Search results for "Ice Cover"
showing 9 items of 19 documents
Diversification of old-age care services for older people: Trade-offs between coverage, diversification and targeting in European countries.
2011
Information on public services for older people is often limited to institutional care and Home Help/ Home Care, be it for individuals in surveys, statistics for a specific country or for international comparisons. Yet, these two major services in many countries are supplemented — or substituted — by other, minor services. The latter include services such as transportation services, meals-on-wheels, alarm systems, and day care. In this study the authors use various data sources to provide information on all or most of these types of support for Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, Spain, and Israel, concluding with a closer scrutiny of Swedish service profiles. When all types of suppo…
The international debt problem: An analysis of the Brady plan
1989
Recently the American Treasury Secretary, Nicholas Brady, launched a new initiative in which he proposed reducing the developing countries’ bank debt. What are the elements of the plan, and which countries would benefit? What problems does it entail? Can it bring about a decisive improvement in the international debt situation of the developing countries? The following two articles attempt to answer these questions.
High Diversity of the Viral Community from an Antarctic Lake
2009
Viruses are the most abundant biological entities and can control microbial communities, but their identity in terrestrial and freshwater Antarctic ecosystems is unknown. The genetic structure of an Antarctic lake viral community revealed unexpected genetic richness distributed across the highest number of viral families that have been found to date in aquatic viral metagenomes. In contrast to other known aquatic viromes, which are dominated by bacteriophage sequences, this Antarctic virus assemblage had a large proportion of sequences related to eukaryotic viruses, including phycodnaviruses and single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) viruses not previously identified in aquatic environments. We also o…
A late Eemian aridity pulse in central Europe during the last glacial inception
2005
How do ice ages begin? It's an obvious question to ask as we enjoy the relative luxury of an interglacial, but a hard one to answer. A look at past transitions may give some clues as to how this period will one day come to an end. A climate reconstruction based on sediments found beneath a lake in the Eifel mountains in Germany provides evidence of an extreme climate event lasting 468 years right at the end of the last interglacial. Dust storms, aridity, bushfires and the loss of trees associated with a warm climate coincided with a southward shift of the warm waters of the North Atlantic drift. In terms of insolation — the rate of delivery of the Sun's radiation to Earth — conditions then …
How to pay for the debt — Coping with the Third World's crisis
1990
The Brady Plan is the first official proposal to give priority to a tangible reduction in the debtor countries' debt service burden and is thus a milestone along the path towards overcoming the international debt crisis. However, the instruments foreseen in the Plan virtually invite criticism and scepticism. What are the main inadequacies of the Brady Plan? How can the international debt strategy be developed further and made more effective?
The evolutionary history of the Arabidopsis arenosa complex: diverse tetraploids mask the Western Carpathian center of species and genetic diversity.
2012
The Arabidopsis arenosa complex is closely related to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Species and subspecies in the complex are mainly biennial, predominantly outcrossing, herbaceous, and with a distribution range covering most parts of latitudes and the eastern reaches of Europe. In this study we present the first comprehensive evolutionary history of the A. arenosa species complex, covering its natural range, by using chromosome counts, nuclear AFLP data, and a maternally inherited marker from the chloroplast genome [trnL intron (trnL) and trnL/F intergenic spacer (trnL/F-IGS) of tRNA(Leu) and tRNA(Phe), respectively]. We unravel the broad-scale cytogeographic and phylogeographic pa…
Subsurface swimming and stationary diving are metabolically cheap in adult Pacific walruses (Odobenus rosmarus divergens).
2021
ABSTRACT Walruses rely on sea-ice to efficiently forage and rest between diving bouts while maintaining proximity to prime foraging habitat. Recent declines in summer sea ice have resulted in walruses hauling out on land where they have to travel farther to access productive benthic habitat while potentially increasing energetic costs. Despite the need to better understand the impact of sea ice loss on energy expenditure, knowledge about metabolic demands of specific behaviours in walruses is scarce. In the present study, 3 adult female Pacific walruses (Odobenus rosmarus divergens) housed in professional care participated in flow-through respirometry trials to measure metabolic rates while…
Microbial succession of nitrate-reducing bacteria in the rhizosphere of Poa alpina across a glacier foreland in the Central Alps
2006
International audience; Changes in community structure and activity of the dissimilatory nitrate-reducing community were investigated across a glacier foreland in the Central Alps to gain insight into the successional pattern of this functional group and the driving environmental factors. Bulk soil and rhizosphere soil of Poa alpina was sampled in five replicates in August during the flowering stage and in September after the first snowfalls along a gradient from 25 to 129 years after deglaciation and at a reference site outside the glacier foreland (> 2000 years deglaciated). In a laboratory-based assay, nitrate reductase activity was determined colorimetrically after 24 h of anaerobic inc…