DMS and SO2 at Baring Head, New Zealand: Implications for the Yield of SO2 from DMS

Atmospheric dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) concentrations were measured at Baring Head, New Zealandduring February and March 2000. Anti-correlated DMS and SO₂ diurnalcycles, consistent with the photochemical production of SO₂ from DMS, were observed in clean southerly air off the ocean. The data is used to infer a yield of SO₂ from DMS oxidation. The estimated yields are highly dependent on assumptions about the DMS oxidation rate. Fitting the measured data in a photochemical box model using model-generated OH levels and the Hynes et al. (1986) DMS + OH rate constant suggests that theSO₂ yield is 50–100%, similar to current estimates for the tropical Pacific.However, the observed amplitude of the DMS diurnal cycle suggests that the oxidation rate is higher than that used by the model, and therefore, that theSO₂ yield is lower in the range of 20–40%.     

Denudation and cooling of the Lake Teletskoye Region in the Altai Mountains (South Siberia) as revealed by apatite fission-track thermochronology

Lake Teletskoye occupies a narrow graben located in the northwestern sector of the Altai fold belt in South Siberia. The lake basin is thought to have formed during the Pleistocene as a distant result of the Cenozoic collision of India and Eurasia that caused a tectonic reactivation of the Palaeozoic Gorny–Altai (GA) and West Sayan (WS) blocks.The present work reports of a pilot fission-track study performed on 13 apatite separates collected from rocks that were sampled along two profiles in close proximity of the lake. The age–length data and AFT thermochronological modelling reveal two important phases of cooling in the Altai Mountains, a first one during the Late Jurassic–Early Cretaceous and a second one that started in the Miocene–Pliocene and that persists until today. The first event is interpreted to result from uplift-induced denudation probably related to the closure of the Mongol–Okhotsk Ocean; the second event can be linked to the young Cenozoic movements that lie at the origin of the formation of the Lake Teletskoye basin.     

Al hematites prepared by homogeneous precipitation of oxinates: material characterization and determination of the Morin transition

A novel method for synthesis of aluminium hematites, based upon the homogeneous precipitation of Fe and Al oxinates in various proportions, is presented. The precursor precipitates are heated in air at 700?°C. X-ray diffraction, thermal analyses, BET, FTIR, optical reflection analysis, TEM and Mössbauer spectroscopy at room temperature and 80?K of the resulting products indicate that single-phase hematites are formed with structural Al substitution of up to 10 at%. Interestingly, the particle size (>100?nm) is not substantially reduced by the Al content. Although it remains difficult to obtain a homogeneously distributed Al substitution in the final hematite, this processing line offers a unique opportunity to separate the effects of grain size and Al substitution on the Morin transition temperature (T _M) of Al hematite. From the comparison between the present hematites and a series of Al-substituted hematites with lepidocrocite as precursor, it could be shown that the effect on T _M, associated with a change of a factor 10 in grain size, is about 1/3 of the effect caused by a change of 10 in the degree of substitution. Finally, it is suggested that proper thermal treatments under different conditions of the same precursors are likely to produce spinel phases.     

Paleoecology of a Middle Wisconsin Deposit from Southern California

Analysis of a buried deposit in the Diamond Valley of southern California has revealed well-preserved pollen, wood, and diatom remains. Accelerator mass spectrometry dates of 41,200±2100 and 41,490±1380 ¹⁴C yr B.P. place this deposit in marine isotope stage 3. Diatoms suggest a shallow lacustrine environment. Pollen data suggest that several plant communities were present near the site, with grassland, scrub, chaparral, forest, and riparian communities represented. Comparison with modern pollen suggests similarities with montane forests in the nearby San Bernardino and San Jacinto ranges, indicating vegetation lowering by at least 900 m elevation and temperatures 4°–5°C cooler than today. An increase in high-elevation conifer pollen documents climatic cooling near the profile top. Early-profile diatoms are typical of warm water with high alkalinity and conductivity, whereas later diatoms suggest a higher flow regime and input of cooler water into the system. We suggest that the sequence is part of the cooling phase of an interstadial Dansgaard–Oeschger cycle. Records of the middle Wisconsin period are rare in southern California, but the Diamond Valley site is similar to records from Tulare Lake in the San Joaquin Valley and the ODP Site 893A record from Santa Barbara Basin. It is probable that the Diamond Valley assemblage is a local expression of a vegetation type widespread in the ranges and basins of southwestern California during the middle Wisconsin.     

Origin of fine-scale sheeted granites by incremental injection of magma into active shear zones: examples from the Pilbara Craton, NW Australia

In the Archaean Pilbara Craton of Western Australia, three zones of heterogeneous centimetre- to metre-scale sheeted granites are interpreted to represent high-level, syn-magmatic shear zones. Evidence for the syn-magmatic nature of the shear zones include imbricated and asymmetrically rotated metre-scale orthogneiss xenoliths that are enveloped by leucogranite sheets that show no significant internal strain. At another locality, granite sheets have a strong shape-preferred alignment of K-feldspar, suggesting magmatic flow, while the asymmetric recrystallisation of the grain boundaries indicates that non-coaxial deformation continued acting upon the sheets under sub-solidus conditions. Elsewhere, randomly oriented centimetre-wide leucogranite dykes are realigned at a shear zone boundary to form semi-continuous, layer-parallel sheets within a magma-dominated, dextral shear zone.

It is proposed that the granite sheets formed by the incremental injection of magmas into active shear zones. Magma was sheared during laminar flow to produce the sheets that are aligned sub-parallel to the shear zone boundary. Individual sheets are fed by individual dykes, with up to 1000s of discrete injections in an individual shear zone. The sheets often lack microstructural evidence for magmatic flow, either because the crystal content of the magma was too low to record internal strain, or because of later recrystallisation.     

Impact of suboxia on sinking particulate organic carbon: Enhanced carbon flux and preferential degradation of amino acids via denitrification

Fluxes of particulate organic carbon (POC) through the oxygen deficient waters in the eastern tropical North Pacific were found to be relatively less attenuated with depth than elsewhere in the eastern North Pacific. The attenuation coefficient (b) for the flux was found to be 0.40 versus the composite value of 0.86 determined by Martin et al. (1987). To examine this further, sinking POC was collected using sediment traps and allowed to degrade in oxic and suboxic experiments. Using a kinetic model, it was found that degradation proceeded at similar rates (roughly 0.8 day⁻¹) under oxic and suboxic conditions, but a greater fraction of bulk POC was resistant to degradation in the suboxic experiments (61% vs. 23%). Amino acids accounted for 37% of POC collected at 75m, but following degradation the value dropped to 17% and 16% in the oxic and suboxic experiments respectively. POC collected from 500m was 10% amino acids. The non-AA component of POC collected at 75m was not degraded under suboxic conditions, while under oxic conditions it was. These results suggest that microbes degrading OC under suboxic conditions via denitrification preferentially utilize nitrogen-rich amino acids. This preferential degradation of amino acids suggests that 9% more nitrogen may be lost via water column denitrification than is accounted for when a more “Redfieldian” stoichiometry for POC is assumed.     

Surface chemistry and reactivity of biogenic silica

The surface chemistry of cultured diatoms was compared to that of biosiliceous material in Southern Ocean sediments, using potentiometric titrations and aluminum adsorption experiments. Aerosil 200, a well-studied synthetic amorphous silica, served as reference solid. Surface charge development and aluminum adsorption on cultured diatom shells were comparable to Aerosil. The surface chemical properties of biosiliceous material buried to depths of 15-25 cm in Southern Ocean sediments, however, deviated markedly from those of the cultured diatoms. In pH range 4-8.5, the surface charge density was systematically lower for biogenic silica from the sediments. In addition, the aluminum adsorption edge on the biosiliceous sediments was shifted to higher pHs by about 0.4 units. The results indicate that ionizable surface silanol groups on diagenetically altered diatom shells are less abundant and, possibly, less acidic than on freshly cultured diatoms. The observed differences in surface chemical structure are consistent with the progressive loss of reactivity, or aging, of biogenic silica which promotes its preservation in sediments.     

Common-Reflection-Surface Stack for Converted Waves

The finite-offset (FO) common-reflection-surface (CRS) stack has been shown to be able to handle not only P-P or S-S but also arbitrarily converted reflections. It can provide different stack sections such as common-offset (CO), common-midpoint (CMP) and common-shot (CS) sections with significantly increased signal-to-noise ratio from the multi-coverage pre-stack seismic data in a data-driven way. It is our purpose in this paper to demonstrate the performance of the FO CRS stack on data involving converted waves in inhomogeneous layered media. In order to do this we apply the FO CRS stack for common-offset to a synthetic seismic data set involving P-P as well as P-S converted primary reflections. We show that the FO CRS stack yields convincing improvement of the image quality in the presence of noisy data and successfully extracts kinematic wavefield attributes useful for further analyses. The extracted emergence angle information is used to achieve a complete separation of the wavefield into its P-P and P-S wave components, given the FO CRS stacked horizontal and vertical component sections.