Marine Carbon Sequestration: Current Situation,Problems and Future

Abuse of fossil energy resources results in the excessive discharge of greenhouse gases, especially CO₂, enhancing the trend of global climate warming. Carbon sequestration is an important method to lower the increasing rate of CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere. Marine carbon sequestration is a novel idea for reducing CO₂ emission, and its reservoir mainly includes seawater and submarine sediment, which not only possess a great potential capacity of carbon sequestration, but also have high safety in relation to continental reservoirs. In this paper, we expounded the technique principle and mechanisms of marine carbon sequestration, potential capacity and time duration of marine carbon sequestration, main factors influencing marine carbon sequestration, CO₂ injection technique, impacts on marine biota from over emission of CO₂ and technique monitoring the leakage of CO₂. Finally, a prospect of marine carbon sequestration was proposed, and its hot topics were accordingly pointed out.     

Marine Ecosystem—Based Management: Definition,Principles, Framework and Practice

As the largest ecosystems of the earth, marine ecosystem provides many types of ecosystem service to human. More than 60% of the global population lives the coastal area. A healthy ocean is critical to our economy, health and way of life. However, with rapid population growth and densely inhabited coastal areas, our dependence on marine resources is greater than ever. The overuse and mismanagement of ecosystem services have placed great pressure on marine systems, thereby threatening the future of marine ecosystems, and the services they provide. With anthropogenic pressures increasing in coastal cities, adopting ecosystem-based management frameworks that minimize impacts on marine environments while allowing for sustainable development is critical. Marine Ecosystem-Based Management seeks to manage marine resources in ways that protect ecosystem health while providing the ecosystem services needed by people. Rather than focusing solely on a single species or resource, MEBM incorporates science and balances the demands of user groups in a manner that produces management strategies that are more likely to be sustainable than traditional approaches. The definition, principles and framework were discussed in this paper based on the summary of literature, and two examples were introduced. Last, some suggestions were put forward to marine ecosystem management for ocean ecosystem and for healthy coastal resources sustainable utilization.     

Marine Chemistry in the Coastal Environment: Principles,Perspective and Prospectus

Marine chemistry of the coastal environment starts with principles of rock weathering that use carbonic acid to mobilize elements, only some of which comprise the majority of sea salt. The principle reason is reverse weathering, extensively represented in coastal waters, and returns most elements to newly formed colloids or minerals while recycling carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This includes the deeper ocean expanse of sediment diagenesis, plus hydrothermal plumes and attendant low-temperature basalt alteration. Within the estuarine and extended shelf regimes, both conservative and non-conservative processes can be distinguished and modeled to determine proportions of weathered elements transmitted to the sea or consumed by reverse weathering. Conceptually, the steady-state processes that lead to the composition of seawater can be viewed as heterogeneous equilibria between dissolved constituents and solid mineral products taking hundreds of millennia. However, initial processes in the estuarine and coastal environment are characterized by shorter term scavenging associated with inorganic and organic colloids. These recycle both carbon and trace elements on timescales commensurate with estuarine flushing and coastal exchange with the ocean. The natural uranium and thorium decay series provide powerful tools for quantifying the rates of estuarine processes, including those within groundwater and the subterranean estuary. In the future, new mass spectrometric and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques will help to define the molecular nature of newly formed estuarine colloids as has been done for dissolved organic matter. As the coastal environment undergoes the forces of climate change in the form of warming and sea level rise, future research should address how these will impact chemistry of the coastal environment as a net source or sink of carbon dioxide and associated organic material.     

Marine tephrochronology of the Mt. Edgecumbe Volcanic Field, Southeast Alaska, USA

The Mt. Edgecumbe Volcanic Field (MEVF), located on Kruzof Island near Sitka Sound in southeast Alaska, experienced a large multiple-stage eruption during the last glacial maximum (LGM)-Holocene transition that generated a regionally extensive series of compositionally similar rhyolite tephra horizons and a single well-dated dacite (MEd) tephra. Marine sediment cores collected from adjacent basins to the MEVF contain both tephra-fall and pyroclastic flow deposits that consist primarily of rhyolitic tephra and a minor dacitic tephra unit. The recovered dacite tephra correlates with the MEd tephra, whereas many of the rhyolitic tephras correlate with published MEVF rhyolites. Correlations were based on age constraints and major oxide compositions of glass shards. In addition to LGM-Holocene macroscopic tephra units, four marine cryptotephras were also identified. Three of these units appear to be derived from mid-Holocene MEVF activity, while the youngest cryptotephra corresponds well with the White River Ash eruption at ∼ 1147 cal yr BP. Furthermore, the sedimentology of the Sitka Sound marine core EW0408-40JC and high-resolution SWATH bathymetry both suggest that extensive pyroclastic flow deposits associated with the activity that generated the MEd tephra underlie Sitka Sound, and that any future MEVF activity may pose significant risk to local population centers.     

天然气水合物的特征及环境意义

天然气水合物是由甲烷等气体和水分子组成的类冰状的固态物质,主要分布在极地永冻层和外大陆架边缘的海洋沉积物中,赋存在天然气水合物中的碳约为１０＾１３吨,相当于全球其他化石燃料中碳含量的两倍,由于天然气水合物处于亚稳定状态。因此天然气水合物既可作为２１世纪潜在能源资源,又可以非稳定状态导致海底滑塌和滑坡等地质灾害,并可通过释放甲烷影响全球气候。     

海相油气区生物礁研究现状、问题与展望

生物礁是良好的油气聚集场所.几十年来我国在生物礁及其含油气性研究、生物礁发育分布规律及其控制因素研究等方面均取得了丰硕的成果, 油气区隐伏生物礁的地球物理识别与预测方法也日趋成熟, 生物礁储层形成机理与预测研究进一步深入.油气区生物礁研究中仍存在一些问题: 一是生物礁基础研究综合程度不够; 二是生物礁成油系统研究薄弱; 三是生物礁分布规律与地质预测精细程度不够.油气区生物礁研究的发展趋势: 一是生物礁基础研究将向综合的生物礁生态-沉积体系研究以及生物礁地球生物学研究方向发展; 二是生物礁与油气成藏研究结合将更加紧密; 三是油气区生物礁的研究手段向多方法的交互验证与集成研究过渡; 四是生物礁储层预测与描述技术将得到进一步发展.