Large block slide at San Juan Grijalva, Northwest Chiapas, Mexico

On November 4, 2007, a large block slide occurred on the south face of the Cerro La Pera at San Juan Grijalva (SJG), northwest Chiapas, Mexico. The SJG landslide has an area of 1.11 km² and a volume of 50 Mm³, making it one of the largest landslide of its type in the twentieth century. The landslide created a dam over 80 m high and 1,170 m wide across the Grijalva River, backing up the water and forming a 49 km² lake. Landslide-generated tsunamis up to 15 m high destroyed the village of SJG, and the newly formed lake flooded 21 villages located upstream. The landslide killed 16 people and caused around 3,600 to be evacuated with incalculable economic losses. It was perhaps the most catastrophic landslide in the history of Mexico. The probable trigger of the landslide was cumulative precipitation of about 67% of the average annual rainfall over the preceding 30 days. The associated potentially causative factors include a M4.5 earthquake that occurred 5 days before the landslide and a water-level drawdown at the Grijalva River generated by the release of water from the Pe?itas dam located 14 km downstream.     

Mercury, copper and zinc contamination in soils and fluvial sediments from an abandoned gold mining area in southern Minas Gerais State, Brazil

Mercury, zinc and copper contamination was evaluated in soils and fluvial sediments from an abandoned gold mining site at Descoberto Municipality (southern Minas Gerais State, Brazil). Metals bioavailability and potential mobility were studied through physical, chemical and mineralogical characterization, geoaccumulation indexes calculations, mercury speciation and determination of potentially bioavailable contents of zinc and copper. Values of pH were in the neutral range, while organic matter concentrations were very low. Mineralogical characterization, in the total samples, indicated the presence of quartz, kaolinite and gibbsite for all samples. Total mercury, zinc and cooper concentrations were higher than the limits recommended by Brazilian documents. Geoaccumulations indexes revealed that most of the sediment samples were low to moderately polluted by zinc and copper, while just one sample was very strongly polluted by mercury. Mercury speciation revealed the predominance of the elementary form for all samples, and low concentrations for exchangeable, strongly bound and residual fractions. Zinc and copper behavior was strongly controlled by iron and aluminum concentrations, while their bioavailable contents were very low in comparison with the total concentrations.     

Characterization of bacterial symbioses in Myrtea sp. (Bivalvia: Lucinidae) and Thyasira sp. (Bivalvia: Thyasiridae) from a cold seep in the Eastern Mediterranean

Cold seeps have recently been discovered in the Nile deep‐sea fan (Eastern Mediterranean), and data regarding associated fauna are still scarce. In this study, two bivalve species associated with carbonate crusts and reduced sediment are identified based on sequence analysis of their 18S and 28S rRNA‐encoding genes, and associated bacterial symbioses are investigated using 16S rRNA gene sequencing and microscopy‐based approaches. The specimens are closely related to Myrtea spinifera and Thyasira flexuosa, two species previously documented at various depths from other regions but not yet reported from the Eastern Mediterranean. Both species harbour abundant gammaproteobacterial endosymbionts in specialized gill epithelial cells. The Myrtea‐associated bacterium is closely related to lucinid symbionts from both deep‐sea and coastal species, whereas the Thyasira‐associated bacterium is closely related to the symbiont of a T. flexuosa from coastal waters off the U.K. An epsilonproteobacterial sequence has also been identified in Thyasira which could correspond to a helicoid‐shaped morphotype observed by electron microscopy, but this was not confirmed using fluorescent in situ hybridization. Virus‐like particles were observed within some symbionts in Thyasira, mostly in bacteriocytes localized close to the ciliated zone of the gill filament. Overall, results indicate that very close relatives of shallow species M. spinifera and T. flexuosa occur at cold seeps in the Eastern Mediterranean and harbour chemoautotrophic symbioses similar to those found in their coastal relatives.     

In situ experimental decomposition studies in estuaries: A comparison of Phragmites australis and Fucus vesiculosus

The decomposition rates of Phragmites australis and Fucus vesiculosus were experimentally determined in an estuarine system using the leaf-bag technique. The study was conducted in fifteen sites arranged in five areas, extending from freshwater, outside the tidal range, to the marine environment, near the mouth of the estuary. The leaf-bags (5 mm mesh), were set up with 3.0 g of dried substrate, submerged in the experimental sites at day 0 and collected at days 3, 7, 15, 30 and 60, to follow biomass loss. The biomass loss through the leaching phase (day 3) was about 16% for Phragmites australis and 33% for Fucus vesiculosus and was independent of salinity for both substrates. The difference in the remaining biomass between the two species increased with time and the decomposition rates differed along the salinity gradient. For F. vesiculosus, the decomposition rate was highest near the mouth of the estuary, corresponding to the preferential distribution area of the algae, and decreased towards freshwater. For Phragmites australis, the fastest decay was observed in the mid estuary, where Phragmites australis occurs naturally, confirming previous studies. The decomposition rates measured at different time intervals (0–15, 0–30 and 0–60 days) were always higher for the algae and decreased with time for both species. These results indicate that the use of decomposition rates as a measure of ecosystem integrity or quality status in transitional waters will not be straightforward and must take into account, among others, the test species, the study area positioning along the estuarine gradient, and the time interval for the calculation of the decomposition rate.     

Discrimination of coastal wetland environments in the Amazon region based on multi-polarized L-band airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery

This study assessed the use of multi-polarized L-band images for the identification of coastal wetland environments in the Amazon coast region of northern Brazil. Data were acquired with a SAR R99B sensor from the Amazon Surveillance System (SIVAM) on board a Brazilian Air Force jet. Flights took place in the framework of the 2005 MAPSAR simulation campaign, a German-Brazilian feasibility study focusing on a L-band SAR satellite. Information retrieval was based on the recognition of the interaction between a radar signal and shallow-water morphology in intertidal areas, coastal dunes, mangroves, marshes and the coastal plateau. Regarding the performance of polarizations, VV was superior for recognizing intertidal area morphology under low spring tide conditions; HH for mapping coastal environments covered with forest and scrub vegetation such as mangrove and vegetated dunes, and HV was suitable for distinguishing transition zones between mangroves and coastal plateau. The statistical results for the classification maps expressed by kappa index and general accuracy were 83.3% and 0.734 for the multi-polarized color composition (R-HH, G-HV, B-VV), 80.7% and 0.694% for HH, 79.7% and 0.673% for VV, and 77.9% and 0.645% for HV amplitude image. The results indicate that use of multi-polarized L-band SAR is a valuable source of information aiming at the identification and discrimination of distinct geomorphic targets in tropical wetlands.     

Effect of implementing ecosystem functional type data in a mesoscale climate model

In this paper, we introduce a new concept of land-surface state representation for southern South America, which is based on "functional" attributes of vegetation, and implement a new land-cover (Ecosystem Functional Type, hereafter EFT) dataset in the Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model. We found that the EFT data enabled us to deal with functional attributes of vegetation and time-variant features more easily than the default land-cover data in the WRF. In order to explore the usefulness of the EFT data in simulations of surface and atmospheric variables, numerical simulations of the WRF model, using both the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the EFT data, were conducted over the La Plata Basin in South America for the austral spring of 1998 and compared with observations. Results showed that the model simulations were sensitive to the lower boundary conditions and that the use of the EFT data improved the climate simulation of 2-m temperature and precipitation, implying the need for this type of information to be included in numerical climate models.     

Studies in the application of recurrence relations to special perturbation methods

The numerical integration of the differential equations describing dynamical systems has been shown in previous papers of this series to be most effectively accomplished by an explicit Taylor series method.In this paper we show that one explicit Taylor series method, developed earlier in this series and which appears to possess a high degree of versatility, yields considerable gains in efficiency over classical single-step and multi-step methods. (In this context efficiency is a measure of the time taken to carry out a calculation of a specific accuracy).For a given accuracy criterion governing the local truncation error (LTE) it is found that the Taylor series method is generallytwice as fast as the classical multi-step method and up totwenty times faster than the classical single-step method.     

Optimizing urban stormwater control strategies and assessing aquifer recharge through drywells in an urban watershed

Hydrogeology Journal - A coupled simulation-optimization model (SOM) is developed in this work that links the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) with a...