Statistical landslide susceptibility assessment in a dynamic environment: A case study for Lanzhou City,Gansu Province,NW China

This study presents a statistical landslide susceptibility assessment (LSA) in a dynamic environment. The study area is located in the eastern part of Lanzhou, NW China. The Lanzhou area has exhibited rapid urbanization rates over the past decade associated with greening, continuous land use change, and geomorphic reshaping activities. To consider the dynamics of the environment in the LSA, multitemporal data for landslide inventories and the corresponding causal factors were collected. The weights of evidence (WofE) method was used to perform the LSA. Three time stamps, i.e., 2000, 2012, and 2016, were selected to assess the state of landslide susceptibility over time. The results show a clear evolution of the landslide susceptibility patterns that was mainly governed by anthropogenic activities directed toward generating safer building grounds for civil infrastructure. The low and very low susceptibility areas increased by approximately 10% between 2000 and 2016. At the same time, areas of medium, high and very high susceptibility zones decreased proportionally. Based on the results, an approach to design the statistical LSA under dynamic conditions is proposed, the issues and limitations of this approach are also discussed. The study shows that under dynamic conditions, the requirements for data quantity and quality increase significantly. A dynamic environment requires greater effort to estimate the causal relations between the landslides and controlling factors as well as for model validation.     

Barium uptake into the shells of the common mussel (Mytilus edulis) and the potential for estuarine paleo-chemistry reconstruction

In this study we test if calcite shells of the common mussel, Mytilus edulis, contain barium in proportion to the water in which they grew. Similar to all bivalves analyzed to date, the [Ba/Ca]_shell profiles are characterized by a relatively flat background [Ba/Ca]_shell, interrupted by sharp [Ba/Ca]_shell peaks. Previous studies have focused on these [Ba/Ca]_shell peaks, but not on the background [Ba/Ca]_shell. We show that in both laboratory and field experiments, there is a direct relationship between the background [Ba/Ca]_shell and [Ba/Ca]_water in M. edulis shells. The laboratory and field data provided background Ba/Ca partition coefficients (D_Ba) of 0.10 ± 0.02 and 0.071 ± 0.001, respectively. This range is slightly higher than the D_Ba previously determined for inorganic calcite, and slightly lower than foraminiferal calcite. These data suggest that M. edulis shells can be used as an indicator of [Ba/Ca]_water, and therefore, fossil or archaeological M. edulis shells could be used to extend knowledge of estuarine dissolved Ba throughputs back in time. Moreover, considering the inverse relationship between [Ba/Ca]_water and salinity, background [Ba/Ca]_shell data could be used as an estuary specific indicator of salinity. The cause of the [Ba/Ca]_shell peaks is more confusing, both the laboratory and field experiments indicate that they cannot be used as a direct proxy of [Ba/Ca]_water or phytoplankton production, but may possibly be caused by barite ingestion.     

Style and evolution of salt pillows and related structures in the northern part of the Northeast German Basin

The northern part of the Northeast German Basin contains a large number of Late Permian (Zechstein) salt pillows, whereas diapiric structures are almost completely absent. This lack of diapirs facilitated the study of early stages of salt movement in the basin. Salt pillows and related structures were investigated in terms of distribution, geometry and time of initiation of salt flow within the regional geological context. The primary Zechstein thickness in the study area was reconstructed to gain more insight into the relationship between the geometry of the salt layer and the style of the salt-related structures. In this study, no clear spatial relationship between the salt structures and basement faults has been found and the location of the salt structures in this area appears to be highly independent of the underlying structural grain. The overburden is affected by minor faulting. We propose that buckling of the overburden due to regional compression significantly contributed to the initiation of the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous salt structures in the basin. Reverse faulting of the Gardelegen and Haldensleben Faults is related to inversion tectonics and exerted a compression on the basin fill. During the deformation, the Late Permian salt layer acted as an efficient detachment and led to a marked decoupling of the Mesozoic overburden from the underlying pre-Zechstein rocks.     

Functioning of intertidal flats inferred from temporal and spatial dynamics of O<Subscript>2</Subscript>, H<Subscript>2</Subscript>S and pH in their surface sediment

In this article, we describe the dynamics of pH, O₂ and H₂S in the top 5–10 cm of an intertidal flat consisting of permeable sand. These dynamics were measured at the low water line and higher up the flat and during several seasons. Together with pore water nutrient data, the dynamics confirm that two types of transport act as driving forces for the cycling of elements (Billerbeck et al. 2006b): Fast surface dynamics of pore water chemistry occur only during inundation. Thus, they must be driven by hydraulics (tidal and wave action) and are highly dependent on weather conditions. This was demonstrated clearly by quick variation in oxygen penetration depth: Seeps are active at low tide only, indicating that the pore water flow in them is driven by a pressure head developing at low tide. The seeps are fed by slow transport of pore water over long distances in the deeper sediment. In the seeps, high concentrations of degradation products such as nutrients and sulphide were found, showing them to be the outlets of deep-seated degradation processes. The degradation products appear toxic for bioturbating/bioirrigating organisms, as a consequence of which, these were absent in the wider seep areas. These two mechanisms driving advection determine oxygen dynamics in these flats, whereas bioirrigation plays a minor role. The deep circulation causes a characteristic distribution of strongly reduced pore water near the low water line and rather more oxidised sediments in the centre of the flats. The two combined transport phenomena determine the fluxes of solutes and gases from the sediment to the surface water and in this way create specific niches for various types of microorganisms.     

Distribution, characterization, and geochemical controls of elements of concern in uranium mine tailings, Key Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada

The distribution of As, Mo, Ni and Se in the aqueous and solid phases of U mine tailings in the Deilmann Tailings Management Facility (DTMF), located at the Key Lake mine in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, was defined using as-discharged tailings samples collected monthly starting in 1996 and core samples collected from the DTMF from 3 locations on 3 occasions between 2004 and 2009. These data indicated that the DTMF can be divided into two geochemical zones; tailings generated from the Deilmann ore body between 1996 and 2000 and tailings from the McArthur River ore body, mined after July 2000. The Deilmann tailings solids are generally characterized by greater elemental concentrations than those in the McArthur River tailings, particularly for As, Co and Ni. These elevated concentrations are attributed to the abundance of Ni–Co–As–S minerals in this ore. The mean aqueous concentrations of As, Mo, Ni, and Se are 3.7, 23.2, 0.14, and 0.02 mg L⁻¹, respectively, in the Deilmann porewaters and 0.20, 4.16, 0.06, and 0.03 mg L⁻¹, respectively, in the McArthur River porewaters. Similarly, the mean As, Mo, Ni, and Se solid phase concentrations are 5.89 × 10³, 69.9, 3.20 × 10³, and 17.4 μg g⁻¹, respectively, for the Deilmann tailings and 440, 13.6, 551, and 3.03 μg g⁻¹ in the McArthur River tailings. Statistically, pH remained unchanged from the time of discharge while Eh values have remained oxic with no significant change between the two tailings types over 15 a of residence time. Results from sequential extractions, thermodynamic modeling, and results of complimentary research indicated that ferrihydrite solubility is the dominant control on aqueous As concentrations and also plays a role in controlling dissolved Mo, Ni and Se.     

Correction to: Leveraging HPC accelerator architectures with modern techniques — hydrologic modeling on GPUs with ParFlow

Computational Geosciences - A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-021-10065-y     

The sinkhole enigma in the Alpine Foreland, Southeast Germany: Evidence of impact-induced rock liquefaction processes

Sudden collapse of the Quaternary soil to form sinkholes on the order of meters and tens of meters has been a geologic phenomenon within living memory in a localized area north of Lake Chiemsee in Southeast Germany. Failing a satisfying explanation, a relation with an undefined glaciation process has always been proposed. Excavations and geophysical measurements at three newly affected sites show underground features such as prominent sandy-gravelly intrusions and extrusions typical of rock liquefaction processes well known to occur during strong earthquakes. Since strong earthquakes can reasonably be excluded to have affected the area under discussion, it has been suggested that the observed widespread liquefaction is related with the recently proposed Holocene Chiemgau meteorite impact event. Except for one earlier proposed but unassertive relation between impact and liquefaction, the obviously direct association of both processes in the Chiemgau area emphasizes that observed paleoliquefaction features need not necessarily have originated solely from paleoseismicity but can provide a recognizable regional impact signature.     

Multi-scale aquifer characterization and groundwater flow model parameterization using direct push technologies

Direct push (DP) technologies are typically used for cost-effective geotechnical characterization of unconsolidated soils and sediments. In more recent developments, DP technologies have been used for efficient hydraulic conductivity (K) characterization along vertical profiles with sampling resolutions of up to a few centimetres. Until date, however, only a limited number of studies document high-resolution in situ DP data for three-dimensional conceptual hydrogeological model development and groundwater flow model parameterization. This study demonstrates how DP technologies improve building of a conceptual hydrogeological model. We further evaluate the degree to which the DP-derived hydrogeological parameter K, measured across different spatial scales, improves performance of a regional groundwater flow model. The study area covers an area of ~60 km² with two overlying, mainly unconsolidated sand aquifers separated by a 5–7 m thick highly heterogeneous clay layer (in north-eastern Belgium). The hydrostratigraphy was obtained from an analysis of cored boreholes and about 265 cone penetration tests (CPTs). The hydrogeological parameter K was derived from a combined analysis of core and CPT data and also from hydraulic direct push tests. A total of 50 three-dimensional realizations of K were generated using a non-stationary multivariate geostatistical approach. To preserve the measured K values in the stochastic realizations, the groundwater model K realizations were conditioned on the borehole and direct push data. Optimization was performed to select the best performing model parameterization out of the 50 realizations. This model outperformed a previously developed reference model with homogeneous K fields for all hydrogeological layers. Comparison of particle tracking simulations, based either on the optimal heterogeneous or reference homogeneous groundwater model flow fields, demonstrate the impact DP-derived subsurface heterogeneity in K can have on groundwater flow and solute transport. We demonstrated that DP technologies, especially when calibrated with site-specific data, provide high-resolution 3D subsurface data for building more reliable conceptual models and increasing groundwater flow model performance.     

Enhancement of prestack diffraction data and attributes using a traveltime decomposition approach

Diffractions not only carry important information about small-scale subsurface structures, they also possess unique properties, which make them a powerful tool for seismic processing and imaging. Since a point diffractor scatters an incoming wave to all directions, a diffraction event implies better illumination than a reflection, because the rays travel through larger parts of the subsurface. Furthermore, unlike the reflection case, in which the emergence location of the reflected wave depends on the source position, in the case of non-Snell scattering, up-going and down-going raypaths are decoupled. Based on this decoupling, we introduce a diffraction traveltime decomposition principle, which establishes a direct connection between zero-offset and finite-offset diffraction wavefield attributes. By making use of this approach, we are able to enhance diffractions and obtain high-quality diffraction wavefield attributes at arbitrary offsets in the prestack domain solely based on zero-offset processing without any further optimization of attributes. We show the accuracy of the method by fitting diffraction traveltimes, and on simple waveform data. Application to complex synthetic data shows the ability of the proposed approach to enhance diffractions and provide high-quality wavefield attributes even in sparsely illuminated regions such as subsalt areas. The promising results reveal a high potential for improved prestack data enhancement and further applications such as efficient diffraction-based finite-offset tomography.     

Towards the establishment of a reliable proxy for the reactive surface area of smectite

Reactive surface area is one of the key parameters for studying the kinetics of mineral dissolution. The common practice in experimental kinetics is to normalize the dissolution rate to the surface area measured by the BET method. The relationship between BET surface area and the reactive surface area is not trivial in minerals such as smectites, which possess both internal and external surface areas, and in which the dissolution is controlled by the chemical attack on the edge surface. The present study examines two proxies for the reactive surface area of the Clay Mineral Society reference smectite SAz-1: BET surface area and the edge surface area measured using AFM.Since smectites are very microporous, their BET surface area is strongly influenced by the degassing procedure. It is demonstrated that outgassing the smectite powder at 135°C in a 15 mL min⁻¹ N₂ gas flow for at least 24 hours minimizes contribution from micropores to less than 11% of the BET surface area.Following dissolution experiments in solutions with a low electrolyte concentration, the BET surface area increased from 34 ± 2 m² g⁻¹ in raw SAz-1 to 127 ± 13 m² g⁻¹ in SAz-1 sample recovered from dissolution experiments. This increase in BET surface area is explained by a decrease in the average size of the smectite aggregates, and by an increase in microporosity due to the depletion in the major interlayer cation, i.e., Ca²⁺. As the BET surface area of the raw smectite sample includes considerably less microporosity compared to the BET surface area of the smectite recovered from dissolution experiments, the former is a better approximation of the external surface area of the dried sample powder.AFM measurements show that there is no correlation between the specific external surface area of the sample and its specific edge surface area. This observation is explained by the platy morphology of the smectite particle in which the specific external surface area depends linearly on the height reciprocal, whereas the specific edge surface area is independent of the particles height and depends linearly on the sum of the reciprocals of the length of the axes. Therefore, there is no reason to expect a correlation between the BET and the edge surface area. Our results show that the edge surface area (4.9 ± 0.7 m² g⁻¹) of the smectite particles cannot be predicted based on its external surface area (136 ± 20 m² g⁻¹). Therefore, the BET surface area cannot serve as a proxy for the reactive surface area. We suggest using AFM measurements of the specific edge surface area as an alternative proxy for the reactive surface area of smectite.