Long-term evolution of the aerosol debris cloud produced by the 2009 impact on Jupiter

We present a study of the long-term evolution of the cloud of aerosols produced in the atmosphere of Jupiter by the impact of an object on 19 July 2009 (Sánchez-Lavega, A. et al. [2010]. Astrophys. J. 715, L155-L159). The work is based on images obtained during 5 months from the impact to 31 December 2009 taken in visible continuum wavelengths and from 20 July 2009 to 28 May 2010 taken in near-infrared deep hydrogen-methane absorption bands at 2.1-2.3 μm. The impact cloud expanded zonally from ∼5000 km (July 19) to 225,000 km (29 October, about 180° in longitude), remaining meridionally localized within a latitude band from 53.5°S to 61.5°S planetographic latitude. During the first two months after its formation the site showed heterogeneous structure with 500-1000 km sized embedded spots. Later the reflectivity of the debris field became more homogeneous due to clump mergers. The cloud was mainly dispersed in longitude by the dominant zonal winds and their meridional shear, during the initial stages, localized motions may have been induced by thermal perturbation caused by the impact’s energy deposition. The tracking of individual spots within the impact cloud shows that the westward jet at 56.5°S latitude increases its eastward velocity with altitude above the tropopause by 5-10 m s⁻¹. The corresponding vertical wind shear is low, about 1 m s⁻¹ per scale height in agreement with previous thermal wind estimations. We found evidence for discrete localized meridional motions with speeds of 1-2 m s⁻¹. Two numerical models are used to simulate the observed cloud dispersion. One is a pure advection of the aerosols by the winds and their shears. The other uses the EPIC code, a nonlinear calculation of the evolution of the potential vorticity field generated by a heat pulse that simulates the impact. Both models reproduce the observed global structure of the cloud and the dominant zonal dispersion of the aerosols, but not the details of the cloud morphology. The reflectivity of the impact cloud decreased exponentially with a characteristic timescale of 15 days; we can explain this behavior with a radiative transfer model of the cloud optical depth coupled to an advection model of the cloud dispersion by the wind shears. The expected sedimentation time in the stratosphere (altitude levels 5-100 mbar) for the small aerosol particles forming the cloud is 45-200 days, thus aerosols were removed vertically over the long term following their zonal dispersion. No evidence of the cloud was detected 10 months after the impact.     

A New Interpretation of Centimetre-scale Variations in the Progress of Infiltration-driven Metamorphic Reactions: Case Study of Carbonated Metaperidotite, Val d'Efra, Central Alps, Switzerland

Progress () of the infiltration-driven reaction, 4olivine +5CO₂ + H₂O = talc + 5magnesite, that occurred during Barrovianregional metamorphism, varies at the cm-scale by a factor of3·5 within an 3 m³ volume of rock. Mineral and stableisotope compositions record that X_CO2, ¹⁸O_fluid, and ¹³C_fluidwere uniform within error of measurement in the same rock volume.The conventional interpretation of small-scale variations in in terms of channelized fluid flow cannot explain the uniformityin fluid composition. Small-scale variations in resulted insteadbecause (a) reactant olivine was a solid solution, (b) initiallythere were small-scale variations in the amount and compositionof olivine, and (c) fluid composition was completely homogenizedover the same scale by diffusion–dispersion during infiltrationand subsequent reaction. Assuming isochemical reaction, spatialvariations in image variations in the (Mg + Fe)/Si of the parentrock rather than the geometry of metamorphic fluid flow. Ifinfiltration-driven reactions involve minerals fixed in composition,on the other hand, spatial variations in do directly imagefluid flow paths. The geometry of fluid flow can never be determinedfrom geochemical tracers over a distance smaller than the oneover which fluid composition is completely homogenized by diffusion–dispersion. KEY WORDS: Alpine Barrovian metamorphism; diffusion; metamorphic fluid composition; metamorphic fluid flow; reaction progress     

Petrology of the tin-bearing granite-leucogranites of the Piaoak Massif, Northern Vietnam

The Piaoak tin-bearing granite-leucogranites located in the Caobang Province of Northern Vietnam compose a stock-like hypabyssal body. Host rocks are represented by Early Devonian carbonate sequences and Early Triassic ??black?? shales. The geochronological age of the Piaoak granite-leucogranites corresponds to the Late Cretaceous: T = 83.5 ± 6.2 Ma, ⁸⁷Rb/⁸⁶Sr method; T = 89.7 ± 1.0 Ma, ³⁹Ar/⁴⁰Ar method. The massif has a simple basic to acid order: two-mica and muscovite granite-leucogranite ?? raremetal aplites, pegmatites ?? tin-bearing greisens and hydrothermal veins. The petrographic and microstructural studies revealed a sharp change in crystallization conditions of the granite-leucogranite magma at the late magmatic stage and formation of muscovite via incongruent melting of protolithionite. The study of melt and coexisting fluid inclusions showed that solidus crystallization occurred under fluid-saturated conditions at 635?C600°C. In composition, the granite-leucogranites of the Piaoak Massif correspond to the raremetal-plumasite geochemical type (according to L.V. Tauson), and reach Li-F facies in terms of their rare-element composition. The composition of aplites and pegmatites demonstrates that granite-leucogranite magma did not accumulate lithophile and volatile components in the residual melt during differentiation, but was initially enriched in rare-metals. It is most probable that the melt was generated from Proterozoic lithotectonic complexes and overlaying Lower Triassic ??black?? shales.     

Pre-failure behaviour of reconstituted peats in triaxial compression

This paper discusses the results of an experimental programme designed to investigate the deviatoric behaviour of peats. The results are obtained from triaxial experiments carried out on reconstituted peat samples. The interpretation of the experimental results follows a hierarchical approach in an attempt to derive the ingredients that an elastic–plastic model for peats should contain, including the yield locus, the hardening mechanism and the flow rule. The results obtained from stress tests along different loading directions show that purely volumetric hardening is not adequate to describe the deviatoric response of peat and that a deviatoric strain-dependent component should be included. The plastic deformation mechanism also depends on the previous stress history experienced by the sample. Stress and strain path dependence of the interaction mechanisms between the peat matrix and the fibres is discussed as a possible physical reason for the observed behaviour. This work offers a relevant set of data and information to guide the rational development and the calibration of constitutive laws able to model the deviatoric behaviour of peats.

     

Source parameters of seismic events potentially associated with damage in block 33/34 of the Kiirunavaara mine (Sweden)

Forty-six mining-induced seismic events with moment magnitude between ?1.2 and 2.1 that possibly caused damage were studied. The events occurred between 2008 and 2013 at mining level 850–1350 m in the Kiirunavaara Mine (Sweden). Hypocenter locations were refined using from 6 to 130 sensors at distances of up to 1400 m. The source parameters of the events were re-estimated using spectral analysis with a standard Brune model (slope ?2). The radiated energy for the studied events varied from 4.7 × 10^?1 to 3.8 × 10⁷ J, the source radii from 4 to 110 m, the apparent stress from 6.2 × 10² to 1.1 × 10⁶ Pa, energy ratio (E _s/E _p) from 1.2 to 126, and apparent volume from 1.8 × 10³ to 1.1 × 10⁷ m³. 90% of the events were located in the footwall, close to the ore contact. The events were classified as shear/fault slip (FS) or non-shear (NS) based on the E _s/E _p ratio (>10 or <10). Out of 46 events 15 events were classified as NS located almost in the whole range between 840 and 1360 m, including many events below the production. The rest 31 FS events were concentrated mostly around the production levels and slightly below them. The relationships between some source parameters and seismic moment/moment magnitude showed dependence on the type of the source mechanism. The energy and the apparent stress were found to be three times larger for FS events than for NS events.     

Detection and analysis of coherent structures in urban turbulence

Summary The continuous wavelet transform provides a suitable tool to visualize the vertical structure of turbulence and to detect coherent structures in turbulent time series. This is demonstrated with a simple example of an artificially ramp structured time series. In this study turbulence data, i.e. the fluctuations of the horizontal wind components u′ and v′, the vertical component w′ and temperature T′, sampled with 20.83 Hz and measured simultaneously at three levels (z/h=1.5, 2.1 and 3.2, with z as the sensor height and h the height of the roughness elements) over an urban canopy in the inner city of Basel, Switzerland, are analyzed. The detection of the coherent structures was performed using the Mexican hat wavelet and the zero-crossing method. The analysis for unstable conditions shows that organized structures (ejection-sweep cycles) cover about 45% of the total run time. A conditional average from a total of 116 detected ejection-sweep sequences during 7 hours was calculated over a time window of 100 seconds. This dominating time scale was derived from peak frequencies of the wavelet spectra as well as from the Fourier spectra. It is shown that the normalized amplitudes of fluctuations of temperature and longitudinal wind speed during the events are largest at the lowest measurement level just above the canopy and decrease with increasing distance from the roughness elements. A comparison of related studies over different non-urban surfaces (mainly forests) shows that the shape of conditionally averaged ejection-sweep sequences is very similar for all canopies, however, the dominating time scale in general increases the rougher the surface is and the higher the roughness elements are.     

Undrained creep failure of a drainage canal slope stabilized with deep cement mixing columns

This paper presents an analysis of the slope failure of a Suvarnabhumi drainage canal during construction. The Suvarnabhumi drainage canal project includes a large drainage canal with a road on both sides. The width of the bottom of the drainage canal is 48.0 m, the depth of the drainage canal is 3.0 m, and the length of the drainage canal is 10.5 km. Because the project was constructed on very soft Bangkok clay, deep cement mixing (DCM) columns were employed to increase the stability of the excavated canal. The failure of the drainage canal slope occurred 25 days after the end of excavation. The field monitoring data show that lateral movement of the canal slope continuously increased with time, which caused failure due to the instability of the canal slope. The time-dependent deformation and undrained creep behavior of very soft clay was suspected to be the cause of the canal failure. A laboratory investigation of undrained creep behavior and a finite element analysis (FEA) using the soft soil creep (SSC) model were performed to confirm the causes of the canal failure. The results indicate that very soft clay specimens that are subjected to deviator creep stress levels of 70 and 100 % of the peak strength failed by creep rupture within 60 days and 8 min, respectively. The factor of safety for the canal slope, which was obtained from the FEA, shows significant reduction from the initial value of 1.710 to 1.045 within 24 days after the end of excavation due to the effect of undrained creep. This paper also describes a solution method that is applied to a new section of the canal. Field monitoring and an FEA of the new trial section were performed to prove the effectiveness of the solution method.     

A general-purpose parallel raster processing programming library test application using a geographic cellular automata model

A general-purpose parallel raster processing programming library (pRPL) was developed and applied to speed up a commonly used cellular automaton model with known tractability limitations. The library is suitable for use by geographic information scientists with basic programming skills, but who lack knowledge and experience of parallel computing and programming. pRPL is a general-purpose programming library that provides generic support for raster processing, including local-scope, neighborhood-scope, regional-scope, and global-scope algorithms as long as they are parallelizable. The library also supports multilayer algorithms. Besides the standard data domain decomposition methods, pRPL provides a spatially adaptive quad-tree-based decomposition to produce more evenly distributed workloads among processors. Data parallelism and task parallelism are supported, with both static and dynamic load-balancing. By grouping processors, pRPL also supports data–task hybrid parallelism, i.e., data parallelism within a processor group and task parallelism among processor groups. pSLEUTH, a parallel version of a well-known cellular automata model for simulating urban land-use change (SLEUTH), was developed to demonstrate full utilization of the advanced features of pRPL. Experiments with real-world data sets were conducted and the performance of pSLEUTH measured. We conclude not only that pRPL greatly reduces the development complexity of implementing a parallel raster-processing algorithm, it also greatly reduces the computing time of computationally intensive raster-processing algorithms, as demonstrated with pSLEUTH.     

An experimental study of nominally symmetric and asymmetric structures isolated with the FPS

This experimental investigation deals with the earthquake behaviour of a nominally symmetric and a mass‐asymmetric three‐storey structural model isolated with the frictional pendulum system (FPS). Both accidental and natural torsion are evaluated in the structure by using recorded accelerations in all building floors and measured deformations at the isolation level. A 3D‐shaking table was used to subject the model to five different ground motions, including impulsive as well as far‐field subduction‐zone type earthquakes. Results show that the analytical predictions of the earthquake behaviour of the isolated structure, as obtained from a physical model of the FPS, are in close agreement with the true complex inelastic measured behaviour of the FPS. Besides, experimental results also validate previous observations about the importance of accounting for the variability of the normal loads in modelling the earthquake behaviour of FPS isolators. Measured torsional deformation amplifications at the base of the building vary, in the mean, from 2.5% to 6% for the symmetric and asymmetric structural configurations, respectively. In relation to the fixed base structure, the reduction factors for the base shear of the isolated structure are, in the mean, about 3.9 for both configurations. Finally, it is concluded that the FPS is capable of controlling the lateral–torsional motions of mass‐asymmetric structures quite effectively by aligning the centre of mass of the superstructure with the centre of pendular and frictional resistance of the isolation system. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.