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‘Peoples of the Arctic’ focuses on the 4 million people that live north of the Arctic Circle, providing an important distinction between indigenous and settler residents, as over 1 million indigenous peoples live in the eight Arctic states. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first people in the Arctic arrived about 40,000 years ago as there were Upper Palaeolithic hunting communities in north-eastern Siberia. There is considerable diversity of indigenous peoples that have called the Arctic home. Arctic demographers predict that more and more Arctic peoples will be based in towns and cities, but in the Russian and North American Arctic there will still be dispersed and small-scale settlements. Indigenous peoples of the Arctic are culturally, economically, and politically active in all the Arctic states.

The Arctic: A Very Short Introduction provides an account of the Arctic, its physical environment, and its people. The Arctic is demanding global attention as it warms, melts, and thaws in a manner that threatens not just its 4 million inhabitants, but the whole planet. The reduction of the Arctic to its changing environment would ignore the complexities of the region and its potential. This VSI explores key issues facing the region today, from geopolitics to global warming. It examines the causes and effects of cultural, physical, ecological, political, and economic change in the Arctic, and considers its uncertain future.

‘Exploration and exploitation’ reviews the history of Arctic exploration and exploitation, which owes a great deal to early European encounters with the 'New World'. This topic includes the earliest Viking settlement of Greenland to a succession of European explorers and expeditions that were designed to search for the Northwest Passage. The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), which specialized in fur trading, was integral to the early exploitation of the Canadian north since it was chartered in May 1670. The history and presence of industrial-scale mining in the Arctic over the last 300 years also played an important part. The term 'Arctic paradox', used by Arctic observers, describes a series of contradictory pressures facing the region—managing resources, promoting sustainable development, and ensuring that indigenous and northern communities are beneficiaries from any form of resource-led development.

‘Arctic ecosystems’ highlights the treeless landscapes that fringe the Arctic Ocean, in which the diversity of plants is low, nutrient supply is limited, and soil depth is constrained by permafrost. The aim is to capture some of the key characteristics of the Arctic biome in the past and present. How do ecosystems function in the northern high latitudes? How have they responded to the recent environmental change? Arctic vegetation is grouped into twenty-one provinces based on various characteristics including relative uniformity of species and number of endemics. High fluctuation in animal populations is a key feature of the Arctic biome.

‘The physical environment’ describes the Arctic as the polar opposite of the Antarctic continent as it is an ocean semi-enclosed by land. The rocks of the Arctic record key periods in Earth history. The Arctic environment has had an interesting path of evolution. Why is the Arctic cold today? The polar latitudes actually receive less solar energy than the rest of the Earth's surface. What is the key role of sea ice in the Arctic climate system? How does sea ice decline impact upon the Arctic Ocean? The Greenland ice sheet, high latitude glaciers, and the importance of permafrost in the far north are also important topics related to the physical environment.

‘The Arctic carbon vault’ describes the large share of Earth's organic carbon sequestered in the frozen ground and within the shelf sea sediments of the Arctic Ocean. The organic carbon stock of the permafrost is roughly equivalent to half of total global soil carbon. A cold Arctic with extensive permafrost is an effective long-term carbon sink as carbon is safely locked away as long as permafrost is maintained. Giant craters appeared on the Yamal peninsula. The thawing permafrost leads to the formation of thermokarst lakes, which are frozen bodies of water held in subsidence depressions created by the thawing of ground ice. Well-preserved carcasses of extinct ice age beasts, including woolly mammoths and cave bears, have been recovered from the thawing permafrost.

‘Arctic futures’ discusses the future of the Arctic that starts in the Norwegian territory of Svalbard wherein the Global Seed Vault functions as an Arctic sanctuary for the genetic diversity of crops. The Svalbard archipelago is a hotspot of Arctic amplification as rapid warming has been keenly felt by the small community. However, the environmental changes, no matter how stark and widespread, will not dampen interest in economic development and strategic posturing. Arctic states and northern peoples remain eager to improve their social and economic conditions as well as adapt to ongoing climate change. The Arctic is a haven of international peace and cooperation as the Arctic Council is cited as a governance model that others could emulate.

‘Arctic governance’ discusses how the Arctic, unlike many other parts of the world, has been spared military conflict, civil wars, and terrorism. Arctic governance involves an array of actors, legal regimes, institutional and social contexts, and strategic aspirations. In 1989, Finland approached the other seven Arctic states with a proposal for the Rovaniemi Meeting, which discusses the protection of the Arctic environment. This provided the foundation for the intergovernmental forum the Arctic Council (1996). The eight Arctic states will remain significant players in the future governance of the northern latitudes alongside indigenous peoples/permanent participants. There will always be powerful drivers that ensure that the 'global Arctic' will be prominent in multiple ways, including the role that China, the European Union, and other external states will play in shaping its future.

‘The Arctic world’ begins with the definition of the Arctic, which is understood as the land, sea, and ice lying north of the Arctic Circle set at a latitude of approximately 66.5° N. The Arctic tree line is a robust indicator of Arctic-ness as everything to the north is a landscape characterized by shrubs, dwarf trees, and lichen. Arctic warming occurs at least twice as rapidly as the global average, which is a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Since 1980, the warming trajectory in the Arctic has been much steeper than that of the rest of the planet.

Traditionally, glacial and periglacial geomorphology has not featured prominently in discussions about the physical geography of the Mediterranean basin. It is now clear, however, that on numerous occasions during the Pleistocene, and to a lesser extent during the Little Ice Age (LIA), glacial and periglacial activity was widespread in many of the region’s mountain ranges (Hughes et al. 2006a; Hughes and Woodward 2008). Even today, small glaciers and active periglacial features can be found on the highest peaks. Many mountain landscapes in the Mediterranean basin are therefore the product of glacial and periglacial processes that have fluctuated in intensity and spatial extent through the Quaternary. Glacial processes are defined here as those occurring as a result of dynamic glacier ice. The periglacial zone is sometimes defined as non-glacial areas where the mean annual temperature is less than 3°C (French 1996: 20). However, cryogenic processes can be important in landform development, even in areas of shallow frost over a wide range of mean annual temperatures. Thus, the term ‘periglacial’ is applied here to areas characterized by cold-climate processes—where frost and nival processes are important—but where glaciers are absent. Glacial and periglacial processes in the uplands can exert considerable influence upon geomorphological systems at lower elevations. Fluvial systems, for example, over a range of timescales have been shown to be especially sensitive to changes in sediment supply and water discharge from glaciated mountain headwaters (Gurnell and Clark 1987; Woodward et al. 2008). Nonetheless, the geomorphological impacts of glaciation are most clearly evident in the Mediterranean mountains where the erosional and depositional legacy is frequently well preserved. Cirques, glacial lakes, icescoured valleys, moraines, pronival ramparts, relict rock glaciers, and other glacial and periglacial features can be found in many Mediterranean mountain ranges (Hughes et al. 2006a). Upland limestone terrains are widespread across the Mediterranean and many of these landscapes have been shaped by a combination of glacial and karstic processes (Chapter 10). In fact, glacio-karst is probably the dominant landscape in many mountain regions, including the Dinaric Alps of Croatia/Bosnia/Montenegro (Nicod 1968), the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain (Smart 1986) and the Pindus Mountains of Greece (Waltham 1978; Woodward et al. 2004; Hughes et al. 2006b).

The nine chapters in Part II build on the physical, biological, and theoretical frameworks set out in Part I, but with a focus on process regimes and change in specific environments. With its emphasis on much larger spatial scales, Part I showed how the Mediterranean basin is a product of long-term interactions between all components of the Earth system. It showed how these interactions drive landscape and ecosystem processes and environmental change. The chapters in Part II examine Mediterranean-wide patterns too, but explore process interactions in sharper resolution and across scales ranging from individual soil profiles, hillslopes, and habitats to larger landscape elements including lake basins, river valleys, dune systems, and coastal plains. Much of the region is dominated by mountains and many process interactions are especially vivid in the Mediterranean because of the erosive energy available in steep and active tectonic settings, and the presence of soft rocks vulnerable to mass movements and water erosion. Abrupt transitions from uplands to lowlands— and the differential response to tectonic uplift of hard and soft rock terrains—are notable features. The seasonally dry climate can leave bare slopes exposed to high intensity rains, and river sediment yields are typically much higher than in adjacent regions. It can be argued that the Quaternary records of these interactions are more varied and better preserved than in any other part of the world. Recent major advances include the development of high resolution proxy climate data from speleothems and robust dating frameworks for fluvial, glacial, and palaeoecological records. These records have provided important new insights into the tempo of climate, landscape, and ecosystem change in the Mediterranean region and beyond. A variety of sedimentary archives also provide insights into the changing nature and intensity of human action in the Mediterranean landscape during the course of the Pleistocene and Holocene and this is a core theme of Part II. The region is unique because of the very early and widespread impact of humans in landscape and ecosystem change—and the richness of the archaeological and geological archives in which it is chronicled.

In comparison to the rest of Europe, Africa, and Asia, most rivers arising and flowing within the Mediterranean watershed typically drain small catchments with mountainous headwaters. The hydrology of Mediterranean catchments is strongly influenced by the seasonal distribution of precipitation, catchment geology, vegetation type and extent, and the geomorphology of the slope and channel systems. It is important to appreciate, as the preceding chapters have shown, that the area draining to the Mediterranean Sea is large and enormously variable in terms of the key controls on catchment hydrology outlined above, and it is therefore not possible to define, in hydrological terms, a strict single Mediterranean river type. However, river regimes across the basin do have a marked seasonality that is largely controlled by the climate system (Chapter 3) and, in most basins, the dominant flows occur in winter—but autumn and spring runoff is also important in many areas. These patterns reflect the general water balance of the basin as a whole, but there are key geographical patterns in catchment hydrology and sediment yield and a marked contrast is evident between the more humid north and the semi-arid south and east (Struglia et al. 2004; Chapter 21). Also, because of the long history of vegetation and hillslope modification by human activity and the more recent and widespread implementation of water resource management projects, there are almost no natural river regimes in the Mediterranean region, especially in the middle and lower reaches of river catchments (Cudennec et al. 2007). Runoff generation on hillslopes in the Mediterranean is very closely related to rainfall intensities and land surface properties as discussed in Chapter 6. While this is probably true of most catchments, runoff generation in the Mediterranean is very sensitive to vegetation cover because of the seasonal dynamics of rainfall and the role played by extreme events. The cumulative effect of these characteristics is a specific set of management problems and restoration issues and, although these are rather different in the various socio-political regimes of the region, it can be argued that they are in many ways unique to Mediterranean catchments.

This volume has traced the development of the Mediterranean landscape over very long timescales and has examined modern processes in a wide range of settings. Earlier chapters have explored tectonic processes and the evolution of the topography and biota, the nature and impact of Quaternary climate change, and natural hazards, as well as the increasing role of human activity in shaping geomorphological processes and ecosystems during the course of the postglacial period. A core theme in several chapters is the nature of the relationship between humans and the Mediterranean environment. Over the last one hundred years or so, and especially in the period since the Second World War, this relationship has changed dramatically. Resource exploitation, urban expansion, and rural depopulation have all taken place at unprecedented rates, with major impacts upon the quality of land, water, air, and ecosystems. The final part of this volume examines four key topics of environmental concern; its four chapters explore, respectively, land degradation, water resources, interactions between air quality and the climate system, and biodiversity and conservation. Where possible, it is important to place these issues within an appropriate historical perspective. Many components of the Mediterranean environment have responded in a sensitive way to past environmental changes, but the pressures on land and water resources have never been more intense. Improved monitoring networks and new modelling efforts are needed to predict more effectively the impact of climate and social change on all environmental systems and to help inform policymakers seeking a more sustainable use of the region’s resources. Chapter 20 examines the ecological aspects of land degradation and sets out new ideas on productivity dynamics. It explores some of the interactions between land use change, vegetation dynamics, grazing patterns and wildfires. The uneven geography of water resources and water use are highlighted in Chapter 21. Water resource issues have become an increasingly important factor in the geopolitics of the region against a background of climate change uncertainty, rising demand, and a diminishing resource base. Chapter 22 analyses the interactions between climate, air quality, and the water cycle.

Linking river behaviour and drainage basin evolution to Quaternary environmental change, most notably the effects of climatic variability, tectonics, and human activity on runoff and sediment delivery, has a long history of research in the Mediterranean areas of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. This field of research was initially stimulated by the (re)discovery at the beginning of the twentieth century of many Classical Period remains buried by river alluvium; perhaps the best known of which is the site of Olympia in western Greece (Huntington 1910). The widespread evidence for large-scale shifts in river channel positions and the rapid growth of deltas and coastal alluvial plains in historical times (Judson 1963; Raphael 1973; Kraft et al. 1980; and Chapter 13) also provided much impetus for this research. In addition, archaeological investigations carried out soon after the Second World War in Algeria (Gaucher 1947), Italy (Selli 1962), Libya (McBurney and Hey 1955) and Spain (Gigout 1959) resulted in the recovery of large numbers of Palaeolithic stone tools from Pleistocene fluvial deposits. These early examples of what has now become more widely known as ‘geoarchaeology’ (Davidson and Shackley 1976; Butzer 1977) or ‘alluvial archaeology’ (Macklin and Needham 1992) were, with their strong interdisciplinary focus, highly innovative and ahead of their time in the way they integrated archaeology, geomorphology, and geochronology. Building on this theme, the principal aim of this chapter is to consider how river systems in the Mediterranean region have responded to the environmental changes that took place during the Late Quaternary–a time interval corresponding approximately to the last 130,000 years. There are a number of reasons for choosing this period for reviewing river-environment interactions in the Mediterranean: 1. It encompasses the last glacial–interglacial cycle (c.130 to 10 ka) for which there is now abundant global evidence from polar ice cores, speleothem records, and lake and marine sediments, for both longand short-term changes in climate. These changes included massive reorganizations of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere systems—often over timescales of less than 100 years (Lowe and Walker 1997)—and they are clearly recorded in the Mediterranean region (see Allen et al. 1999 and Chapter 4).

By examining both contemporary processes and long-term records of change, this volume explores the climates, landscapes, ecosystems, and hazards that comprise the Mediterranean world. This is the only region on Earth where three continents meet and their interaction has produced a very distinctive physical geography. This book examines the landscapes and processes at the margins of the three continents and the distinctive marine environment between them. In broad terms, the physical geography of the Mediterranean is a product of long-term interplay between tectonic forces, climate change, river basin and marine processes, and biosphere dynamics, as well as the action of humans during the course of the Holocene. From the outset, it is important to keep in mind that this physical geography is an integration of energy, materials, and processes within a much wider global system. The Mediterranean is a zone of convergence and interaction. It is a meeting place not only for tectonic plates, but also for air masses, energy, and river flows from both temperate and tropical latitudes. The region also interacts directly with the global ocean, receiving cool North Atlantic waters in exchange for the warmer and saltier waters produced in the basins of the Mediterranean Sea. It is also a biodiversity hotspot; the Mediterranean has been a meeting place for plants, animals, and humans from three continents throughout much of its history. The chapters in Part I set out the physical and biological framework for the rest of the book and examine key debates about the evolution of the Mediterranean environment. They explore fundamental interactions between the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The scene is set for later chapters that focus more closely on particular aspects of the Mediterranean environment such as ecosystem dynamics, river basin systems, karst environments, natural hazards, and land degradation. Chapter 1 examines the role of tectonic processes in the development of the Mediterranean landscape and its marine basins. Also highlighted are the dramatic environmental changes and the geomorphological legacy associated with the Messinian Salinity Crisis of the Late Miocene. Chapter 2 focuses on the marine environment, both ancient and modern.

Catastrophic earthquakes, explosive volcanic eruptions, and devastating storms and floods are intimately bound up within the history and mythology of the Mediterranean world. It is a key region for the study of natural hazards because it offers unrivalled access to long records of hazard occurrence and impact through documentary, archaeological and geological archives. Early texts and archaeological data have provided unique insights into the nature and impact of past eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other hazards. Notable events were carefully documented in Antiquity and the archaeological record provides insights into the impact of catastrophic events on past human societies. The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, for example, was famously documented by Pliny the Younger, and the excavations at Pompeii have provided extraordinarily rich insights into the dynamics and impacts of tephra falls and pyroclastic flows. The significance of environmental hazards in the demise of civilizations such as Minoan Crete (tsunami) and the Early Bronze Age in the Near East (drought) has been vigorously debated for decades. While such events have undoubtedly threatened people in the region since prehistoric times, the actual threat to human society has increased dramatically in the historical and modern periods as urban environments and their populations have rapidly expanded. This part of the volume analyses hazards associated with both endogenic and exogenic Earth processes and the interactions between them. It includes volcanic processes, crustal instability, tsunamis, fluvial floods, extreme weather phenomena, and wildfires. Each chapter explores the basic controls and the geography of a particular hazard and related processes, and, over a range of timescales, magnitude and frequency relationships and the nature of the threat to human society. High-magnitude events are a fundamental part of the physical geography of the Mediterranean and play a key role in long-term landscape evolution and ecosystem change. Even though the processes associated with each hazard typically take place over very short timescales, they can set in motion long-term adjustments to geomorphological and ecosystem processes. Tephra falls can change soil properties and vegetation communities, for example, and earthquakes may trigger base-level change and landslips in river basins that enhance fluvial sediment yields for many centuries.

Whilst about 12 per cent of the earth’s dry and ice-free land is covered by carbonate rocks (limestone, marble, and dolomite), the proportion is significantly higher in the landscapes that border the Mediterranean Sea. These rock types are especially widespread in the northern part of the region and limestones in particular reach great thicknesses in Spain, southern France, Italy, the Balkan Peninsula, and Turkey and in many of the Mediterranean islands. Abundant precipitation in the uplands of the Mediterranean has encouraged solutional weathering of these carbonate rocks for an extended period. The region contains some of the deepest karst aquifers in the world, with many extending deep below present sea level (e.g. Bakalowicz et al. 2008). The regional fall in base level associated with the Messinian Salinity Crisis allowed the formation of very deep, multiphase karst systems in several parts of the Mediterranean basin (e.g. Mocochain et al. 2006). Thus, karst terrains and karstic processes are very significant components of the physical geography of the Mediterranean basin. Indeed, along with the climate and the vegetation, it can be argued that limestone landscapes (including limestone bedrock coasts) are one of the defining characteristics of the Mediterranean environment. Much of the northern coastline is flanked by mountains with bare limestone hillslopes (Figure 10.2) drained by short and steep river systems whose headwaters commonly lie in well-developed karst terrain. Karst terrains are also well developed in the Levant and in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria, while relict karst features can be identified in the low-relief desert regions of Libya and Egypt (Perritaz 2004) (Figure 10.1). Mediterranean karst environments are also associated with distinctive soils, habitats and ecosystems as described in Chapters 5, 6, and 23. The nature and evolution of the karst landscapes across the Mediterranean region displays considerable spatial variability due to contrasts in relief, bedrock composition and structure, climatic history, and other factors. The karst geomorphological system is distinguished from other systems (e.g. glacial, fluvial, coastal, and aeolian) because of the dominant role of dissolution which results in water flowing in a subterranean circulation system rather than in surface channels (Ford 2004).