The spectacular fossils of the ‘water margin’: the Cambrian biota of Chengjiang,Yunnan, China

Shi Nai'an's fourteenth century Chinese epic ‘Water Margin’ tells of the release of 36 heavenly spirits and 72 baleful stars from their captivity beneath a tablet of stone at Mount Longhu in Jiangxi Province. They are reincarnated as the 108 heroes of the Liangshan marsh in Shandong Province, who rise against an unjust world. The virtuous exploits of the ‘108’ were brought to life through the cathode‐ray screens of 1970s television sets, as the TV series The Water Margin introduced heroes like Lin Chong battling his evil nemesis Gao Qiu. Far to the west of Jiangxi Province and several hundred years after the Water Margin during the summer of 1984, a young scientist from Nanjing was working amongst the hills and lakes of southern Yunnan Province. He too overturned a stone slab, releasing from their half‐billion year captivity a cornucopia of new Chinese legends. His name was Xianguang Hou and he had made one of the most momentous fossil discoveries in history, uncovering the exceptionally preserved marine fossils of the Chengjiang biota from the ancient water margin of Cambrian seas.     

The influence of coupled physical swelling and chemical reactions on deformable geomaterials

Coupled thermo‐hydro‐mechanical‐chemical modelling has attracted attention in past decades due to many contemporary geotechnical engineering applications (e.g., waste disposal, carbon capture and storage). However, molecular‐scale interactions within geomaterials (e.g., swelling and dissolution/precipitation) have a significant influence on the mechanical behaviour, yet are rarely incorporated into existing Thermal‐Hydro‐Mechanical‐Chemical (THMC) frameworks. This paper presents a new coupled hydro‐mechanical‐chemical constitutive model to bridge molecular‐scale interactions with macro‐physical deformation by combining the swelling and dissolution/precipitation through an extension of the new mixture‐coupling theory. Entropy analysis of the geomaterial system provides dissipation energy, and Helmholtz free energy gives the relationship between solids and fluids. Numerical simulation is used to compare with the selected recognized models, which demonstrates that the swelling and dissolution/precipitation processes may have a significant influence on the mechanical deformation of the geomaterials.     

Effects of temporal scales and space mismatches on the TRMM 3B42 v7 precipitation product in a remote mountainous area

The accurate measurement of precipitation is essential to understanding regional hydrological processes and hydrological cycling. Quantification of precipitation over remote regions such as the Tibetan Plateau is highly unreliable because of the scarcity of rain gauges. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of the satellite precipitation product of tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) 3B42 v7 at daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal scales. Comparison between TRMM grid precipitation and point‐based rain gauge precipitation was conducted using nearest neighbour and bilinear weighted interpolation methods. The results showed that the TRMM product could not capture daily precipitation well due to some rainfall events being missed at short time scales but provided reasonably good precipitation data at weekly, monthly, and seasonal scales. TRMM tended to underestimate the precipitation of small rainfall events (less than 1 mm/day), while it overestimated the precipitation of large rainfall events (greater than 20 mm/day). Consequently, TRMM showed better performance in the summer monsoon season than in the winter season. Through comparison, it was also found that the bilinear weighted interpolation method performs better than the nearest neighbour method in TRMM precipitation extraction.     

A new standardized Palmer drought index for hydro‐meteorological use

Accepting the concept of standardization introduced by the standardized precipitation index, similar methodologies have been developed to construct some other standardized drought indices such as the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI). In this study, the authors provided deep insight into the SPEI and recognized potential deficiencies/limitations in relating to the climatic water balance it used. By coupling another well‐known Palmer drought severity index (PDSI), we proposed a new standardized Palmer drought index (SPDI) through a moisture departure probabilistic approach, which allows multi‐scalar calculation for accurate temporal and spatial comparison of the hydro‐meteorological conditions of different locations. Using datasets of monthly precipitation, temperature and soil available water capacity, the moisture deficit/surplus was calculated at multiple temporal scales, and a couple of techniques were adopted to adjust corresponding time series to a generalized extreme value distribution out of several candidates. Results of the historical records (1900–2012) for diverse climates by multiple indices showed that the SPDI was highly consistent and correlated with the SPEI and self‐calibrated PDSI at most analysed time scales. Furthermore, a simple experiment of hypothetical temperature and/or precipitation change scenarios also verified the effectiveness of this newly derived SPDI in response to climate change impacts. Being more robust and preferable in spatial consistency and comparability as well as combining the simplicity of calculation with sufficient accounting of the physical nature of water supply and demand relating to droughts, the SPDI is promising to serve as a competent reference and an alternative for drought assessment and monitoring. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of expansion ratio on the critical Reynolds number in single fracture flow with sudden expansion

Flow in a single fracture (SF) is an important research subject in groundwater hydrology, hydraulic engineering, radioactive nuclear waste repository and geotechnical engineering. An abruptly changing aperture is a unique type of SF. This study discusses the relation between the values of the critical Reynolds number (Re_c) for the onset of symmetry breaking of flow and the expansion ratio (E) of SF, which is defined as the ratio between the outlet (D) and inlet (d) apertures. This study also investigates the effect of inlet aperture d on Re_c for flow in an SF with abruptly changing apertures (SF‐ACA) using the finite volume method. Earlier numerical and experimental results showed that flow is symmetric in respect to the central plane of the SF‐ACA at small Reynolds number (Re) but becomes asymmetric when Re is sufficiently large. Our simulations show that the value of Re_c decreases with the increasing E, and the relationship between the logarithm of Re_c and E can be described accurately using either a quadratic polynomial function or a logarithmic function. However, the relationship of Re_c and d for a given E value is vague, and Re_c becomes even less sensitive to d when E increases. This study also reveals that the hydraulic gradient (J) and flow velocity (v) follow a super‐linear relationship that can be fitted almost perfectly by the Forchheimer equation. The inertial component (J_i) of J increases monotonically with Re, whereas the viscous component (J_v) of J decreases monotonically with Re. The Re value corresponding to equal inertial and viscous components of J (named as the transitional point Re) decreases when E increases, and such a transitional point Re should be closely related to the critical Reynolds number Re_c, although a rigorous theoretical proof is not yet available. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Size and spatial distribution of loess slides on the Chinese Loess Plateau

ABSTRACT

The size and spatial distribution of loess slides are important for estimating the yield of eroded materials and determining the landslide risk. While previous studies have investigated landslide size distributions, the spatial distribution pattern of landslides at different spatial scales is poorly understood. The results indicate that the loess slide distribution exhibits a power-law scaling across a range of the size distribution. The mean landslide size and size distribution in the different geomorphic types are different. The double Pareto and inverse gamma functions can coincide well with the empirical probability distribution of the loess slide areas and can quantitatively reveal the rollover location, maximum probability, and scaling exponents. The frequency of loess slides increases with mean monthly precipitation. Moreover, point distance analysis showed that > 80% of landslides are located < 3 km from other loess slides. We found that the loess slides at the two study sites (Zhidan and Luochuan County) in northern Shaanxi Province, China show a significant clustered distribution. Furthermore, analysis results of the correlated fractal dimension show that the landslides exhibit a dispersed distribution at smaller spatial scales and a clustered distribution at larger spatial scales.     

Parallelized combined finite-discrete element (FDEM) procedure using multi-GPU with CUDA

This paper focuses on the efficiency of finite discrete element method (FDEM) algorithmic procedures in massive computers and analyzes the time-consuming part of contact detection and interaction computations in the numerical solution. A detailed operable GPU parallel procedure was designed for the element node force calculation, contact detection, and contact interaction with thread allocation and data access based on the CUDA computing. The emphasis is on the parallel optimization of time-consuming contact detection based on load balance and GPU architecture. A CUDA FDEM parallel program was developed with the overall speedup ratio over 53 times after the fracture from the efficiency and fidelity performance test of models of in situ stress, UCS, and BD simulations in Intel i7-7700K CPU and the NVIDIA TITAN Z GPU. The CUDA FDEM parallel computing improves the computational efficiency significantly compared with the CPU-based ones with the same reliability, providing conditions for achieving larger-scale simulations of fracture.     

Temporal variation of soil erosion resistance on sloping farmland during the growth stages of maize (Zea mays L.)

Maize growth has great effects on soil properties and thus likely induces the changes in soil erosion resistance on sloping farmland. However, temporal variation of soil erosion resistance during the growth stages of maize is still unclear in the mountainous yellow soil area where maize is the dominant crop. In this study, four maize plots (MP) and four bare land plots (CK) were conducted to investigate soil erosion resistance, and multiple indicators of soil erosion resistance were measured including the total soil anti-scourability (TAS), mean weight diameter (MWD), soil erodibility K factor and soil shear strength (SH). A comprehensive soil erosion resistance index (CSERI) was employed to quantify the temporal variation of soil erosion resistance during the growth stages of maize (seedling stage, SS; jointing stage, JS; tasselling stage, TS; maturing stage, MS). The results showed that TAS, MWD, SH increased significantly with maize growth and SH decreased when at MS. But K factor decreased significantly over time. CSERI increased significantly during the growth stages of maize and the CSERI of JS, TS, MS increased on average by 74.72, 180.68 and 234.57% than that of SS. Compared to CK, CSERI of MP increased by 49.90, 66.82, 55.60 and 38.61% during the growth stages of maize. The temporal variation of soil erosion resistance was closely related to the changes in maize cover, maize roots and soil organic carbon. The findings demonstrated that it is necessary to consider the temporal variation of soil erosion resistance in the mountainous yellow soil area.