Timing of mineralization at the Shihu gold deposit in the middle segment of the Taihang Mountain,China

The Shihu gold deposit, located in the middle-south section of the core of the Fuping mantle branch structure, is hosted in the Archean Fuping Group and adjacent to the quartz diorite porphyrite. The gold deposit is the only large gold deposit with reserves of more than 30 tons gold discovered in western Hebei Province so far. In order to constrain the timing of mineralization of this ore deposit, this paper focuses on the isotopic dating of zircon and pyrite. Zircons in gold-bearing quartz veins are magmatic in origin and no hydrothermal zircon has been found in such quartz veins, indicating that zircons were derived from the wall rocks. U–Pb ages of zircons fall mainly in the two domains: 2492 ± 82 and 136 ± 4 Ma, respectively, indicative of the contribution of the Fuping-Group TTG gneiss and Yanshanian igneous rocks, respectively. The Re–Os isotopic compositions of pyrites in the gold-bearing quartz veins yield an isochron age of 127 ± 31 Ma. Combined with other dating results, we suggest that the main metallogenic age of the Shihu gold deposit is 120–127 Ma.     

乌尉高速公路边坡稳定性综合评价

针对乌尉(乌鲁木齐至尉犁)高速公路地处高寒、高海拔、高地震烈度区,地质环境条件复杂的特点,提出一种基于多判据的边坡稳定性模糊综合评价方法。首先,分析研究三高地区公路沿线工程地质条件、边坡岩体结构特征及其变形破坏模式。在此基础上,以TSMR评价体系为框架,考虑地震荷载对边坡稳定性的影响,引入地震作用影响系数β,建立了适用于“三高”地区公路边坡岩体质量分级体系THRSMR;基于边坡可靠性分析理论,归纳总结Monte Carlo法的操作步骤,并借助GEO-SLOPE软件,给出各研究边坡的可靠度指标与失效概率;最后,将定性评价、极限平衡分析、可靠度分析和数值计算的结果分别作为基础指标,采用模糊综合评价方法对每一边坡的边坡稳定性,给出进一步量化结论。其结果对类似地区高速公路边坡稳定性评价具有一定的参考价值。     

Flooding a landscape: impact of Holocene transgression on coastal sedimentology and underwater archaeology in Kiladha Bay (Greece)

Franchthi Cave, bordering Kiladha Bay, in Greece, is a key archaeological site, due to its long occupation time, from?~?40,000 to?~?5000 year BP. To date, no clear evidence of Neolithic human dwellings in the cave was found, supporting the assumption that Neolithic people may have built a village where there is now Kiladha Bay. During the Neolithic period/Early Holocene, wide areas of the bay were indeed emerged above sea level. Bathymetric and seismic data identified a terrace incised by a valley in?~?1 to 2 m sediment depth. Eight sediment cores, up to 6.3-m-long, were retrieved and analysed using petrophysical, sedimentological, geochemical, and chronostratigraphic methods. The longest core extends into the exposure surface, consisting of a layer of carbonate rubble in a finer matrix, representing weathering processes. Dated organic remains place this unit at?~?8500 cal year BP. It is overlain by stiff silty mud representing an estuarine environment. This mud is capped by reduced sediments with roots marking an exposure surface. A shell-layer, dated to?~?6300 cal year BP, overlies this terrestrial sequence, reflecting the marine transgression. This layer occurs at 10.8 mbsl, 7.7 m deeper than the global sea level at that time, suggesting tectonic subsidence in the area. It is overlain by finer-grained marine carbonate-rich sediments. The top of the core shows traces of eutrophication, pebbles and marine shells, all likely a result of modern anthropogenic processes. These results are interpreted in the context of human occupation: the exposed surface contains pottery sherds, one dating to the Early to Middle Neolithic period, indicating that Neolithic people were present in this dynamic landscape interacting with a migrating coastline. Even if the artefacts are isolated, future investigations of the submerged landscape off Franchthi Cave might lead to the discovery of a Neolithic village, which eventually became buried under marine sediments.     

The Fragmentation in a Protoplanetary Disk and the Properties of the Resultant Self-Gravitating Clumps

We study the fragmentation properties in the protoplanetary disk and properties of the resultant self-gravitating clumps using our newly constructed disk model. Our disk model includes the mass inflall term from a molecular cloud core and the photoevaporation winds effect. We adopt the conventional fragmentation criterion to judge whether a protoplanetary disk can fragment. In this work, we follow our previous work to investigate the properties of the resultant self-gravitating clumps. In our calculation, the initial masses of the resultant self-gravitating clumps lie in the range of tens of M_J to more than one hundred of M_J, where M_J is the Jupiter mass. These initial masses can seemingly account for the masses of extrasolar planets in magnitude. We also calculate the subsequent gas accretion of clumps in 1.27 × 10⁴ yr after the formation of self-gravitating clumps. We find that the subsequent gas accretion of self-gravitating clumps is very efficient, and the clump masses grow to hundreds of M_J and the physical radii R_c of clumps increase to about 10 AU. Additionally, we also calculate the orbital migration of clumps. We find that most clumps have short migration timescale to be accreted onto the protostar, and only a small fraction of clumps have long migration timescale (>10⁶ yr) to successfully become gas giant planets. These results are consistent with previous studies.     

Adjoint analysis of Buckley-Leverett and two-phase flow equations

This paper analyzes the adjoint equations and boundary conditions for porous media flow models, specifically the Buckley-Leverett equation, and the compressible two-phase flow equations in mass conservation form. An adjoint analysis of a general scalar hyperbolic conservation law whose primal solutions include a shock jump is initially presented, and the results are later specialized to the Buckley-Leverett equation. The non-convexity of the Buckley-Leverett flux function results in adjoint characteristics that are parallel to the shock front upstream of the shock and emerge from the shock front downstream of the shock. Thus, in contrast to the behavior of Burgers’ equation where the adjoint is continuous at a shock, the Buckley-Leverett adjoint, in general, contains a discontinuous jump across the shock. Discrete adjoint solutions from space-time discontinuous Galerkin finite element approximations of the Buckley-Leverett equation are shown to be consistent with the derived closed-form analytical solutions. Furthermore, a general result relating the adjoint equations for different (though equivalent) primal equations is used to relate the two-phase flow adjoints to the Buckley-Leverett adjoint. Adjoint solutions from space-time discontinuous Galerkin finite element approximations of the two-phase flow equations are observed to obey this relationship.     

High-dimensional geostatistical history matching

Hydrocarbon reservoir modelling and characterisation is a challenging subject within the oil and gas industry due to the lack of well data and the natural heterogeneities of the Earth’s subsurface. Integrating historical production data into the geo-modelling workflow, commonly designated by history matching, allows better reservoir characterisation and the possibility of predicting the reservoir behaviour. We present herein a geostatistical-based multi-objective history matching methodology. It starts with the generation of an initial ensemble of the subsurface petrophysical property of interest through stochastic sequential simulation. Each model is then ranked according the match between its dynamic response, after fluid flow simulation, and the observed available historical production data. This enables building regionalised Pareto fronts and the definition of a large ensemble of optimal subsurface Earth models that fit all the observed production data without compromising the exploration of the uncertainty space. The proposed geostatistical multi-objective history matching technique is successfully implemented in a benchmark synthetic reservoir dataset, the PUNQ-S3, where 12 objectives are targeted.     

Constraint energy minimizing generalized multiscale finite element method in the mixed formulation

This paper presents a novel mass-conservative mixed multiscale method for solving flow equations in heterogeneous porous media. The media properties (the permeability) contain multiple scales and high contrast. The proposed method solves the flow equation in a mixed formulation on a coarse grid by constructing multiscale basis functions. The resulting velocity field is mass-conservative on the fine grid. Our main goal is to obtain first-order convergence in terms of the mesh size which is independent of local contrast. This is achieved, first, by constructing some auxiliary spaces, which contain global information that cannot be localized, in general. This is built on our previous work on the generalized multiscale finite element method (GMsFEM). In the auxiliary space, multiscale basis functions corresponding to small (contrast-dependent) eigenvalues are selected. These basis functions represent the high-conductivity channels (which connect the boundaries of a coarse block). Next, we solve local problems to construct multiscale basis functions for the velocity field. These local problems are formulated in the oversampled domain, taking into account some constraints with respect to auxiliary spaces. The latter allows fast spatial decay of local solutions and, thus, allows taking smaller oversampled regions. The number of basis functions depends on small eigenvalues of the local spectral problems. Moreover, multiscale pressure basis functions are needed in constructing the velocity space. Our multiscale spaces have a minimal dimension, which is needed to avoid contrast dependence in the convergence. The method’s convergence requires an oversampling of several layers. We present an analysis of our approach. Our numerical results confirm that the convergence rate is first order with respect to the mesh size and independent of the contrast.     

Interior boundary-aligned unstructured grid generation and cell-centered versus vertex-centered CVD-MPFA performance

Grid generation for reservoir simulation must honor classical key constraints and be boundary aligned such that control-volume boundaries are aligned with geological features such as layers, shale barriers, fractures, faults, pinch-outs, and multilateral wells. An unstructured grid generation procedure is proposed that automates control-volume and/or control point boundary alignment and yields a PEBI-mesh both with respect to primal and dual (essentially PEBI) cells. In order to honor geological features in the primal configuration, we introduce the idea of protection circles, and to generate a dual-cell feature based grid, we construct halos around key geological features. The grids generated are employed to study comparative performance of cell-centred versus cell-vertex control-volume distributed multi-point flux approximation (CVD-MPFA) finite-volume formulations using equivalent degrees of freedom. The formulation of CVD-MPFA schemes in cell-centred and cell-vertex modes is analogous and requires switching control volume from primal to dual or vice versa together with appropriate data structures and boundary conditions. The relative benefits of both types of approximation, i.e., cell-centred versus vertex-centred, are made clear in terms of flow resolution and degrees of freedom required.     

Ensemble clustering for efficient robust optimization of naturally fractured reservoirs

In the development of naturally fractured reservoirs (NFRs), the existence of natural fractures induces severe fingering and breakthrough. To manage the flooding process and improve the ultimate recovery, we propose a numerical workflow to generate optimal production schedules for smart wells, in which the inflow control valve (ICV) settings can be controlled individually. To properly consider the uncertainty introduced by randomly distributed natural fractures, the robust optimization would require a large ensemble size and it would be computationally demanding. In this work, a hierarchical clustering method is proposed to select representative models for the robust optimization in order to avoid redundant simulation runs and improve the efficiency of the robust optimization. By reducing the full ensemble of models into a small subset ensemble, the efficiency of the robust optimization algorithm is significantly improved. The robust optimization is performed using the StoSAG scheme to find the optimal well controls that maximize the net-present-value (NPV) of the NFR’s development. Due to the discrete property of a natural fracture field, traditional feature extraction methods such as model-parameter-based clustering may not be directly applicable. Therefore, two different kinds of clustering-based optimization methods, a state-based (e.g., s _w profiles) clustering and a response-based (e.g., production rates) clustering, are proposed and compared. The computational results show that the robust clustering optimization could increase the computational efficiency significantly without sacrificing much expected NPV of the robust optimization. Moreover, the performance of different clustering algorithms varies widely in correspondence to different selections of clustering features. By properly extracting model features, the clustered subset could adequately represent the uncertainty of the full ensemble.