Aim Presentation of an hypothesis suggesting that the extraordinarily similarity of the Russian Altai and the American Southern Rocky Mountain Flora represents an Oroboreal Flora; that had to have had an essential continuity across the northern part of the world in the Tertiary period, constituting a highland and steppe component of the betterknown Arcto-Tertiary Flora of eastern and far-western North America and eastern Asia. Location North America and Middle (Altai) Asia. Methods Summarization of the author's field and herbarium studies of whole floras over a period of over 60 years, consisting of successive specializations in vascular plants, lichens, and bryophytes. Main conclusions (1) The modern alpine and associated marginal steppe and montane floras contain taxa of Tertiary age. (2) The floras of the southern mountains antedate those of the present-day Arctic. (3) The Middle Asiatic and the North American floras once enjoyed a contiguous existence over a broad area involving connections between North America and Asia across the North Pole by way of Greenland. Their present disjunctions are products of extinction and attrition of ranges, not of long-distance migration or dispersal mechanisms. (4) North-eastern North American disjunctions of so-called Cordilleran species (the Nunatak hypothesis) need not require explanations involving long-distance dispersal or migration, but represent relictual populations of the once widely distributed Oroboreal flora.

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Extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy was used to investigate the effects of oxidation and reduction on supported noble metal clusters. After long-term exposure to laboratory air at room temperature, platinum clusters with an average diameter of approximately 7 Å inside the pores of BaKLTL zeolite were almost completely fragmented. The EXAFS data indicate small, highly disordered platinumplatinum contributions but no bulk platinum oxides. Treatment in H 2 at 450°C led to the formation of platinum clusters about 10 Å in average diameter, and exposure of these to air at room temperature led to the formation of a disordered platinum-oxide-like phase covering a core of platinum atoms. The reactivity of platinum clusters with oxygen is size-dependent, and platinum cluster growth by oxidation-reduction cycles may be inhibited by the size of the zeolite pores. Similarly, iridium clusters on MgO, approximated as Ir 4 , were fragmented by treatment in O 2 , but treatment of the oxidized iridium clusters with H 2 at 573 K resulted in the formation of clusters with an Ir-Ir coordination number of 2.7 (and an Ir-Ir distance of 2.68 Å), indicating slightly less than four Ir atoms per cluster. These data are nearly the same as those characterizing the original sample prior to oxidation, suggesting that the clusters had been reformed into almost their original state. This is the first evidence of supported metal clusters being oxidized and then regenerated nearly intact. The near reversibility of the oxidation-reduction process may be unique to iridium, being related to its slight but non-negligible oxophilicity and its resistance to sintering.

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