Modelling of hydrogeochemical potential of three lake catchments in Polesie region (Eastern Poland)

Total dissolved solids (TDS) in lake and catchment water is a result of geological structure, as well as duration of rock and water contact and human activity. In this paper, a potential dissolved solids (PtDS) in three ??czna–W?odawa Lake catchments was determined using extraction and computer software (GIS and AquaChem). Human pressure on water quality was estimated as a difference of the TDS and a catchment hydrogeochemical potential (TPtDS, total potential dissolved solids). TPtDS coefficient included hydrogeological features of the aquifer, soil cover impact on infiltrated water quality, and sediments susceptibility to denudation. The main advantage of the model is a possibility of its employment for every catchment or other areas (e.g. administrative) on both microscale and mesoscale. The highest TPtDS occurred in the catchment, favoured with underground supply, which was located in the vicinity of the Cretaceous mesoregional unit (Che?m Hills). The lowest value was observed in the catchment built with organogenic sediments and coarse material. A seasonal constancy of TPtDS values proved a stability of the lake‐catchment systems under study. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Microconchids

Microconchids are a group of tiny, encrusting tubeworms. They appeared in the Late Ordovician, some 450 Myr ago, flourished during the rest of Palaeozoic and Triassic, and became extinct in the Middle Jurassic. Their morphological resemblance to the sedentary polychaete genus Spirorbis, very common in marine environments, misled various authors for decades. This mistake originally gave the genus Spirorbis an enormous stratigraphical range, from Ordovician to Recent. Indeed, microconchids provide an excellent example of evolutionary convergence with respect to both their morphology and ecology. In the late 1970s these ‘spirorbids’ were interpreted as vermetid gastropods on the basis of the inner architecture and microstructure of their tubes. This idea, however, was challenged in the 1990s when detailed microstructural investigation showed them to be neither polychaetes nor gastropods, but closely related to an extinct Palaeozoic enigmatic group of organisms called tentaculitids. No thorough investigation of their origin, phylogeny and ecology has ever been conducted, but new data concerning their palaeobiology has come to the light during the last few years.     

Sediment accumulation rates in subpolar fjords – Impact of post-Little Ice Age glaciers retreat,Billefjorden, Svalbard

The Little Ice Age (∼1600–1900 AD) and 20th century sediment accumulation rates in Billefjorden, a subpolar fjord on Svalbard, were reconstructed by applying ²¹⁰Pb, ¹³⁷Cs and AMS ¹⁴C datings. The modern sediment accumulation rate decreases from more than 0.39 cm y⁻¹ at the fjord head to 0.08 cm y⁻¹ close to the fjord mouth. However, during the Little Ice Age the sediments accumulated at a much lower rate of 0.02 cm y⁻¹ in the central fjord basin. This difference is most likely related to the rapid retreat of glaciers during the 20th century, when most of them withdrew up to 2 km. The post-Little Ice Age increases in temperature and a negative glacier mass balance resulted in a larger meltwater discharge transferring substantial amounts of sediments released from the glaciers, as well as those eroded from previously stored unconsolidated glacial sediments. A comparison of data from the subpolar fjords of Svalbard suggests that the increase in the sediment accumulation rate is a common trend, and further increases might be expected if climate warming continues. The properties of the fjord sediments (grain size, IRD, coarse-fraction composition, clay mineralogy) from the Little Ice Age and the 20th century showed no distinct differences. The change in the accumulation rate may be the most evident sedimentary record of this climatic change.     

The Lyman-Alpha Forest as an Indicator of Large-Scale Structure Elements

Astronomy Letters - We propose a method of analyzing the absorption spectra of quasars that allows the physical parameters of absorbing clouds, absorbers, to be roughly estimated: their masses,...     

Contribution of early impact events to metal‐silicate separation,thermal annealing,and volatile redistribution: Evidence in the Pułtusk H chondrite

Three‐dimensional X‐ray tomographic reconstructions and petrologic studies reveal voluminous accumulations of metal in Pu?tusk H chondrite. At the contact of these accumulations, the chondritic rock is enriched in troilite. The rock contains plagioclase‐rich bands, with textures suggesting crystallization from melt. Unusually large phosphates are associated with the plagioclase and consist of assemblages of merrillite, and fluorapatite and chlorapatite. The metal accumulations were formed by impact melting, rapid segregation of metal‐sulfide melt and the incorporation of this melt into the fractured crater basement. The impact most likely occurred in the early evolution of the H chondrite parent body, when post‐impact heat overlapped with radiogenic heat. This enabled slow cooling and separation of the metallic melt into metal‐rich and sulfide‐rich fractions. This led to recrystallization of chondritic rock in contact with the metal accumulations and the crystallization of shock melts. Phosphorus was liberated from the metal and subsumed by the silicate shock melt, owing to oxidative conditions upon slow cooling. The melt was also a host for volatiles. Upon further cooling, phosphorus reacted with silicates leading to the formation of merrillite, while volatiles partitioned into the residual halogen‐rich, dry fluid. In the late stages, the fluid altered merrillite to patchy Cl/F‐apatite. The above sequence of alterations demonstrates that impact during the early evolution of chondritic parent bodies might have contributed to local metal segregation and silicate melting. In addition, postshock conditions supported secondary processes: compositional/textural equilibration, redistribution of volatiles, and fluid alterations.     

Anisotropic Kepler and anisotropic two fixed centres problems

In this paper we show that the anisotropic Kepler problem is dynamically equivalent to a system of two point masses which move in perpendicular lines (or planes) and interact according to Newton’s law of universal gravitation. Moreover, we prove that generalised version of anisotropic Kepler problem as well as anisotropic two centres problem are non-integrable. This was achieved thanks to investigation of differential Galois groups of variational equations along certain particular solutions. Properties of these groups yield very strong necessary integrability conditions.     

Health risk assessment related to an effect of sample size fractions: methodological remarks

Contents of As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn were determined in the material collected in sandboxes of seven spa resorts located in S Poland (CCE) and their results used to establish a health risk of children. After sieving out grains > 2 mm, the bulk samples were quantitatively separated into four grain fractions: 2000–1000, 1000–200, 200–63 and < 63 µm. In each of them were determined: the mineral composition, the total contents of the elements, and the distribution of the elements among the fractions distribution factor. In the bulk material < 2 mm, the totals of the elements are 5–64 times lower than in the finest fractions (< 63 µm). Considering that the finest fractions are enriched in clay minerals such as clinochlore, illite and kaolinite, which can adsorb and desorb metals, this material is most dangerous for children, staying both permanently and temporarily in the spas. The total health risks HI resulting from non-carcinogenic elements present in the fractions < 63 µm are 1.26 and 0.94, for the children-residents 3 and 6 years old, respectively. The figures are disturbing as one of them exceeds and the other is close to a permissible limit of 1. The highest contribution (93.4%) into the total HI is caused by inadvertent swallowing the soil “dirt”: the ingestion path HQ _ing for the 3 years old residents is 1.17, and for the 6-year olds 0.88. With respect to the elements, the highest is the risk resulting from Pb: HQ _in values of the residents are 4.71E−01 and 3.54E−01 for the 3-year olds and the 6-year olds. Slightly lower are the HQ _ing values calculated for both age groups: in the case of Cr—3.12E−01 and 2.34E−01 and As—2.92E−01 and 2.19E−01). The dermal path (HQ _dermal ) contributes to the total HI much less as it equals 6.5%, while the contribution of the inhalation path (HQ _inhal ) is considerably the lowest and equals only 0.1%. The Risk indexes determined in the case of cancerogenic components for both age groups of the spa residents are lower than the permissible limit 10E−5 and equal 6.48E−06 and 9.72E−06, respectively. Considering the children that only visit the spas, all the calculated indexes, i.e., HI and Risk, are significantly lower than those determined for the children-residents.

     

Sibsonian and non-Sibsonian natural neighbour interpolation of the total electron content value

In radioastronomy the interferometric measurement between radiotelescopes located relatively close to each other helps removing ionospheric effects. Unfortunately, in case of networks such as LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), due to long baselines (currently up to 1500 km), interferometric methods fail to provide sufficiently accurate ionosphere delay corrections. Practically it means that systems such as LOFAR need external ionosphere information, coming from Global or Regional Ionospheric Maps (GIMs or RIMs, respectively). Thanks to the technology based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), the scientific community is provided with ionosphere sounding virtually worldwide. In this paper we compare several interpolation methods for RIMs computation based on scattered Vertical Total Electron Content measurements located on one thin ionospheric layer (Ionospheric Pierce Points—IPPs). The results of this work show that methods that take into account the topology of the data distribution (e.g., natural neighbour interpolation) perform better than those based on geometric computation only (e.g., distance-weighted methods).     

Changes of snow cover in Poland

The present paper examines variability of characteristics of snow cover (snow cover depth, number of days with snow cover and dates of beginning and end of snow cover) in Poland. The study makes use of a set of 43 long time series of observation records from the stations in Poland, from 1952 to 2013. To describe temporal changes in snow cover characteristics, the intervals of 1952–1990 and of 1991–2013 are compared and trends in analysed data are sought (e.g., using the Mann–Kendall test). Observed behaviour of time series of snow-related variables is complex and not easy to interpret, for instance because of the location of the research area in the zone of transitional moderate climate, where strong variability of climate events is one of the main attributes. A statistical link between the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index and the snow cover depth, as well as the number of snow cover days is found.     

Free core nutation period inferred from the gravity measurements at Józefosław

The Free Core Nutation (FCN) is an important eigenmode which affects both Earth rotation and body tide. The FCN parameters, the resonance period and the quality factor are important for understanding the dynamics of the Earth at nearly diurnal periods. Those parameters are usually estimated either from the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations of nutation, or from the tidal gravity measurements. In this paper we investigate the determination of the FCN parameters from gravity records covering a period of more than three years, collected with the use of a LaCoste&Romberg Earth Tide no. 26 gravimeter, located at Józefos?aw observatory near Warsaw. From the resonant enhancements of gravimetric factors and phases of diurnal tidal gravity waves, we could infer the FCN period to be equal to 430 sidereal days. This result is in very good agreement with previous gravimetric and VLBI nutation results, confirming the discrepancy in the dynamic flattening of the outer liquid core from its theoretical value based on the hydrostatic equilibrium assumption. The estimated FCN quality factor (Q ≈ 1300) is considerably smaller than the VLBI nutation result, which confirms that the local gravity measurements are more sensitive than VLBI global analyses to site-dependent phenomena (such as atmospheric and indirect ocean tidal effects). We also investigated the importance of gravimetric corrections in the FCN analysis, including numerical tests and simulations. This allowed us to estimate the uncertainty of FCN parameters due to improper or incomplete set of environmental corrections. We took also into account the impact of gravimetric factor errors and tidal wave selection on estimated FCN parameters. We demonstrated that despite relatively noisy measurements due to unfavorable gravimeter location, we were able to obtain very good results in case when proper correction and tidal wave selection were applied.