animals and integrate them into human and posthuman society. Precedents for intra-species cultural uplift abound in human history, ...

Histories of vertical crustal motions at convergent margins offer fundamental insights into the relationship between interplate slip and permanent deformation. Moreover, past abrupt motions are proxies for potential tsunamigenic earthquakes and benefit hazard assessment. Well-dated records are required to understand the relationship between past earthquakes and Holocene vertical deformation. He...

Soaring birds migrate in massive numbers worldwide. These migrations are complex and dynamic phenomena, strongly influenced by meteorological conditions that produce thermal and orographic uplift as the birds traverse the landscape. Herein we report on how methods were developed to estimate the strength of thermal and orographic uplift using publicly available digital weather and topography dat...

The uplift behavior of structures subjected to severe seismic motion has not been clarified. This paper presents experimental and analytical studies conducted for clarifying this problem of spread foundation structures on rock. First, centrifugal loading tests are conducted to determine the uplift behavior of these structures, and the uplift behavior of these structures is confirmed. Then, simu...

Uplift and pore pressures are fundamental loading conditions that affect the strength and stability of concrete dams. Historically, these loads have been difficult to quantify and to implement in finite element analysis (FEA). Some dam design guidelines propose different techniques to apply the estimated uplift pressure for its use in FEA of concrete dams. These methodologies are, in general, q...

Terrain generation finds many applications such as in CGI movies, animations and video games. This paper describes a new and simple-to-implement terrain generator called the Uplift Model. It is based on the theory of crustal deformations by uplifts in Geology. When a number of uplifts are made on the Earth’s surface, the final net effect is an average of the influence of each uplift at each poi...

This paper analyses Late Cenozoic uplift in the Bolivian Andes, using the morphology of well preserved regional paleosurfaces in the Eastern Cordillera that define three axially draining braided river catchments that formed between ∼12 and ∼9 Ma. Rock uplift since the formation of the paleodrainage systems, which has been quantified using four different methods, is 1705±695 m, with a mean erosi...

At large scale, landscapes result from the combination of two major processes: tectonics which generate the main relief through crust uplift, and weather which accounts for erosion. This paper presents the first method in computer graphics that combines uplift and hydraulic erosion to generate visually plausible terrains. Given a user-painted uplift map, we generate a stream graph over the enti...

Long-standing debates exist over the timing and mechanism of uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and, more specifically, over the connection between lithospheric evolution and surface expressions of plateau uplift and volcanism. Here we show a T-shaped high wave speed structure in our new tomographic model beneath South-Central Tibet, interpreted as an upper-mantle remnant from earlier lithospheric f...