IN MARCH 1989, North America's largest marine oil spill occurred in one of its largest estuaries: Alaska's Prince William Sound. Observations of the spill trajectory serve to delineate the circulation within the sound and along the southern coast of Alaska. This region has very high rates of freshwater discharge and intense wind stresses: the average annual amount of fresh water entering the Northeast Pacific drainage system is at least 20% larger than the Mississippi River system, and the seasonal signals of wind stress and wind stress curl here are the largest in the North Pacific. Even as the oil was being released in the sound, it came under the influence of this coastal circulation. The spilled oil and subsequently released surface drifters have served as tracers that can be used to examine our knowledge of the processes affecting regional coastal flow. This knowledge might be applied to coastal processes elsewhere. Oceanographic and meteorological processes played an important role in distributing the spilled oil within the sound and along the coast after the accident. Were these processes unusual or typical of the region and time of year'? How, if at all, did they contribute to the spill? Are they helping to remove or concentrate the oil spill debris? How have the spill observations and other recently acquired data improved our knowledge of the regional oceanography? The Setting The coastal orography which defines Prince William Sound (Fig. 1, p. 4) affects the coastal circulation in several ways. The water motion is restricted by topography, and coastal mountains alter the meteorology. This vast coastal mountain range extends from British Columbia throughout southeast and southcoast Alaska to Kodiak Island. The heights of the coastal mountains exceed 4 km. Since the height of the tropopause is beneath that elevation at this latitude, atmospheric disturbances are usually blocked from moving inland. This regional tendency for orographic blockage of storm systems occurs along the northeast Pacific from British Columbia to the northern Gulf of Alaska. The adiabatic elevation of the moisture-laden
This essay investigates how Allied postwar planners sought to overcome a set of legal, political, and pragmatic problems in the punishment of Nazi perpetrators by turning to conspiracy law. In doing so, they sought to glean the rhetorical benefits of conspiracy discourse and argument but were largely thwarted due to the specialized burdens of proof required by law. Here, I suggest that while everyday uses of conspiracy discourse can overcome the problem of assigning individual guilt in the midst of dispersed and collective criminality due to its low burdens of proof, the heart of the Western legal tradition—the fault principle—stymies the effectiveness of conspiracy law as a charge. Despite its relative inefficacy, conspiracy law has had a significant legacy in shaping postwar understandings of World War II and in providing a precedent to hold perpetrators accountable in recent postconflict trials. The continued usage of conspiracy law, despite its shortcomings, points to the limits of legal solutions in the wake of mass atrocities and the need for creative mechanisms for dealing with perceptions of individual and collective guilt.
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