Journal articles on the topic 'Mountain galaxias'

The introduced salmonid Oncorhynchus mykiss was eradicated by use of the piscicide rotenone from a section of small montane stream upstream of an impassable barrier. Recolonization of the stream both above and below the barrier by the native Galaxias olidus was monitored annually for four successive years. Following trout eradication, G. olidus recolonized the trout-free stream section above the barrier but was never detected below the barrier where trout still occurred. Initial colonization was by juvenile G. olidus but a successful breeding population had established three years after trout eradication. The implications of the use of barriers and targeted eradication programmes are discussed for the management of small, threatened fish species.

Patterns of feeding in the mountain galaxiid (Galaxias olidus) were examined at dawn and dusk during low flow in April and high flow in September in an intermittent stream. During April (low flow), feeding rates were relatively low and aperiodic, whereas in September (high flow), the fish were clearly feeding diurnally at a relatively high rate. These results suggest that feeding in G. olidus in intermittent streams may vary on a daily and seasonal basis, possibly as a consequence of changes in light availability and stream flow. Light determines the ability of fish to find their prey, and seasonal changes in flow may determine the availability of prey (i.e. drifting invertebrates). This pattern suggests that the predatory impact of drift-feeding fish, such as G. olidus, is likely to be considerably less during low-flow periods when drifting invertebrates are not available than during high-flow periods when such prey may be abundant.

The introduced salmonid Oncorhynchus mykiss was eradicated by use of the piscicide rotenone from a section of small montane stream upstream of an impassable barrier. Recolonization of the stream both above and below the barrier by the native Galaxias olidus was monitored annually for four successive years. Following trout eradication, G. olidus recolonized the trout-free stream section above the barrier but was never detected below the barrier where trout still occurred. Initial colonization was by juvenile G. olidus but a successful breeding population had established three years after trout eradication. The implications of the use of barriers and targeted eradication programmes are discussed for the management of small, threatened fish species.

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area encompasses an area of 1.38 million hectares, or approximately 20% of the island state of Tasmania. The World Heritage Area plays a significant role in the conservation of Tasmania's fauna and natural biological processes. The area supports 30 species of terrestrial mammal including three endemic species (91% of total Tasmanian species), 120 species of terrestrial bird including 10 endemic species (76% of state total), 14 species of terrestrial reptile including seven endemic species (67% of state total), seven species of frog including three endemic species (64% of state total), 16 species of freshwater fish including four endemic species (64% of state total), and 68 species of marine fish including one endemic species (14% of state total). A number of vertebrate species are entirely restricted to the World Heritage Area (Moss Froglet, Pedra Branca Skink, Mountain Skink, Pedder Galaxias, Swamp Galaxias and Western Paragalaxias, while the migratory Orange-bellied Parrot breeds only within the World Heritage Area. A number of other species have the majority of their Tasmanian range within the World Heritage Area (Broad-toothed Rat, Ground Parrot, Southern Emu-wren, Tasmanian Tree Frog, Northern Snow Skink, Southern Snow Skink, Bathurst Harbour Skate and the Clarence Galaxias). The World Heritage Area also supports a range of threatened mammal, bird, reptile and fish species. Of the 44 species of introduced vertebrates which have established feral populations in Tasmania, only seven species (16% of state total) have a significant presence within the World Heritage Area and pose a potential threat to the area's integrity. The diversity and endemism of the vertebrate fauna of the World Heritage Area reflects the Gondwanan origins of much of the fauna of western Tasmania, the repeated glaciation of the area during the Pleistocene, and subsequent pulses of speciation among certain taxa.

Regionalisations based on species assemblages are a useful framework for characterising ecological communities and revealing patterns in the environment. In the present study, multivariate analyses are used to discern large-scale patterns in fish assemblages in the Murray–Darling Basin, based on information from the Murray–Darling Basin Authority’s first Sustainable Rivers Audit (SRA), conducted in 2004–2007. The Basin is classified into nine regions with similar historical fish assemblages (i.e. without major human intervention), using data that combine expert opinion, museum collections and historical records. These regions are (1) Darling Basin Plains, (2) Northern Uplands, (3) Murray Basin Plains, (4) Northern Alps, (5) Central East, (6) Avoca Lowland, (7) Southern Slopes, (8) Southern Alps and (9) South-Western Slopes. Associations between assemblages and physical variables (catchment area, elevation, hydrology, precipitation, temperature) are identified and used to reinforce the definitions of regions. Sustainable Rivers Audit data are compared with the historical assemblages, highlighting species whose range and abundance have changed since the early 19th century. Notable changes include declines in native species such as silver perch, river blackfish, mountain galaxias, Macquarie perch, trout cod and freshwater catfish, and the advent of alien species including common carp, eastern gambusia, goldfish, redfin perch, brown trout and rainbow trout. Less significant declines are evident for native carp gudgeons, golden perch, two-spined blackfish, bony herring and flathead gudgeon. Changes are evident even in regions where habitats have been little disturbed in the past 200 years.

AbstractGalaxy nuclei are a unique laboratory to study gas flows. Their high-resolution imaging in galactic nuclei are instrumental in the study of the fueling and feedback of star formation and nuclear activity in nearby galaxies. Several fueling mechanisms can now be confronted in detail with observations done with state-of-the-art interferometers. Furthermore, the study of gas flows in galactic nuclei can probe the feedback of activity on the interstellar medium of galaxies. Feedback action from star formation and AGN activity is invoked to prevent galaxies from becoming overly massive, but also to explain scaling laws like black hole (BH)-bulge mass correlations and the bimodal color distribution of galaxies. This close relationship between galaxies and their central supermassive BH can be described as co-evolution. There is mounting observational evidence for the existence of gas outflows in different populations of starbursts and active galaxies, a manifestation of the feedback of activity. We summarize the main results recently obtained from the observation of galactic inflows and outflows in a variety of active galaxies with current millimeter interferometers such as ALMA or the IRAM array.

There is now mounting evidence that the intrinsic shape of elliptical galaxies and bulges of disk galaxies may generally be triaxial. There are different signatures of non–axisymmetric structures observed: velocity gradients along the minor axis (e.g. Davies & Birkinshaw 1986), twisting of the isophotes (e.g. Williams & Schwarzschild 1979) and misalignment between bulge and disk major axes (e.g. Bertola, Vietri & Zeilinger 1991). Therefore, a framework of reliable algorithms for the dynamical modelling of such triaxial potentials is needed.

The question of bars within bars has been reviewed by Friedli and Martinet (1993), who have also performed N-body simulations to produce nested bars. They propose that if a system of embedded bars is effective in transporting gas to the galactic center (Shlosman et al. 1989), then it is perhaps a step in the secular evolution of barred galaxies. In order to pursue this interesting proposition, and also because observational evidence for the existence of secondary bars is mounting (e.g. Buta & Crocker 1993; Shaw et al. 1993, Wozniak et al. 1995), it is important to understand the stellar kinematics in such systems.

There is mounting evidence that type transitions are a common property among Active Galactic Nuclei: the broad lines in, at least, eleven Seyfert galaxies have ocassionaly appeared and subsequently disappeared leading to the reclasification of their nuclei from type 1–1.5 to type 1.8–2 or viceversa.

ABSTRACT Spectroscopic observations of 32 H ii regions in the spiral galaxy NGC 3963 and the barred irregular galaxy NGC 7292 were carried out with the 2.5-m telescope of the Caucasus Mountain Observatory of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute using the Transient Double-beam Spectrograph with a dispersion of ≈1 Å pixel−1 and a spectral resolution of ≈3 Å. These observations were used to estimate the oxygen and nitrogen abundances and the electron temperatures in H ii regions through modern strong-line methods. In general, the galaxies have oxygen and nitrogen abundances typical of stellar systems with similar luminosities, sizes, and morphology. However, we have found some peculiarities in chemical abundance distributions in both galaxies. The distorted outer segment of the southern arm of NGC 3963 shows an excess oxygen and nitrogen abundances. Chemical elements abundances in NGC 7292 are constant and do not depend on the galactocentric distance. These peculiarities can be explained in terms of external gas accretion in the case of NGC 3963 and major merging for NGC 7292.

Russell Porter, artist, explorer, engineer, turned his hobby into an observatory of unprecedented scale in California. Although he was a trained architect, Russell Porter is known as a scientist, photographer, surveyor, and inventor and played a pivotal role in the development of the Palomar Observatory. Though he never foresaw telescope design in his career plans, Porter was intimately involved in the design and other aspects of the Glass Giant, the 200-inch-diameter telescope on Palomar Mountain. In 1915, Porter returned to MIT as a professor of architecture. When the United States entered World War I, Hartness advised the National Bureau of Standards to retain Porter to develop manufacturing techniques for optical instruments, including prisms and reflecting surfaces. Russell Porter’s work remains visible on the Cal Tech campus in Pasadena. A visit to the corridors of the astrophysics building reveals spectacular cosmic images of distant galaxies and nebula along with 30 of Porter’s more than 1000 cutaway design drawings of telescopes.

ABSTRACT Contrary to the standard lore, there is mounting observational evidence that feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) may also play a role at the low-mass end of the galaxy population. We investigate this using the cosmological simulation suite fable, with a particular focus on the dwarf regime (Mstellar < 109.5 M⊙). We find that overmassive black holes (BHs), with respect to the mean scaling relations with their host galaxies, drive hotter and faster outflows and lead to significantly reduced gas mass fractions. They are also more likely to display a kinematically misaligned ionized gas component in our mock MaNGA velocity maps, although we caution that cosmic inflows and mergers contribute to misalignments as well. While in the local Universe the majority of AGN in dwarfs are much dimmer than the stellar component, for z ≥ 2 there is a significant population that outshines their hosts. These high-redshift overmassive BHs contribute to the quenching of dwarfs, whereas at late cosmic times supernova (SN) feedback is more efficient. While our results are overall in good agreement with X-ray observations of AGN in dwarfs, the lack of high-luminosity X-ray AGN in fable at low redshifts highlights an interesting possibility that SN feedback could be too strong in fable’s dwarfs, curtailing AGN growth and feedback. We predict that future observations may uncover many more AGN in dwarfs with lower luminosities and at higher redshifts.

An overview of our current understanding of the formation and evolution of star clusters is given, with the main emphasis on high-mass clusters. Clusters form deeply embedded within dense clouds of molecular gas. Left-over gas is cleared within a few million years and, depending on the efficiency of star formation, the clusters may disperse almost immediately or remain gravitationally bound. Current evidence suggests that a small percentage of star formation occurs in clusters that remain bound, although it is not yet clear whether this fraction is truly universal. Internal two-body relaxation and external shocks will lead to further, gradual dissolution on time scales of up to a few hundred million years for low-mass open clusters in the Milky Way, while the most massive clusters (>10 5 M ⊙ ) have lifetimes comparable to or exceeding the age of the Universe. The low-mass end of the initial cluster mass function is well approximated by a power-law distribution, , but there is mounting evidence that quiescent spiral discs form relatively few clusters with masses M >2×10 5 M ⊙ . In starburst galaxies and old globular cluster systems, this limit appears to be higher, at least several ×10 6 M ⊙ . The difference is likely related to the higher gas densities and pressures in starburst galaxies, which allow denser, more massive giant molecular clouds to form. Low-mass clusters may thus trace star formation quite universally, while the more long-lived, massive clusters appear to form preferentially in the context of violent star formation.

AbstractSpectacular colour images have been made by combining CCD images in three different passbands using Adobe Photoshop. These beautiful images highlight a variety of astrophysical phenomena and should be a valuable resource for science education and public awareness of science. The wide field images were obtained at the Siding Spring Observatory (SSO) by mounting a Hasselblad or Nikkor telephoto lens in front of a 2K × 2K CCD. Options of more than 30 degrees or 6 degrees square coverage are produced in a single exposure in this way. Narrow band or broad band filters were placed between lens and CCD enabling deep, linear images in a variety of passbands to be obtained. We have mapped the LMC and SMC and are mapping the Galactic Plane for comparison with the Molonglo Radio Survey. Higher resolution images have also been made with the 40 inch telescope of galaxies and star forming regions in the Milky Way.

Submillimeter wavelengths hold the key to some of the most important aspects of astronomy. These range from star-forming molecular clouds and proto-planetary disks in our galaxy to infrared emitting galaxies at cosmological distances. Indeed, the essential problems of star-formation and galaxy-formation will be directly probed by the submillimeter spectral lines and continuum radiation emitted by these objects. Other fascinating topics falling into the submillimeter band include the Wien component of the cosmic background radiation, containing information on the nature of the early universe, and nearer to home, the spectroscopy of planetary atmospheres. Since the submillimeter contains fundamental information on the physics and chemistry of so many aspects of our universe, every effort should be made to provide the very best instrumentation for these astronomical studies. We should be capable of detection and analysis of even the most distant objects yet conceived.Telescopes specifically designed for submillimeter astronomy are now operating on high mountain sites and the field is developing in an exciting and rapid fashion. NASA’s airborne program has been in operation for some time and has been of the greatest importance in getting the field started. Both ground and airborne programs will continue to be essential because of their flexibility for implementing new investigations, for instrument development and to support the growth of an active science community, especially students. However, it is now essential to move forward on a space program.

Context. We have been seeing mounting evidence that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) might extend far beyond the canonical Mi ∼ 100 M⊙ limit, but the impact of such a hypothesis on the chemical enrichment of galaxies is yet to be clarified. Aims. We aim to address this question by analysing the observed abundances of thin- and thick-disc stars in the Milky Way with chemical evolution models that account for the contribution of very massive stars dying as pair instability supernovae. Methods. We built new sets of chemical yields from massive and very massive stars up to Mi ∼ 350 M⊙ by combining the wind ejecta extracted from our hydrostatic stellar evolution models with explosion ejecta from the literature. Using a simple chemical evolution code, we analysed the effects of adopting different yield tables by comparing predictions against observations of stars in the solar vicinity. Results. After several tests, we set our focus on the [O/Fe] ratio that best separates the chemical patterns of the two Milky Way components. We find that with a standard IMF, truncated at Mi ∼ 100 M⊙, we can reproduce various observational constraints for thin-disc stars; however, the same IMF fails to account for the [O/Fe] ratios of thick-disc stars. The best results are obtained by extending the IMF up to Mi = 350 M⊙, while including the chemical ejecta of very massive stars in the form of winds and pair instability supernova (PISN) explosions. Conclusions. Our study indicates that PISN may have played a significant role in shaping the chemical evolution of the thick disc of the Milky Way. Including their chemical yields makes it easier to reproduce not only the level of the α-enhancement, but also the observed slope of thick-disc stars in the [O/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] diagram. The bottom line is that the contribution of very massive stars to the chemical enrichment of galaxies is potentially quite important and should not be neglected in models of chemical evolution.

A recent PLOSONE article utilized tabulations of opinions obtained from federal scientists to assert “perceived losses of scientific integrity under the Trump Administration.” The article presupposes the wide-spread existence of scientific integrity among federal scientists, which I refute based upon documented 40+ years’ experience making fundamental scientific discoveries which the scientific establishment systematically ignores and in instances has attempted to suppress. These discoveries include, but are not limited to: Earth’s nickel-silicide inner-core composition, the physical impossibility of both mantle convection and Earth-core convection; recognition that Earth’s early formation as a Jupiter-like gas giant makes it possible to derive virtually all geological and geodynamic behavior of our planet, including origin of continents and oceans, ocean floor topography, origin of mountains characterized by folding, primary initiation of fjords and submarine canyons, and two previously unanticipated potentially variable energy sources - nuclear fission and stored energy of protoplanetary compression; nuclear-fission-reactor origin of planetary magnetic fields, including the geomagnetic field; thermonuclear ignition of stars and the reason why the multitude of galaxies display just a few patterns of luminous stars; and, particulate pollution, not greenhouse gases, as the main cause of local and global warming. A scientific community, apparently suffering from Integrity Deficit Syndrome, cannot be expected to provide a truthful assessment, especially when queried about the actions of a president who might change the science landscape under which they flourish.

Since the discovery of hypervelocity stars in 2005, it has been widely believed that only the disruption of a binary system by a supermassive black hole at the Galactic center (GC), that is, the so-called Hills mechanism, is capable of accelerating stars to beyond the Galactic escape velocity. In the meantime, however, driven by the Gaia space mission, there is mounting evidence that many of the most extreme high-velocity early-type stars at high Galactic latitudes do originate in the Galactic disk and not in the GC. Moreover, the ejection velocities of these extreme disk-runaway stars exceed the predicted limits of the classical scenarios for the production of runaway stars. Based on proper motions from the Gaia early data release 3 and on recent and new spectrophotometric distances, we studied the kinematics of 30 such extreme disk-runaway stars, allowing us to deduce their spatial origins in and their ejection velocities from the Galactic disk with unprecedented precision. Only three stars in the sample have past trajectories that are consistent with an origin in the GC, most notably S5-HVS 1, which is the most extreme object in the sample by far. All other program stars are shown to be disk runaways with ejection velocities that sharply contrast at least with classical ejection scenarios. They include HVS 5 and HVS 6, which are both gravitationally unbound to the Milky Way. While most stars originate from within a galactocentric radius of 15 kpc, which corresponds to the observed extent of the spiral arms, a group of five stars stems from radii of about 21−29 kpc. This indicates a possible link to outer Galactic rings and a potential origin from infalling satellite galaxies.

Saidin Salkić is a survivor of Bosnia’s 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Salkić was interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Radio National in July 2007. The interviewer asked Salkić to tell him about the genocide: “What can you remember about that?” (ABC Radio National). Salkić cited memories of the smell of his father’s jumper and of the flowers growing in his mother’s garden. The interviewer interrupted him, asking for a more chronological description of the events of the genocide itself. Salkić responded that it was not possible to answer the question in such a concise, easily archivable manner, that “you can’t really bundle your memories like that” (ABC Radio National).Listening to this interview, I sat waiting for a neat ‘survivor sound-bite’ that I could neatly insert into this paper. It didn’t happen. I turned off the radio thinking that I had learned nothing of the genocide that took place in Srebrenica. In listening to a survivor—an eye witness—there is a sense that he, of all people, should be able to tell the chronology, the facts of the event; of who did what to whom and why. Yet what is learned—what Salkić’s testimony-without-testimony spoke of and explained—is the most important thing: loss. This is the lacuna in testimony. What happens to the loss when we attempt to testify to it? What is then lost? Salkić’s memory is unarchivable in the normative sense, and his refusal to testify in the accepted way ruptures the process (not a necessarily deliberate refusal, but a refusal borne out of an inability and an impossibility of containing such an event through language). Loss eludes testimony and is also loss as the loss of testimony. It is impossible to fully testify to loss, and that is testimonial, or testimony’s trace.Using Derrida's theories around the archive and the cinder, this article examines what survives an event such as genocide, what is left and, crucially, what is missing, what is not recoverable. What happens to the loss when we attempt to testify to it, to salvage something of it? What is disrupted? What is instead recovered in its place?Derrida’s archive (Derrida, Archive Fever), responds to these gaps and losses. This archive is not, it would seem, about the archive at all. Instead, Derrida provides a departure from the examination of the structure and institution of the archive. As Carolyn Steedman puts it in her reading of Archive Fever, “it turned out not to be about the archival turn. It is about dust.” (Steedman ix) This “dust”, this prelude to the ash, to the cinder, is the search for what is not there, for what is barely visible but at the same time, viscous and residual; the dust which coats and conceals no matter how well you have wielded the duster. For Derrida the dust he has found in the archive is both a meditation on beginnings and on the “fever”. He reflects not on the archive, then, but on that which drives (and destroys) the archive. Derrida’s description of prayer is a way of approaching an understanding of how a memory such as Salkić’s—at once unarchivable, yet crucial to our comprehension of the event, might fit into an understanding of the archive. Derrida writes,“My way of praying, if I pray, is absolutely secret. Even if [I were] in a synagogue praying with others, I know that my own prayer would be silent and secret, and interrupting something in the community” (On Religion). Is it impossible to archive memories such as Salkić’s because his is an impenetrable recollection that disrupts the broader archive? Why do we desire that the archive archives? Why do we desire that the archive recovers, documents and makes public these excruciatingly private moments? The ultimate secret, private and silent moment of death is made loud and public in the archives of genocide. The tendency is to want archives to show the individual, the human being amongst the tangle of anonymous bodies with whom we can identify. But in laying their death and their life bare (indeed in laying their death and life bare through the act of showing their death and life), their privacy and secret is disclosed. Their final privacy in a public death. This is death that is made public through its interconnectedness to the other simultaneous deaths around it. This is also a death that, through its place in a broader history, becomes disconnected from the individual. Finally, it is also a death that has come about through the choice made by someone else that this is your moment and mode of death. I wish to look again at Derrida when he writes that his prayer, though silent and secret, is “interrupting something in the community” (On Religion). Salkić’s memory, too, interrupts. It causes a rupture in what an archive is perceived to be and remains unarchivable. It interrupts our process, yet it cannot be disregarded. Salkić’s memory of his parents is at first seemingly of minor importance in establishing an historical truth as to what occurred in Srebrenica, yet what he has remembered is the loss, the impossibility of remembering, of salvaging this event intact for another audience. If Salkić had presented a readily archivable memory of Srebrenica—a logical and coherent sound bite—would it have a place in the archive? Is such a memory recoverable? Would it be a memory and experience hidden by the formulaic style of historical memory? As it is, Salkić’s memory ruptures the archive. It reveals those dusty spots of the event that our duster cannot reach. It is this dust that removes our certainty, our hope in the archive as a provider of answers and as a clean receptacle for the truth (this whole truth). “Suspension of certainty is part of the prayer” (Derrida, On Religion). We must suspend our certainty in the archive and it is this uncertainty that drives us to keep looking, to keep asking, to keep collecting. To know that we cannot know. To know that we can never have a complete archive. Derrida speaks of the “hopelessness of prayer” (On Religion). The hopelessness of the archive lies in its inability to ever provide a complete or conclusive story and it is this hopelessness that is also driving the archive. I think that the archive should contain these dusty spots that reveal rather than conceal.Still we, the archivists of other people’s memories, fear inconclusivity and complication in the archive. We do not wish to suspend our certainty. Still we assume that through an archive we can fully hold an event. The interviewer will always interrupt Salkić’s memory, demanding the full account, the complete archive, as though such a thing were possible. Still our archive privileges and still then, our archive is hopeless. Other genocides are ignored even as they occur, filed still further back, yet the dust is not going anywhere. Even when it fully coats and conceals an event, the dust lends the event and its memories form and marks their non/presence.Maybe, then, the archive in its presumed weight is no more than a skin, “the glosses on the edge of the abyss” (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 143), giving a thin layer of protection and concealment. It is the losses and exclusions (those scarred and phantom limbs) that urge us to look further. To know, then, the archive as Foucault’s “unstable assemblage of faults, fissures and heterogeneous layers” (146). So what, then? How do we reconcile ourselves with or even begin our recovery of the scarred and phantom limbs? (Do they even want to be found? Are they even there?) This is Derrida’s dilemma of “How to watch over something that one can, however, neither watch over, nor assimilate, nor internalise, nor categorise” (For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue 138).Yet these testimonies (such as Salkić’s) are disallowed. They rupture with their silence. The archive cannot contain such testimony. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why testimony cannot be codified. The silence, after all, cannot in itself offer any hint or clue towards a complete testimony. The silence cannot provide an archiving system into which Salkić’s memory might be deposited or neatly filed. Instead the silent cinder marks an acknowledgment of the difficulty of representation and of defining an experience by way of collectivity or of representing trauma in a coherent survivor sound-bite.These are the Derridean cinders of the event. The cinders are not the event—the originary sound or moment—itself. They are the ashes of this. To try and contain, conclude and comprehend the event itself through its ashes—through the bare artefacts it leaves behind—is to try to comprehend something that is ungraspable and unknowable. Derrida writes, “The cinder is not, is not what is. It remains from what is not, in order to recall the delicate, charred bottom of itself only non-being or non-presence” (Derrida, Cinders 39). Yet he continues, “Cinders remain. Cinder there is.”This is the fragility of the cinder, smothering and concealing the secret before it reaches us, translating it from language into unreadable ash. Was it ever really with us or on its way to meet us? This is “not some sort of conditional secret that could be revealed, but the secret that there is no secret, that there never was one, not even one” (Caputo 109). Turning to Salkić’s memories, I wonder if there is anything there other than an amnesiac or uncooperative guest/ghost? Maybe I wrote his words down incorrectly in my initial dismissal? Or maybe the memories are, in their incompleteness, in the interrupted gaps, telling us a secret? That there is none. That it is ineffable, not some secret waiting to be whispered, intact, in our ear. That nothing is fully recoverable from such an event and that it is the very unrecoverability that tells all that is important to know of the event. The fire has burned and consumed its beginnings and its event, leaving only ash, cinder, behind as a trace. As it is a cindered trace, it differs from other traces in its unchartability. It is not possible to follow the flyaway cinders back to an event as the cinders are not markers, but remains: “the body of which cinders is the trace has totally disappeared, it has totally lost its contours, its form, its colours, its natural determination” (Derrida, Points 391). In genocide, people have been killed, raped, disappeared, removed, displaced. The cinders that remain are unidentifiable and undetermined, but it is this presence of non-presence that remains. This is the invisible presence of the loss. Unlike a footprint, the cinder cannot be followed, cannot be recovered. It is a trace which “remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without remainder. That is, something which is not” (Derrida, Points 208). So what light can Derrida’s dusty cinder possibly shed on the archival responses to genocide? In its marking and coating of the various impossibilities and losses within the archive, the cinder makes certain aspects more visible. If not visible, then perhaps sensed as one senses smoke. Let us consider the romantic imagining of a library and the role that dust plays in such an imagining. The dust swirls around, leaving shiny absences while also settling heavily on certain shelves. This is a revealing dust, a dust which marks time, marking the losses and forgettings, rendering the absences and difficulties within the archive not so much wholly visible, as visible through their invisibility. This is the invisible smoke that fogs the glass and sneaks under the velvet rope. We invoke the call to never again (“and again, and again, and again” echoes Homi K Bhabha), we mark remembrance days, we watch trials from behind the glass in polite institutionalised silence, we remember only the dead and the time, we build memorials and establish courts, we write dissertations and publish our articles, we cram the impossible nothing – what we imagine to be empty space – full of language and debate. But what do these lives and losses mean? What depth and weight is in the emptiness, the silence, the secret? Cinders persist. Cinders mark the lacuna and the space for the silence and silenced. The cinder, the burned remains of language, provides no way of telling or testifying. The cinders, in marking the difficulty of representation, also mark the exclusion and loss of certain voices within the archive. To see the cinder as a provision of a lens through which to view absences is a fragile vision. Yet, within the cinder is an impression of a figure (the hints and remains of a burned moment; that which was but no longer is). In the cinder’s very presence, in its non-presence, this entails and implies an absence. The event “immediately incinerates itself, in front of your eyes: an impossible mission” (Derrida, Cinders 35). This impossible mission, though, contains a possibility in the gap, the space that is left. There is no longer the physical support of the form; we are left with a grey shapeless ash, as “everything is annihilated in the cinders” (Derrida, Points 391). While the event has totally lost the trace of itself in its incineration, what rises (dare I say phoenix-like) from the ash is the choking shapelessness of a loss. A loss that defies and confounds the archive. Yet how can the cinder, the ash marking the gaps, the silence, the ghostly secret, be incorporated into testimony and the testimonial gathering modes? Can such testimonies be codified? Agamben’s thoughts, through ‘Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive’ are crucial in this respect in contemplating the im/possibility of gaining a complete testimony and of the necessity of the lacuna in all testimony. Agamben writes of the absence of the complete witness to the event through analogy: “Just as in the expanding universe, the furthest galaxies move away from us at a speed greater than that of their light, which cannot reach us, such that the darkness we see in the sky is nothing but the invisibility of the light of unknown stars, so that the complete witness […] is the one we cannot see.” (161 – 162). It is precisely the one who cannot testify, who is silent and silenced, who is the complete witness. And it precisely because of this that the incorporation of the cinder—the act of pinning down the ash—is perhaps impossible to approach within the archive. I borrow here Primo Levi’s example cited by Agamben. Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz amongst other things, writes of a child in Auschwitz called Hurbinek who repeats the word mass-klo or perhaps matisklo to himself, but the meaning of the word remains secret. Levi writes of the child that, “nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine” (38). The word becomes the cinders of the lacuna represented in Levi’s archive—in his testimony. Agamben writes that, “this means that testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness” (39). In order to give this sound to the event—to see its shadow and hear its silence, we must remove our reliance on the “sun”—on having the remembering done for us through didactic monuments and museums. This brings to mind, in this impossible incorporation, the designated “Void Space” at the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin. The Jüdisches Museum in Berlin is something of a perfect archive. The “Void Space” is where the missing elements might be felt. Standing in the void, I felt something of the loss and the claustrophobia that is only possible in a large, dark, empty space shut in by a heavy handle-less door. However, if I had walked through the door and into this void without knowing what it was, I would most likely have backed out, thinking that I had made a mistake; that this space wasn’t part of the museum. Instead, it is a designated void. It is an incredibly effective and affective space, but it is still an ordered, designated, planned space. I can almost hear the planning meeting: “over here in the South Wing, that’s where we’ll put the loss.” Here, the cinder element, that missing part, is given space. Yet, in its provision here in this museum space, the ash is cooled. In its designation as such a space—its permanence and uniformity—something of the cinder is extinguished and its fragility is lost: “if you entrust it to paper, it is all the better to inflame you with” (Derrida, Cinders 53).The cinder should instead reconfigure the very structures of our responses; the way we consider the structure of the archive itself. The cinder marks the impossibility. It must be external to the current representation. It cannot be incorporated. Nothing can be built from the cinder; no Phoenix can rise from it, nothing recognisable in it or from it. To sanction it and offer it “space” would remove its purpose, strip it of its ashes, it “remains unpronounceable in order to make saying possible although it is nothing” (Derrida, Cinders 73).However, in these cinders and their draughts, we are left with crucial refutations. There is a something here that defies the archive, which defies the reductions and exclusions, which defies those attempts to “burn everything” (holos caustos), to destroy all through the act of genocide itself. This is a haunting. In the cinderless archive, in the interrupting and limiting of Salkić’s testimony, we “have gone so fast as to be unaware of its existence” (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 194). We rush to conclude, comprehend and contain, and in our rush, we miss the patient cinder and we do not feel its haunting. However, should we show our own patience (the patience of a cinder), we would find the (necessarily) unending task of comprehending genocide, and find there something “troubling enough to become unforgettable to the point of obsession” (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 194).This is the hope in and for the archive as a means of wrestling with the crises of response presented by genocide, and brings my call for openness and dialogue with and of the archive. The cinder recovered from the event, rather than being a philosophical whimsy, marks that which has been lost or silenced or forgotten through the archive in its current structure. The archive as it stands has become, to borrow Zournazi’s thoughts on hope, “self enclosed and the exchange becomes a kind of monologue, a type of depression and narcissism where territories are defended and the stakes raised are already known” (Zournazi 12). Cinders are the hope in the archive. They are also a dangerous, gamblers hope in which the outcomes remain unknown. They are that which has been burned, which can no longer exist in (or bear any resemblance to) the original form, but which persist nonetheless, disrupting the known entities of the archive with dust, the promise of a secret. A secret which can never be told, but that is hope. This is a hope which, as the unearthed remains of a skeleton described by Linda Marie Walker, haunts, just as a cinder might: “The remains, in their haunting, were giving, or opening, a space for thought and a dreaming of past presence.” Hope caught in a cinder, made airborne. Hope that is recovered intact from the event. Hope that these spaces and gaps in the archive, marked by the cinder, might not descend into either a hopeless disengagement nor a retreat into useless and futile rage in the face of genocide and its informing debates. Hope instead that the archive might be turned from a monologue of certainty into an engagement, an exchange, a constant uncertain questioning. A sense that there is no cool remove from genocide and that to attempt to contain it is to do damage to the memory. I end with a quote from Primo Levi in his short story on the element of carbon, which comes at the end of The Periodic Table. This atom of carbon that Levi attempts to describe, and of which “every verbal description must be inadequate” (227), is also the cinder. It is invisible to the eye, it is unpronounceable, but it coats everything. And without its presence we are and we have recovered nothing: “So it happens that every element says something to someone (something different to each) like the mountain valleys or beaches visited in youth. One must perhaps make an exception for carbon, because it says everything to everyone” (Levi 225).The dependence on and domination of archives which have at their core an aim of concluding, comprehending and containing an event, denies the necessary complexity and incomprehensibility of stories such as Salkic’s. There is a risk here of forgetting that such complex stories, such incomplete memories—like carbon itself—speak to the essence of what it is to be human and what it is to have lost. 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