Solar-wind–magnetosphere coupling,including relativistic electron energization,during high-speed streams

High geomagnetic activity occurs continuously during high-speed solar wind streams, and fluxes of relativistic electrons observed at geosynchronous orbit enhance significantly. High-speed streams are preceded by solar wind compression regions, during which time there are large losses of relativistic electrons from geosynchronous orbit. Weak to moderate geomagnetic storms often occur during the passage of these compression regions; however, we find that the phenomena that occur during the ensuing high-speed streams do not depend on whether or not a preceding storm develops. Large-amplitude Alfvén waves occur within the high-speed solar wind streams, which are expected to lead to intermittent intervals of significantly enhanced magnetospheric convection and to thus also lead to repetitive substorms due to repetitively occurring reductions in the strength of convection. We find that such repetitive substorms are clearly discernible in the LANL geosynchronous energetic particle data during high-speed stream intervals. Global auroral images are found to show unambiguously that these events are indeed classical substorms, leading us to conclude that substorms are an important contributor to the enhanced geomagnetic activity during high-speed streams. We used the onsets of these substorms as indicators of preceding periods of enhanced convection and of reductions in convection, and we have used ground-based chorus observations from the VELOX instrument at Halley station as an indicator of magnetospheric chorus intensities. These data show evidence that it is the periods of enhanced convection that precede substorm expansions, and not the expansions themselves, that lead to the enhanced dawn-side chorus wave intensity that has been postulated to cause the energization of relativistic electrons. If this inference is correct, and if it is chorus that energizes the relativistic electrons, then high-speed solar wind streams lead to relativistic electron flux enhancements because the embedded large-amplitude Alfvén waves give multi-day periods of intermittent significantly enhanced convection.     

The informal Australian city

In recent years, a vibrant literature on urban informality has emerged in urban geography. A key claim of this literature is that informality is not only present in cities in the Global South, and that the concept can be usefully applied to understand important dimensions of urbanisation in cities in the Global North. In this paper, we apply insights from that literature to an examination of informality in Australian cities, as a means of deepening our understanding of changes currently underway in urban governance and politics. Drawing on that literature and our own research into informal practices in Australian cities, we examine the forces that help to produce informality, the diverse forms and agents of informality, the forms of authority that they enact, and their relationship to formal economies, regulations and politics. We use examples of informal housing, informal labour, do-it-yourself music venues, graffiti and its regulation, food foraging, and queer community building in Sydney to illustrate our arguments. We conclude by reflecting on the lessons learnt across these diverse cases for our understanding of urban governance and politics in Australia, and offer an agenda for further research on this issue.     

The effects of impacts on the cooling rates of iron meteorites

Iron meteorites provide a record of the thermal evolution of their parent bodies, with cooling rates inferred from the structures observed in the Widmanstätten pattern. Traditional planetesimal thermal models suggest that meteorite samples derived from the same iron core would have identical cooling rates, possibly providing constraints on the sizes and structures of their parent bodies. However, some meteorite groups exhibit a range of cooling rates or point to uncomfortably small parent bodies whose survival is difficult to reconcile with dynamical models. Together, these suggest that some meteorites are indicating a more complicated origin. To date, thermal models have largely ignored the effects that impacts would have on the thermal evolution of the iron meteorite parent bodies. Here we report numerical simulations investigating the effects that impacts at different times have on cooling rates of cores of differentiated planetesimals. We find that impacts that occur when the core is near or above its solidus, but the mantle has largely crystallized can expose iron near the surface of the body, leading to rapid and nonuniform cooling. The time period when a planetesimal can be affected in this way can range between 20 and 70 Myr after formation for a typical 100 km radius planetesimal. Collisions during this time would have been common, and thus played an important role in shaping the properties of iron meteorites.     

水下喷发火山碎屑岩储层特征及主控因素:以新西兰Taranaki盆地中新世Kora火山为例

新西兰Taranaki盆地中新世Kora火山是海底喷发形成的碎屑岩型火山,可代表浅埋藏火山岩的储层特征.本文根据5口钻井的孔隙度、渗透率、孔隙孔径和铸体薄片开展Kora火山的储层特征、储集空间组成、缝宽以及原生和次生孔隙之间关系的分析.研究结果如下:(1)储集空间主要为次生孔隙,然后是裂缝和原生孔隙;Kora火山具有高...     

Multiscale Terrain and Topographic Modelling with the Implicit TIN

It is often assumed that real land surfaces demonstrate the statistically self-affine scaling behaviour of fractional Brownian surfaces. Tests of this assumption against empirical data, however, show many deviations. Estimates of fractal properties vary between methods and over different scale ranges. So far, this empirical evidence has come from the analysis of variograms for DEMs representing areas up to tens of kilometres in diameter. Here we report results obtained by using variograms to analyse land surface DEMs at the continental scale, with a grid resolution of 30 arc seconds. Results reveal variogram curvature and breaks of slope, but also linear sections over distance lags of hundreds of kilometres. The estimated mean fractal dimension calculated from these sections is 2.66, substantially higher for all continents at these broad scales (around 200 km) than values calculated at the erosional landscape scale (around 200 m). Thus the land surface is not self-affine, and it is not clear that it follows any simple multifractal model. At the longest wavelengths, patterns found in the variograms appear to be related to broad tectonic features of the Earth's surface. For the reader to assess their quality and generality, estimates of fractal dimension should always be accompanied by statements of the scale range covered and the goodness of fit to a log-linear relationship.     

Further evidences of deep convective vertical transport of water vapor through the tropopause

A few years ago, we identified a deep convective transport mechanism, of water vapor through the tropopause, namely, storm top gravity wave breaking, such that tropospheric water substance can be injected into the lower stratosphere via this pathway. The main evidence presented previously was taken from the lower resolution AVHRR images of the storm anvil top cirrus plumes obtained by polar orbiting satellites. Recent observations have provided further supporting evidence for this important cross-tropopause transport mechanism. There are now many higher resolution satellite images, mainly from MODIS instrument, that show more definitely the existence of these plumes, many of which would probably be unseen by lower resolution images.Furthermore, a thunderstorm movie taken in Denver (USA) area during STEPS2000 field campaign and another thunderstorm movie taken by a building top webcam in Zurich also demonstrate that the jumping cirrus phenomenon, first identified by T. Fujita in 1980s, may be quite common in active thunderstorm cells, quite contrary to previous belief that it is rare. We have used a cloud model to demonstrate that the jumping cirrus is exactly the gravity wave breaking phenomenon that transports water vapor through the tropopause.These additional evidences provide increasing support that deep convection contributes substantially to the troposphere-to-stratosphere transport of water substance. This corroborates well with recent studies of the stratospheric HDO/H₂O ratio which is much highly than it would be if the transport is via slow ascent. The only explanation that can be used to interpret this observation at present is that water substance is transported through the tropopause via rapid vertical motion, i.e., deep convection.     

Accurate estimators of power spectra in N-body simulations

A method to rapidly estimate the Fourier power spectrum of a point distribution is presented. This method relies on a Taylor expansion of the trigonometric functions. It yields the Fourier modes from a number of fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), which is controlled by the order N of the expansion and by the dimension D of the system. In three dimensions, for the practical value   N = 3  , the number of FFTs required is 20.
We apply the method to the measurement of the power spectrum of a periodic point distribution that is a local Poisson realization of an underlying stationary field. We derive an explicit analytic expression for the spectrum, which allows us to quantify – and correct for – the biases induced by discreteness and by the truncation of the Taylor expansion, and to bound the unknown effects of aliasing of the power spectrum. We show that these aliasing effects decrease rapidly with the order N . For   N = 3  , they are expected to be, respectively, smaller than  ∼10⁻⁴  and 0.02 at half the Nyquist frequency and at the Nyquist frequency of the grid used to perform the FFTs. The only remaining significant source of errors is reduced to the unavoidable cosmic/sample variance due to the finite size of the sample.
The analytical calculations are successfully checked against a cosmological N -body experiment. We also consider the initial conditions of this simulation, which correspond to a perturbed grid. This allows us to test a case where the local Poisson assumption is incorrect. Even in that extreme situation, the third-order Fourier–Taylor estimator behaves well, with aliasing effects restrained to at most the per cent level at half the Nyquist frequency.
We also show how to reach arbitrarily large dynamic range in Fourier space (i.e. high wavenumber), while keeping statistical errors in control, by appropriately 'folding' the particle distribution.     

Seawater rare-earth element patterns preserved in apatite of Pennsylvanian conodonts?

Past workers have used rare-earth element patterns recorded in biogenic apatite as proxies for original seawater chemistry. To explore the potency of this approach, we analyzed Pennsylvanian conodonts from limestones, gray shales, and black shales of the Fort Scott and Pawnee formations (Desmoinesian) and Swope and Dennis formations (Missourian) in Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa, U.S.A. Analysis of individual platform conodonts from seven taxa using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) revealed a consistent enrichment in the middle rare-earth elements (MREE). Analogous MREE enrichment has been observed in authigenic apatite and bulk samples of phosphate-rich black shales from the same formations. Importantly, however, phosphate-depleted shales intimately associated with the P-rich intervals are relatively depleted in MREE. These antithetic patterns argue convincingly for secondary migration from the bulk sediment into the phosphate, and the extent of MREE enrichment in the conodonts is correlated positively with the total REE content. MREE enrichment in conodonts does not vary systematically as a function of lithology, stratigraphic level, conodont genus, geographic location, or with independent estimates of paleoredox conditions in the bottom waters. Collectively, these results argue for postmortem (diagenetic) REE uptake resulting in a pronounced (and progressive) MREE enrichment. Any cerium anomalies, if initially present, were masked by diagenetic uptake of REE. Paleoenvironmental interpretations of conodont REE, particularly for samples exhibiting MREE enrichment, should therefore be viewed with caution.     

Eolian deposition of trace elements onto Taylor Valley Antarctic glaciers

The major ion and trace element chemistry in four 60-110 cm deep snow pits was examined from three Antarctic Taylor Valley glaciers (Commonwealth, Canada and Howard), all located within 20 km of the Ross Sea. Taylor Valley (TV) (77°30′S, 163°15′E) is part of the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV), the largest ice-free area in Antarctica. Snow chemistry of these glaciers is strongly influenced by cross-valley (SW-NE and NE-SW) winds that deposit eolian materials, including mineral dust and soluble salts. Arsenic, Cd, Cu, Mo, Pb, Sb and Sn in recent TV glacier snow are almost exclusively derived from eolian dust. The relative magnitude of element variations with depth relate to the exposure of snow sites to prevalent winds. Eolian deposition is a primary source of these elements to Canada Glacier snow and supra and proglacial streams. Eolian processes are likely very important to the delivery and availability of nutrients and, potentially toxic elements to dry valley Antarctic ecosystems.     

Coastal eutrophication, land use changes and Ceratium furca (Dinophyceae) blooms in Pago Pago Harbor, American Samoa 2007-2009

The bloom forming dinoflagellate, Ceratium furca, has been linked with coastal eutrophication worldwide in tropical and subtropical locations. During the summer of 2007, an unusual 6-month long bloom of C. furca was observed in Pago Pago Harbor, Tutuila Island, American Samoa. Incidents of dinoflagellate blooms in this area have not been previously reported. The bloom was first reported in May and dissipated in November 2007. In February-March 2009, a similar C. furca bloom was observed. During both blooms,...