Terrestrial vertebrates show striking changes in species richness across topographic gradients. For mammals, nearly twice as many species per unit area occur in topographically complex regions as in adjacent lowlands. The geological context of this pervasive biogeographic pattern suggests that tectonic processes have a first-order impact on regional diversity. I evaluate ecological, evolutionar...

geometric and material nonlinear behavior of slender webs in i-column girders having stocky flanges under the action of combined lateral and axial loads is investigated. interaction curves corresponding to the application of compressive and shear loads at buckling and ultimate stages for both web plates and column sections are plotted. in addition, the effects of flange and web slenderness rati...

[1] Although Mars is currently not tectonically active, it may have experienced plate tectonics early in its history. The southern hemisphere of Mars possesses a thick crust which probably renders the lithosphere positively buoyant. In this paper we present numerical and scaling arguments which show that if the area of positively buoyant lithosphere grows beyond a critical fraction ( 50% for Ma...

The Earth is likely to have acquired most of its water during accretion. Internal heat of planetesimals by short-lived radioisotopes would have caused some water loss, but impacts into planetesimals were insufficiently energetic to produce further drying. Water is thought to be critical for the development of plate tectonics, because it lowers viscosities in the asthenosphere, enabling subducti...

Archaeologists and historians working on topics such as agricultural technology, resource distribution, settlement patterns, raw materials procurement, artifact analysis and natural disasters are automatically involved in geological questions. The geologic history of the Japanese Islands is, therefore, of basic importance to our enquiries, but those interests are poorly served by the current li...

Deciphering relationships among the orders of placental mammals remains an important problem in evolutionary biology and has implications for understanding patterns of morphological character evolution, reconstructing the ancestral placental genome, and evaluating the role of plate tectonics and dispersal in the biogeographic history of this group. Until recently, both molecular and morphologic...

Stress inversion of seismological datasets became an essential tool to retrieve the stress field of active tectonics and volcanic areas. In particular, in volcanic areas, it is able to put constrains on volcano-tectonics and in general in a better understanding of the volcano dynamics. During the last decades, a wide range of stress inversion techniques has been proposed, some of them specifica...

Tectonic family member 1 (TCTN1) encodes a member of the tectonic family which are evolutionarily conserved secreted and transmembrane proteins, involving in a diverse variety of developmental processes. It has been demonstrated that tectonics expressed in regions that participate in Hedgehog (Hh) signaling during mouse embryonic development and was imperative for Hh-mediated patterning of the ...