A fully coupled simple model for unsaturated soils

Different phenomena influence the strength and volumetric behavior of unsaturated soils. Among the most important are suction hardening, hydraulic hysteresis, and the influence of volumetric strain on the soil-water retention curves. Fully coupled hydro-mechanical models require including all three phenomena in their constitutive relationships. Among these phenomena, suction hardening is the most influencing as it determines the apparent preconsolidation stress, the position of the loading-collapse yield surface, and the shift of both the isotropic consolidation and the critical state lines. In this paper, a fully coupled hydro mechanical model is presented. It is based on the modified Cam-Clay model but includes a yield surface with anisotropic hardening that takes account of the shift of the critical state line with suction. For highly overconsolidated materials, the sub-loading surface concept has been included in order to increase the precision of the model for these materials. The shift of the retention curves produced by volumetric strains is simulated using a hydraulic model based on the grain and current pore size distribution of the soil.     

Climatic and environmental controls on the occurrence and distributions of long chain alkenones in lakes of the interior United States

Long chain alkenones (LCA) are temperature-sensitive lipids with great potential for quantitative reconstruction of past continental climate. We conducted the first survey for alkenone biomarkers from 55 different lakes in the Northern Great Plains and Nebraska Sand Hills of the United States. Among those surveyed, we found 13 lakes that contain LCAs in the surface sediments. The highest concentrations of alkenones in sediments are found in cold (mean annual air temperature ∼11 °C versus 17 °C in our warmest sites), brackish to mesosaline (salinity = 8.5-9.7 g/L), and alkaline (pH = 8.4-9.0) lakes with high concentrations of sodium and sulfate. The dynamics of stratification and nutrient availability also appear to play a role in LCA abundance, as early spring mixing promotes a bloom of alkenone-producing haptophytes. Four of the alkenone-containing sites contain the C_37:4 alkenone; however, we discovered an unprecedented lacustrine alkenone distribution in a cluster of lakes, with a total absence of C_37:4 alkenone. We attribute this unusual composition to a different haptophyte species and show that the sulfate:carbonate ratio may control the occurrence of these two distinct populations. We created a new in-situ temperature calibration for lacustrine sites that contain C_37:4 using a water-column calibration from Lake George, ND and show that is linearly correlated to lake water temperature (R² = 0.74), but is not. A number of lakes contain an unidentified compound series that elutes close to the LCAs, highlighting the importance of routine GC-MS examination prior to using lacustrine LCAs for paleotemperature reconstructions.     

Magnetic characterization of Cretaceous‐Tertiary boundary sediments

Abstract— Rock magnetic properties across several K‐T boundary sections have been investigated to reveal any possible magnetic signature associated with the remains of the impact event at the end of the Cretaceous. Studied sections' locations vary in distance to the Chicxulub structure from distal (Agost and Caravaca, Spain), through closer (ODP Hole 1049A, Blake Nose, North Atlantic), to proximal (El Mimbral and La Lajilla, Mexico). A clear magnetic signature is associated with the fireball layer in the most distal sections, consisting of a sharp increase in susceptibility and saturation isothermal remanent magnetization (SIRM), and a decrease in remanence coercivity. Magnetic properties in these sections point to a distinctive ferrimagnetic phase, probably corresponding to the reported Mg‐ and Ni‐rich, highly oxidized spinels of meteoritic origin. At closer and proximal sections magnetic properties are different. Although there is an increase in susceptibility and SIRM associated with a rusty layer placed on top of the siliciclastic deposit in proximal sections, and with a similar limonitic layer on top of the spherule bed that defines the boundary at Blake Nose, the magnetic properties indicate a mixture of iron oxyhydroxides dominated by fine‐grained goethite. Based on previous geochemical studies at Blake Nose and new geochemical and PGE abundance measurements performed in this work at El Mimbral, this goethite‐rich layer can be interpreted as an effect of diagenetic remobilization and precipitation of Fe. There is not enough evidence to assert that this Fe concentration layer at proximal sections is directly related to deposition of fine meteoritic material. Magnetic, geochemical, and iridium data reject it as a primary meteoritic phase.     

Simulation of Non-Gaussian Transmissivity Fields Honoring Piezometric Data and Integrating Soft and Secondary Information

The conditional probabilities (CP) method implements a new procedure for the generation of transmissivity fields conditional to piezometric head data capable to sample nonmulti-Gaussian random functions and to integrate soft and secondary information. The CP method combines the advantages of the self-calibrated (SC) method with probability fields to circumvent some of the drawbacks of the SC method—namely, its difficulty to integrate soft and secondary information or to generate non-Gaussian fields. The SC method is based on the perturbation of a seed transmissivity field already conditional to transmissivity and secondary data, with the perturbation being function of the transmissivity variogram. The CP method is also based on the perturbation of a seed field; however, the perturbation is made function of the full transmissivity bivariate distribution and of the correlation to the secondary data. The two methods are applied to a sample of an exhaustive non-Gaussian data set of natural origin to demonstrate the interest of using a simulation method that is capable to model the spatial patterns of transmissivity variability beyond the variogram. A comparison of the probabilistic predictions of convective transport derived from a Monte Carlo exercise using both methods demonstrates the superiority of the CP method when the underlying spatial variability is non-Gaussian.