The influence of coronal mass ejections on the gas dynamics of the atmosphere of a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet

The results of three-dimensional numerical simulations of the gas dynamics of the atmosphere of a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet during the passage of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the central star are presented. These computations assumed the parameters for the stellar wind and the CME to be typical of the solar values. The characteristic variations of the flow pattern are considered for quasi-closed and closed (but appreciably distorted by the gravitational influence of the star) gaseous envelopes of the exoplanet. It is shown that a typical CME is sufficient to tear off the outer part of an asymmetric envelope that is located beyond the Roche lobe and carry it away from the exoplanet. This leads to a substantial increase in the mass-loss rate from the exoplanet envelope during the passage of CMEs. The mass-loss rate grows by about a factor of 11 for a closed envelope, and by about a factor of 14 for a quasi-closed envelope. Possible evolutionary consequences of the loss of part of the atmosphere during the passage of CMEs are discussed.     

Epitaxial intergrowths—an indicator of thermodynamic conditions of diamond formation

Hydrothermal activity at Bahía Concepción, on the western coast of the Gulf of California, is not linked to present volcanic activity. This site is a potential energy source; however, geothermal modelling of the system is needed in order to determine the processes that generated this activity. Two processes might lead to the formation of the secondary fluids that were sampled in this submarine hydrothermal system: the thermal endmember might be undergoing either boiling or mixing with a fluid trapped within the sedimentary strata.

However, boiling was ruled out as this process would not produce a highly saline fluid within the temperature range determined for the Bahía Concepción system (～87°C). We modelled the mixing of a highly saline fluid with a geothermal fluid of meteoric origin. Our results suggest that the composition of the thermal water representing the hot endmember at Bahía Concepción consists of 20–30% highly saline fluid and 70–80% aqueous fluid of meteoric origin. The computed fluid has a chemical composition similar to that determined for the submarine vents. Its derived contents of calcium, chloride, and silica are similar to those we measured for the vent discharge. Our hypothesis of saline water addition is supported by the mineralizing fluid characteristics determined from fluid inclusion microthermometric study of a fossil intertidal system that discharges in the vicinity of the vent areas. This intertidal spring fluid at ～40°C, according to the geochemical model, would be supersaturated in opaline silica and calcite, consistent with the mineralogy of the stromatolitic sinter encircling the discharges.     

Studying coronal holes through observations of an HeI infrared line and the Hα line

New results from electrophotometric scanning of the solar disk in the HeI λ 10830 Å and H_α lines are presented. The intensity at the center of the HeI λ 10830.30 Å line is 1–3% higher in the regions of coronal holes than in quiescent regions; this is accompanied by a decrease in the size and contrast of the chromospheric network compared to the network in quiescent regions. Our observations in the HeI line revealed chains of “dark points” surrounding coronal holes. The H_α±0.5 observations show increased velocities of ascent near the dark points compared to the velocities inside coronal holes and in quiescent regions. It is proposed that the intensification and acceleration of the flows of solar plasma from the dark points are due to reconnection of the magnetic fields of the bipolar chromospheric network and the predominantly unipolar magnetic field inside the coronal holes. Our observations suggest that the same reconnection process takes place near the temperature minimum, in the presence of certain conditions at the boundary between coronal holes and bipolar active regions. The reconnection process produces plasma flows from the chromosphere to the corona, which are sufficient to form prominences.     

Groundwater of Egypt: “an environmental overview”

Although Egypt has the great Nile River, which is the main supply of water, Egypt’s water is limited to 55.5 billion m³ per annum. Owing to the rapid growth of the population and the increasing consumption of water in agriculture, industry, domestic use, etc., it is expected that Egypt will rely to some extent on groundwater to develop the new projects such as Tushka in Upper Egypt and East Oweinat. Issues related to groundwater in Egypt are identified with the common geological features associated with formation of the aquifers and demonstrating the location of the main resources of groundwater, followed by the main objective of this paper, which is addressing the environmental issues related to groundwater in Egypt. Several studies have been reviewed and personal communication made with the authorities to introduce this work and provide an overview of the groundwater quality problems in Egypt with examples from different parts of the country.     

A review of formation mechanism and restoration measures of “black-soil-type” degraded grassland in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

The aim of this paper was to review the formation mechanism and restorative measures of the black-soil-type degraded grassland ecosystem of the source area of Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The relationship among plants, animals, soil, climate change, human activity and the black-soil-type degraded grassland was analyzed based on a review of literature and report of previous investigations conducted by the authors. Degradation of the black-soil-type grassland was caused by a set of complex factors such as altitude range, district characteristics and weather conditions, which existed for a long period of time. Livestock overgrazing and climate dryness were the dominant factors that caused the degradation of the grassland in question. In addition, damages done by rodents, especially pikas (Ochotona curzoniae), via burrowing through the turf and gnawing at herbs have sped up the formation process of the degradation of the black-soil-type grassland. Furthermore, with the inflation of the population in the last 20 years, the influence of human activity on grassland degradation cannot be neglected. Based on the different successive stages of degradation of the black-soil-type grassland ecosystem, different restorative measures were suggested. The lightly and moderately degraded grasslands should be kept away from disturbance, such as fencing closure, weeding, fertilizing, using rodenticide, decreasing stocking rate, optimizing population structure stocked and slaughter ages; whereas the artificial and semi-artificial grassland establishment required to restore ecosystems should be applied to heavily and extremely degraded grasslands.     

Hydrological and geotechnical investigations of mass movements in an equatorial city (Yaoundé, Cameroon)

In the present study, mass movements (landslide and mudslide) bound to a gully located at Mendong, a suburb of Yaoundé in Cameroon were examined using hydrological, geotechnical and geomorphological observations. The data indicate that water is an important causative factor of mass movements in the area studied. In fact, the water flow (waste water and runoff) provokes the saturation of materials at the slope foot. These materials lose their mechanical qualities and some deep ruptures generate landslide. During the rainy season, when the cumulative rainfall is more than 200 mm, these landslides are accompanied by mudslides that generate disturbances on the infrastructure situated around the gully and farther downstream. The economic and environmental damages resulting from the Mendong mass movements are considerable, such as degradation of the topography, losses in farm land, transportation and downstream sedimentation in a pond situated at the slope foot, loss of life and damage to the economy. All this calls for a multidisciplinary and integrated approach to hazard assessment and risk mitigation, which included data collection and interpretation, growing public and authority awareness, and preventing or reducing runoff and waste water flows by proper management and drainage.     

Relics of an early-Panafrican metabasite–metarhyolite formation in the Brno Massif, Moravia, Czech Republic

The Brno Massif in Moravia, Czech Republic, is an important exposure of Precambrian basement in central Europe. It includes large volumes of Cadomian granitoids and a narrow fault-bounded zone with metagabbros, metadiorites, and metabasalts. This so-called Central Basic Belt also contains some metarhyolites; one of these was dated by means of the zircon evaporation method at 725 ±15 Ma. Chemical and isotope data show that the dated rock represents a mantle-derived magma which is cosanguinous with surrounding MORB-type metabasites. The data suggest that the Brno Massif hosts the oldest metabasite complex currently known in central Europe. Its formation apparently coincides with the main period of ocean-floor spreading and island-arc formation in the Panafrican orogens. This lends further support to the theory that the Brno Massif is a Gondwana-derived element. Received: 9 December 1999 / Accepted: 9 February 2000     

The oxygen isotopic composition as an indicator of the genesis of “Basaltic” corundum

This paper reports an oxygen isotopic study of corundums and associated minerals from the Yogo lamprophyres (Montana, US), plagioclase-corundum inclusions in alkali basalt (Tunkin depression, Russia), and from modern alluvium of Podgelbanochnyi alkaline basaltic volcano (Primorye, Russia). It is shown that all sapphires genetically related to mafic magmatic rocks have a similar oxygen isotopic composition (the variations of δ¹⁸O are within 2.5‰) with most values plotting between +4.5 and +7.0‰ SMOW. The oxygen isotopic ratios in the associated minerals (olivines, pyroxenes, mica, and others) and host rocks are plotted in the same interval. This indicates that the sapphire crystallized during evolution of the parental mafic magma. However, there are xenogenic corundums, which were only transported by basaltic magma to the Earth’s surface. They have a sharply distinct oxygen isotopic composition, which suggests their disequilibrium with the host lavas, and, correspondingly, a different genetic nature.     

Culling criteria for “standard” formation water analyses

Although many schemes have been proposed for sorting and classifying formation waters, none contains procedures for automatically culling erroneous analyses prior to computer processing or graphical display. Techniques are described for automatic (electronic) culling of formation water analyses on initial entry into a data base, based on chemical analysis and on the method of production and sampling. With respect to the chemical analysis, this can be rejected for a variety of reasons, including incomplete or poor data, and contamination by mud filtrate, acid wash or cement wash. With respect to the method of production and sampling, certain methods of production are excluded, as are samples from multiple drillstem tests or from drillstem tests where the recovered fluid is dominantly non-aqueous; culling is also based on samples subject to corrosion in separators and treaters. The culling criteria act sequentially and using the more than 141,000 formation water analyses from the entire Western Canada Sedimentary Basin as a test case, 68.8% of the analyses were rejected from further study.Following assignment to the pertinent stratigraphic unit, a second series of conditional culling criteria can be applied at the aquifer-specific and area-specific level, including rejection because of KCl mud contamination. Final culling (third series of criteria) is done manually by a geochemist using a variety of methods such as cumulative frequency plots of individual ions and regional concentration variation maps.     

Toward an Understanding of Biogenic-silica Dissolution in Seawater – An Initial Rate Approach Applied between 40 and 90 °C

Summary The kinetics of phytoplankton frustule dissolution has generally been studied as the appearance of silicic acid in a batch reactor. Unfortunately, this approach, though often illuminating, has not so far been successful because of the difficulty of parameterising the full reaction curve. This current study shows how the initial rate approach to chemical kinetics offers a way around this bottleneck, thereby allowing much chemical kinetics information about frustule dissolution to be collected. The technique is shown to be flexible and suited to short reaction times which facilitate detailed quantitative kinetics investigation, indeed, as would be expected in a solution phase, kinetics study. The technique is exemplified by a dissolution study of uncleaned frustules of Cyclotella crypticaat 40 °C and above. The frustules were found to yield the same dissolution rate after 5 weeks dark storage, at 4 °C. Meanwhile, log dissolution rate was found to vary linearly with pH, with gradient 0.38 ± 0.01 (r ²=0.990). Linearity was upheld even at pHs as high as 14. Finally, a robust Arrhenius plot was established between 40 and 90 °C yielding an activation energy for dissolution of 84 ± 3 kJ mol ⁻¹. Follow through with the Eyring equation yielded an activation enthalpy, ΔH ^‡, and an activation entropy, ΔS ^‡, of 81 and 85 J mol ⁻¹ K ⁻¹, respectively. The discussion brings salient aspects of existing knowledge about diatom frustule dissolution kinetics into the wider context of silicate mineral dissolution.     

Hydrothermally reset magmatic spinels in retrograde serpentinites: formation of “ferritchromit” rims and chlorite aureoles

Serpentinized harzburgites from southern Tuscany (Italy) host different kinds of spinels: (a) relic, magmatic Al-spinels, (b) hydrothermally altered spinels, occurring as ferritchromit rims, (c) syn- and post-serpentinization magnetites. The composition of relic Al-spinels suggests 5–15% partial melting of a fertile, spinel lherzolite. After the main serpentinization, Al-spinels are progressively replaced by ferritchromit rims by a dissolution–recrystallization process. Transmission electron microscopic investigation shows that ferritchromit actually consists of a complex, nanometric association of Cr-magnetite (Mg_0.03 Fe_0.97²⁺ Al_0.11 Cr_0.89 Fe³⁺ _1.00 O₄), chlorite and lizardite, with (001)_chl/liz always parallel to (111)_Cr-mag. Mg and Al, released during the Al-spinel ferritchromit replacement, interact with mesh-textured serpentine, giving rise to chloritic aureoles (i.e., randomly intergrown chlorite, lizardite and septechlorite) that overgrow and postdate mesh textures.     

Physicochemical modeling of formation of Ag–Au–Hg solid solutions: Kyuchyus deposit (Yakutia,Russia) as an example

The «Selektor-C» software package and standard thermodynamic functions of ternary Ag–Au–Hg solid solutions were used for developing physicochemical models in natural processes with participation of gold, silver and mercury. On the example of the Kyuchyus Au–Sb–Hg deposit we have worked out hypogene and hypergene models of formation of native gold, including mercuric gold. We obtained thermodynamic evidence that the Kyuchyus deposit ores formed with the origin of electrum at the early main productive quartz–sulfide stage and ternary Au–Ag–Hg solid solutions at the late non-substantive Au-bearing stages.     

“Becoming” an environmentalist in Indonesia

This article looks at how five environmental leaders in Jogjakarta became environmentally active, and at the groups and interventions they formed. Interview data are drawn from a broader project that aimed to find out what might turn an Indonesian person into someone who cares for the environment. It examines the journey in leadership as “becoming” in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari (1987); a journey constituted in the desire to make something different. Against a backdrop of day-today practices in Central Java that do not favour environmental conservation and sustainability, the five informants seized upon an idea, a praxis, and explored it in the company of like-minded others, to join or make an organisation or action dedicated to redressing environmental crisis or neglect.     

The New “York” Regression: Application of an Improved Statistical Method to Geochemistry

York's (1969) method of regression, determining the best-fit line to data with errors in both variables using a least-squares solution, has become an integral part of isotope geochemistry. Although other methods agree with York's best-fit line (e.g., maximum likelihood), there is little agreement on the standard-error estimates for slope and intercept values. The reasons for this are differing levels of approximation used to compute the standard error, doubts concerning procedures for determining a confidence interval once the standard error has been estimated, and a typographical error in the original publication. This paper examines York's method of regression and standard errors of the parameters of a best-fit line. A very accurate method for determining the standard error in slope and intercept values is introduced, which eliminates the need to multiply the standard-error estimate by the goodness-of-fit parameter known as MSWD. In addition, a derivation of a fixed-intercept method of regression is introduced, and interpretations of MSWD and use of the t-adjustment in confidence intervals are discussed. The accuracy of the standard-error computations is determined by comparing the results to slope and intercept statistics generated from several thousand Monte Carlo regressions using synthetic ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar inverse isochron data.     

Model of heat and mass transfer by fluid during formation of Mo-U deposits in the Strel’tsovka ore field,eastern Transbaikal region: Forced convection of solutions generated by a deep source

The Strel’tsovka and Antei uranium deposits located in the Strel’tsovka caldera are unique in ore resources. According to the considered mathematical model, the uranium source of these deposits was related to the middle-lower crustal silicic magma chambers or had mantle origin. Boundary conditions of the model are based on modern views of physicochemical conditions of hydrothermal process in the Strel’tsovka ore field and factors governing ore deposition therein. Modeling results are consistent with morphology of orebodies and ultimate uranium resources of the deposits and thus confirm indirectly that the physicochemical parameters of the ore-forming system are coherent. The maximal duration of uranium ore deposition is estimated at 500 ka.     

The “methane eruption” on Lake Baikal in 1912 as an effect of a strong earthquake

New factual materials on methane eruptions into the water of Lake Baikal in August 1912 are considered. The regional press is used as the information source. The spatio-temporal relationship between the gas eruptions and earthquakes, observed in South Baikal in 1912, is revealed, which permits us to consider this effect as a consequence of seismic activity intensification. Intensive methane discharge into water is a potential danger for the lake’s ecosystem as was proved by massive death of water organisms in South Baikal in 1912 during the described phenomena.     

Reservoir characterization and formation evaluation of a “Royal onshore field”, Southern Niger Delta using geophysical well log data

The reservoir properties of three wells in Royal Field, Niger Delta basin was characterized using fundamental formula. The distributions and thicknesses of sand bodies were determined within each of the wells in the field using geophysical modeling software. The quantitative and qualitative analyses were done for the three exploration wells with the depth ranges of 4000-9700m for Royal well 1, 1000-8805m for Royal well 2, and 4000-8000m for Royal well 3. Each well has identified sand units. Royal well 1 and Royal well 2 have 5 sand units (A, B, C, D, E) each, with respective thicknesses 422m, 110m, 92m, 142m and 350m for well 1, and 82m, 65m, 214m, 362m, and 192m for well 2. Royal well 3 has 4 sand units (A, B, C, D), with respective thicknesses 135m, 80m, 269m and 229m. Petrophysical evaluations were made from well logs. The average porosity values obtained for Royal wells 1, 2, and 3 are 0.24, 0.18 and 0.22 respectively while the corresponding average permeability values are 2789mD, 1292mD, 1643mD. Porosity values obtained from porosity logs and density log (RHOB) using porosity formula are found to be within the range of 0.07- 0.45, while their permeabilities range from 164 to 8453 milli Darcy. The water saturation obtained for each reservoir unit in combination with the resistivity index were used to prove the presence of hydrocarbon in these sands. Royal well 2 having its sand A, 80% hydrocarbon saturated and 82m thickness is the most prolific. The results clearly indicate that the application of this technique is very effective for the interpretation of reservoir properties.     

Analysis of the “Ulitka” noise background as an anti-coincidence filter for the OGRAN gravitational-wave antenna

An analysis of experimental data from the ??Ulitka?? high-frequency gravitational-gradient meter installed in the underground Baksan Neutrino Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences is presented, focusing on the planned use of this instrument as an ??anti-coincidence filter?? for the OGRAN gravitational-wave antenna. The statistics of the Ulitka noise background over a year??s observing are analyzed, and compared with the background measured earlier when Ulitka was located on the territory of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow. A reduction in the rate of occurrence of large nonthermal spikes is noted. We have found associations between earthquakes and excitations of the seismically isolated high-frequency mode of the longitudinal oscillations of Ulitka.