Clinoform architecture and along‐strike facies variability through an exhumed erosional to accretionary basin margin transition

Exhumed basin margin‐scale clinothems provide important archives for understanding process interactions and reconstructing the physiography of sedimentary basins. However, studies of coeval shelf through slope to basin‐floor deposits are rarely documented, mainly due to outcrop or subsurface dataset limitations. Unit G from the Laingsburg depocentre (Karoo Basin, South Africa) is a rare example of a complete basin margin scale clinothem (>60 km long, 200 m‐high), with >10 km of depositional strike control, which allows a quasi‐3D study of a preserved shelf‐slope‐basin floor transition over a ca. 1,200 km² area. Sand‐prone, wave‐influenced topset deposits close to the shelf‐edge rollover zone can be physically mapped down dip for ca. 10 km as they thicken and transition into heterolithic foreset/slope deposits. These deposits progressively fine and thin over tens of km farther down dip into sand‐starved bottomset/basin‐floor deposits. Only a few km along strike, the coeval foreset/slope deposits are bypass‐dominated with incisional features interpreted as minor slope conduits/gullies. The margin here is steeper, more channelized and records a stepped profile with evidence of sand‐filled intraslope topography, a preserved base‐of‐slope transition zone and sand‐rich bottomset/basin‐floor deposits. Unit G is interpreted as part of a composite depositional sequence that records a change in basin margin style from an underlying incised slope with large sand‐rich basin‐floor fans to an overlying accretion‐dominated shelf with limited sand supply to the slope and basin floor. The change in margin style is accompanied with decreased clinoform height/slope and increased shelf width. This is interpreted to reflect a transition in subsidence style from regional sag, driven by dynamic topography/inherited basement configuration, to early foreland basin flexural loading. Results of this study caution against reconstructing basin margin successions from partial datasets without accounting for temporal and spatial physiographic changes, with potential implications on predictive basin evolution models.     

Sediment routing in the Zagros foreland basin: Drainage reorganization and a shift from axial to transverse sediment dispersal in the Kurdistan region of Iraq

In the northwestern sector of the Zagros foreland basin, axial fluvial systems initially delivered fine-grained sediments from northwestern source regions into a contiguous basin, and later transverse fluvial systems delivered coarse-grained sediments from northeastern sources into a structurally partitioned basin by fold-thrust deformation. Here we integrate sedimentologic, stratigraphic, palaeomagnetic and geochronologic data from the northwestern Zagros foreland basin to define the Neogene history of deposition and sediment routing in response to progressive advance of the Zagros fold-thrust belt. This study constrains the depositional environments, timing of deposition and provenance of nonmarine clastic deposits of the Injana (Upper Fars), Mukdadiya (Lower Bakhtiari) and Bai-Hasan (Upper Bakhtiari) Formations in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Sediments of the Injana Formation (~12.4–7.75 Ma) were transported axially (orogen-parallel) from northwest to southeast by meandering and low-sinuosity channel belt system. In contrast, during deposition of the Mukdadiya Formation (~7.75–5 Ma), sediments were delivered transversely (orogen-perpendicular) from northeast to southwest by braided and low-sinuosity channel belt system in distributive fluvial megafans. By ~5 Ma, the northwestern Zagros foreland basin became partitioned by growth of the Mountain Front Flexure and considerable gravel was introduced in localized alluvial fans derived from growing topographic highs. Foredeep accumulation rates during deposition of the Injana, Mukdadiya and Bai-Hasan Formations averaged 350, 400 and 600 m/Myr respectively, suggesting accelerated accommodation generation in a rapidly subsiding basin governed by flexural subsidence. Detrital zircon U-Pb age spectra show that in addition to sources of Mesozoic-Cenozoic cover strata, the Injana Formation was derived chiefly from Palaeozoic-Precambrian (including Carboniferous and latest Neoproterozoic) strata in an axial position to the northwest, likely from the Bitlis-Puturge Massif and broader Eastern Anatolia. In contrast, the Mukdadiya and Bai-Hasan Formations yield distinctive Palaeogene U-Pb age peaks, particularly in the southeastern sector of the study region, consistent with transverse delivery from the arc-related terranes of the Walash and Naopurdan volcano-sedimentary groups (Gaveh-Rud domain?) and Urumieh-Dokhtar magmatic arc to the northeast. These temporal and spatial variations in stratigraphic framework, depositional environments, sediment routing and compositional provenance reveal a major drainage reorganization during Neogene shortening in the Zagros fold-thrust belt. Whereas axial fluvial systems initially dominated the foreland basin during early orogenesis in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, transverse fluvial systems were subsequently established and delivered major sediment volumes to the foreland as a consequence of the abrupt deformation advance and associated topographic growth in the Zagros.     

The Qijurittuq site (IbGk-3), Eastern Hudson Bay: An IPY Interdisciplinary Study

Geografisk Tidsskrift—Danish Journal of Geography 110(2):227–243, 2010

An interdisciplinary study was conducted at Qijurittuq (IbGk-3), an archaeological site located on Drayton Island along the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, Nunavik. Local Inuit made important contributions to the research. High school students participated in the field school, and elders shared their traditional knowledge. The elders expressed an interest in the source of the wood used to construct Qijurittuq's semi-subterranean dwellings, and this inspired us to expand our research in that direction. This interdisciplinary study included a reconstruction of the geomorphological and environmental history of Drayton Island, wood provenance and dendrochronology studies, research on house architecture and settlement patterns, and a zooarchaeological analysis. This paper synthesizes the preliminary results of this interdisciplinary investigation within the context of climate change. We discuss the persistence of semi-subterranean dwellings in eastern Hudson Bay long after they had been abandoned elsewhere. At Qijurittuq, their abandonment corresponds with the end of Little Ice Age. However, at the same time, the development of more permanent contact with Euro-Canadians was having a strong impact upon Inuit culture.     

A whole-basin, mass-balance approach to paleolimnology

Lake sediments record the flux of materials (nutrients, pollutants, particulates) through a lake system both qualitatively, as changes in the composition of geochemical and biological tracers, as well as quantitatively, through changes in their rate of burial. Burial rates provide a direct link to contemporary (neo-) limnological studies as well as management efforts aimed at load reductions, but are difficult to reconstruct accurately from single cores owing to the spatial and temporal variability of sediment deposition in most lakes. The accurate determination of whole-lake burial rates from analysis of multiple cores, though requiring more effort per lake, can help resolve such problems and improve our understanding of sediment heterogeneity at multiple scales. Partial solutions to these problems also include focusing corrections based on ²¹⁰Pb flux, co-evaluation of concentration profiles, trend analysis using multiple lakes, and trend replication based on a small number of cores from the same lake. Recent multi-core studies demonstrate that no single core site faithfully records the whole-lake time-resolved input of materials, but that as few as five well-placed cores can provide a reliable record of whole-lake sediment flux for morphometrically simple basins. Lake-wide sediment fluxes can be coupled with reconstructed outflow losses to calculate historical changes in watershed and atmospheric loading of nutrients, metals, and other constituents. The ability of paleolimnology to accurately assess the sedimentary flux and extend the period of reference into the distant past represents an important contribution to the understanding of biogeochemical processes and their response to human and natural disturbance.     

Estimation of precipitation fields from 1-minute rain gauge time series – comparison of spatial and spatio-temporal interpolation methods

Accurate estimations of spatio-temporal fields at unsampled locations are important in a number of applications. Often, spatio-temporal fields are advected, which means the change in field values over time at a particular point in space stems to a large extent from motion of a more or less constant spatial field. For such dynamic fields, interpolation methods including information on the motion behaviour of the field are promising extensions of solely spatial (snapshot) and symmetric spatio-temporal methods. In this paper, the performance of different deterministic and geostatistical interpolation methods is compared for precipitation estimation from 1-minute time series of spatially distributed rain gauges. The focus is on spatio-temporal methods that include information on the motion behaviour of the rainfield, estimated from weather radar using optical flow. The different interpolation methods are introduced and evaluated using rain gauge measurements of a 15-day period and cross-validation. The results show that including information on the motion behaviour significantly improves interpolation quality in terms of RMSE.     

Valuing the non-CO2 climate impacts of aviation

The non-CO₂ climate impact of aviation (NO_x and contrails) is assessed and emissions weighting factors (EWFs) i.e., the factor by which aviation CO₂ emissions should be multiplied to get the CO₂-equivalent emissions for annual fleet average conditions are estimated. The EWFs are estimated using two economic metrics. One is based on the relative damage cost between non-CO₂ forcers and CO₂. The other is based on the cost-effective valuation between the non-CO₂ forcers and CO₂ given an upper ceiling on the global annual average surface temperature (set at 2?K above pre-industrial levels). We also estimate EWFs using three physical metrics, Global Warming Potential (GWP), Global Temperature change Potential (GTP) and Sustained GTP (SGTP) and compare our results with the economics based metrics. Given best estimates on the forcing contributions from CO₂, contrails and NO_x from aviation and by using a discount rate of 3%/year, the RDC based metric gives an EWF equal to 1.4 (slightly higher than EWFs based on GWP and SGTP using a 100?year time horizon). EWF using the cost-effective approach depends on the time that remains before stabilization occurs. It is roughly equal to unity until a few years before the temperature reaches its ceiling, and approximately 2 when stabilization has taken place. EWFs based on GTP resemble those based on CETO when the time left to when stabilization occurs is sufficiently large. Once stabilization has occurred CETO values resemble RDC based values. If aviation-induced cirrus clouds are included, uncertainties increase and the EWFs for GWP, SGTP and RDC based metrics end up in the range 1.3–2.9, while EWFs for GTP and CETO remain close to unity in the near term.     

Compositional and thermal convection in magma chambers

Magma chambers cool and crystallize at a rate determined by the heat flux from the chamber. The heat is lost predominantly through the roof, whereas crystallization takes place mainly at the floor. Both processes provide destabilizing buoyancy fluxes which drive highly unsteady, chaotic convection in the magma. Even at the lowest cooling rates the thermal Rayleigh number Ra is found to be extremely large for both mafic and granitic magmas. Since the compositional and thermal buoyancy fluxes are directly related it can be shown that the compositional Rayleigh number Rs (and therefore a total Rayleigh number) is very much greater than Ra. In the case of basaltic melt crystallizing olivine Rs is up to 10⁶ times greater than Ra. However compositional and thermal buoyancy fluxes are roughly equal. Therefore thermal and compositional density gradients contribute equally to convection velocities in the interior of the magma. Effects of thermal buoyancy generated by latent heat release at the floor are included.The latent heat boundary layer at the floor of a basaltic chamber is shown to be of the order of 1 m thick with very low thermal gradients whereas the compositional boundary layer is about 1 cm thick with large compositional gradients. As a consequence, the variation in the degree of supercooling in front of the crystal-liquid interface is dominated by compositional effects. The habit and composition of the growing crystals is also controlled by the nature of the compositional boundary layer. Elongate crystals are predicted to form when the thickness of the compositional boundary layer is small compared with the crystal size (as in laboratory experiments with aqueous solutions). In contrast, equant crystals form when the boundary layer is thicker than the crystals (as in most magma chambers). Instability of the boundary layer in the latter case gives rise to zoning within crystals. Diffusion of compatible trace elements through the boundary layer can also explain an inverse correlation, observed in layered intrusions, between Ni concentration in olivine and the proportion of Ni-bearing phases in the crystallizing assemblage.