A mid to late Holocene cryptotephra framework from eastern North America

Holocene cryptotephras of Alaskan and Pacific Northwestern origin have recently been detected ca. 7000 km away on the east coast of North America. This study extends the emerging North American tephrochronological framework by geochemically characterising seventeen cryptotephra layers from four newly explored peatlands. All detected tephras were deposited during the late Holocene, with no horizons present in the peat between ca. 3000–5000 years ago. The prevalence of the Alaskan White River Ash eastern lobe (AD 847 ± 1) is confirmed across the eastern seaboard from Newfoundland to Maine and a regional depositional pattern from Mount St Helens Set W (AD 1479–1482) is presented. The first occurrences of four additional cryptotephras in eastern North America are described, three of which may originate from source regions in Mexico, Kamchatka (Russia) and Hokkaido (Japan). The possibility of such tephras reaching eastern North America presents the opportunity to link palaeo-archives from the tropics and eastern Asia with those from the western Atlantic seaboard, aiding inter-regional comparisons of proxy-climatic records.

‘The Problem of the Future in Nineteenth-Century Spain’

This article examines the problems and paradoxes in the representation of the future in three nineteenth-century Spanish works: El futuro Madrid (1868) by Fernández de los Ríos, ‘Madrid en el siglo xxi’ (1847) by Neira de Mosquera, and Ni en la vida ni en la muerte by Juan Bautista Amorós (Silverio Lanza). While these texts demonstrate Spain’s participation in the general movement towards using the future as a setting for literary works, they do not corroborate the theory that the nineteenth century was a time of optimism and belief in the doctrine of Progress. Concepts derived from discussions of the future in the history of ideas, such as historia magistra vitae, are shown to be relevant to discussion of these futuristic fictions, in sometimes unexpected ways.