Characteristic classes for the degenerations of two-plane fields in four dimensions (Q1368579)

The authors study topological obstructions to making a generic real oriented two-plane distribution on a closed oriented 4-manifold globally an Engel distribution. These obstructions are formulated by means of the first Chern classes of the normal bundle and the dual bundle of the subbundle defined by the distribution. Moreover, representations of these Chern classes are given by pieces of the degeneration locus of the distribution.