, 2005). This erosive regime straightens the coast and steers a large southward longshore drift to

the Sulina mouth. If the elongation of the Musura barrier will connect it to the northern protective jetty of the Sulina navigation canal, the fluvial sediment load of the main secondary distributary, the Old Stambul, may be redirected from the shallow infilling lagoon behind the barrier toward the offshore. In such conditions, an eventual depositional merging of the Chilia lobe with the Sulina shipping canal can be envisioned with dramatic consequences for maintaining navigation access at the Sulina mouth. This project benefited funding from various sources including a Romanian doctoral grant for F.F. and a WHOI selleck products Coastal Ocean Institute grant to L.G. We thank colleagues from WHOI (Jeff Donnelly and Andrew Ashton) and University of Bucharest, in particular Emil Vespremeanu and Stefan Constatinescu, for their support and are grateful for discussions with Sam White and Bogdan Murgescu on the cultural and agricultural histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Romanian Principalities. “
“Uniformitarianism as an approach to the interpretation

of geologic evidence for past Earth events and processes has been a fundamental guiding principle in many areas of geoscience (Oldroyd Selleckchem Raf inhibitor and Grapes, 2008) (Table 1). The origins of this approach and its relevance to the history of research in geography and geology are described in detail (Chorley et al., 1984) and critiqued elsewhere (e.g., Shea, 1982), but this approach is derived from Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795) which argued that observation

and measurement of present-day Earth surface processes and their products can be used to explain the formation of similar products by similar processes that operated in the past, for through the application of ‘natural laws’. This reasoning means that geology (e.g. stratigraphy) is therefore similar to cosmology, in which observations are made on the outcomes of processes, rather than the processes themselves (Balashov, 1994). Lyell (1830–1833) expanded upon Hutton’s thesis, including statements on the rate and steady-state nature of geologic processes (Camardi, 1999). Gould (1965) classified these components into substantive uniformitarianism (whereby theories of uniform conditions or rates of change (i.e., natural laws) can be tested) and methodological uniformitarianism (whereby these natural laws apply over a range of spatial and temporal scales). Conflation of different components within Lyell’s viewpoint of uniformitarianism, into the single Principle of Uniformitarianism (or Actualism), is a motivation to reject the notion of uniformitarianism in geography and geology (Gould, 1965, Shea, 1982 and Baker, 1999).