Antecedent aeolian dune topographic control on carbonate and evaporite facies: Middle Jurassic Todilto Member,Wanakah Formation,Ghost Ranch,New Mexico,USA

The Middle Jurassic Todilto Member of the Wanakah Formation is a carbonate and gypsum unit inset into the underlying aeolian Entrada Sandstone in the San Juan Basin. Field and thin section study of the uppermost Entrada and Todilto at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, identified Todilto facies and their relationship to remnant Entrada dune topography. Results support the previous interpretation that the Entrada dunes, housed in a basin below sea level, were rapidly flooded by marine waters. Mass wasting of the dunes gave rise to sediment‐gravity flows that largely buried remnant dune topography, leaving ca 12 m of relief that defined the antecedent condition for Todilto deposition. Previously interpreted as seasonal varves deposited in a stratified water body, the Todilto is reinterpreted as a microbial biolaminite. Most diagnostic are organic‐rich laminae with structures characteristic of filamentous microbes and containing trapped aeolian silt, and clotted‐texture laminae with a fabric associated with calcification of extracellular polymeric substances. The spatial arrangement of Todilto facies is controlled by the dune palaeotopography. A continuous basal laminated mudstone thickens over the dune crest, reflecting the optimum conditions for microbial mat development, and is interpreted to have been deposited when marine waters submerged the topography. Subsequent drying caused emergence of the crestal area, and formation of tepee structures and a dissolution breccia. Gypsiferous mudflats and periodic ponds occupied the dune flanks and interdune area, with gypsum concentrated within the interdune area. Entrada sands remained unstable during Todilto deposition with common injection structures into the Todilto, and a remnant slope caused the downslope movement and folding of Todilto strata on the upper lee face. Although some expansion of the gypsum occurred in the subsurface, facies architecture fostered development of a dissolution front adjacent to the interdune gypsum body with section collapse of gypsiferous limestone on the dune flanks.     

A 2000 year record of climatic change at Ongoke Lake,southwest Alaska

We analyzed sediments of the past 2000 years from Ongoke Lake, southwest Alaska, for organic carbon, organic nitrogen, biogenic silica (BSi), and diatom assemblages at decadal to centennial resolution to infer limnological changes that may be related to climatic variation in southwestern Alaska. The chronology is based on a ²¹⁰Pb profile from bulk sediments and nine AMS ¹⁴C ages from terrestrial plant macrofossils. Four of the ¹⁴C ages span a core depth interval of 60.5 cm but are statistically indistinguishable from one another with a mean of ~1300 AD, which compromises the determination of temporal trends at Ongoke Lake and comparison with other paleoclimate records. The diatom record suggests changes in the duration of ice cover and strength of thermal stratification that are probably related to temperature variation. This variation includes a cold interval around the first millennium cooling (FMC) and a warm interval spanning the medieval climate anomaly (MCA). However, the lake-sediment record shows no clear signals of temperature variation for the period of the Little Ice Age (LIA) or the twentieth century. Climatic changes during these periods may have been manifested through effective-moisture (precipitation minus evapotranspiration) variation in the Ongoke Lake area. We estimate water depths and infer effective-moisture fluctuations by applying a regional transfer function to our diatom record. Together with inferences from diatom autecologies, this water-depth reconstruction suggests that effective moisture increased steadily from 50 BC to 350 AD, which was followed by relatively dry conditions between 550 and 750 AD and relatively wet conditions between 750 and 1450 AD. Effective moisture was low from ~1450 to 1850 AD, coinciding with the LIA; an alternative age model places this interval between ~1315 and 1850 AD. During the past 150 years, effective moisture increased, with estimated water depths reaching peak values in the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers the first paleolimnological record for inferring centennial-scale climatic variation over the past two millennia from southwestern Alaska.

Weathering the escarpment: chemical and physical rates and processes,south‐eastern Australia

Differences in chemical weathering extent and character are expected to exist across topographic escarpments due to spatial gradients of climatic and/or tectonic forcing. The passive margin escarpment of south‐eastern Australia has a debated but generally accepted model of propagation in which it retreated (within 40 Ma) to near its current position following rifting between Australia and New Zealand 85–100 Ma before present. We focus on this escarpment to quantify chemical weathering rates and processes and how they may provide insight into scarp evolution and retreat. We compare chemical weathering extents and rates above and below the escarpment using a mass balance approach coupling major and trace element analyses with previous measurements of denudation rates using cosmogenic nuclides (¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al). We find a slight gradient in saprolite chemical weathering rate as a percentage of total weathering rate across the escarpment. The lowlands area, encompassing the region extending from the base of the escarpment to the coast, experiences a greater extent of chemical weathering than the highland region above the escarpment. Percents of denudation attributable to saprolite weathering average 57 ± 6% and 47 ± 7% at low and high sites respectively. Furthermore, the chemical index of alteration (CIA), a ratio of immobile to mobile oxides in granitic material that increases with weathering extent, have corresponding average values of 73·7 ± 3·9 and 65·5 ± 3·4, indicating lower extents of weathering above the escarpment. Finally, we quantify variations in the rates and extent of chemical weathering at the hillslope scale across the escarpment to suggest new insight into how climate differences and hillslope topography help drive landscape evolution, potentially overprinting longer term tectonic forcing. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analogue models of caldera collapse in strike-slip tectonic regimes

Regional-scale faulting, particularly in strike-slip tectonic regimes, is a relatively poorly constrained factor in the formation of caldera volcanoes. To examine interactions between structures associated with regional-tectonic strike-slip deformation and volcano-tectonic caldera subsidence, we made scaled analogue models. Tabular (sill-like) inclusions of creamed honey in a sand/gypsum mix replicated shallow-level granitic magma chambers in the brittle upper crust. Lateral motion of a base plate sited below half the sand/gypsum pack allowed simulation of regional strike-slip deformation. Our experiments modelled: (1) strike-slip deformation of a homogeneous brittle medium; (2) strike-slip deformation of a brittle medium containing a passive magma reservoir; (3) caldera collapse into sill-like magma reservoirs without regional strike-slip deformation; and (4) caldera collapse into sill-like magma reservoirs after regional strike-slip deformation. Our results show that whilst the magma chamber shape principally influences the development and geometry of volcano-tectonic collapse structures, regional-tectonic strike-slip faults (Riedel shears and Y-shears) may affect a caldera’s structural evolution in two main ways. Firstly, regional strike-slip faults above the magma chamber may form a pre-collapse structural grain that is exploited and reactivated during subsidence. Our experiments show that such faults may preferentially reactivate where tangential to the collapse area and coincident with the chamber margins. In this case, volcano-tectonic extension in the caldera periphery tends to localise on regional-tectonic faults that lie just outside the chamber margins. In addition, volcano-tectonic reverse faults may link with and reactivate pre-collapse regional-tectonic faults that lie just inside the chamber margins. Secondly, where regional-tectonic strike-slip faults define corners in the magma chamber margin, they may halt the propagation of volcano-tectonic reverse faults. The experiments also highlight the potential difficulties in assessing the relative contributions of volcano-tectonic and regional-tectonic subsidence processes to the final caldera structure seen in the field. Disruption of the pre-collapse surface by regional-tectonic faulting was preserved during coherent volcano-tectonic subsidence to produce a caldera floor of differentially-subsided fault blocks. Without definitive evidence for syn-eruptive growth faulting, thickness changes in caldera fill across such regional-tectonic fault blocks in nature could be mistaken as evidence for piecemeal volcano-tectonic collapse.     

Wind stress forcing of the North Sea 'pole tide'

We conduct numerical simulations of the wind forcing of sea level variations in the North Sea using a barotropic ocean model with realistic geography and bathymetry to examine the forcing of the 14 month 'pole tide', which is known to be anomalously large along the Denmark–Netherlands coast. The simulation input is the monthly mean surface wind stress field from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis for the 40 year period 1958–1997. The ocean model output sea level response is then compared with 10 coastal tide gauge records from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) over the same period of time. Besides the strong seasonal variations, several prominent quasi-periodicities exist near 7 years, 3 years, 14 months, 9 months and 6.5 months. Correlations and spectral analyses show remarkable agreement between the model output and the observations, particularly in the 14 month, or Chandler, period band. The latter indicates that the enhanced pole tide found in the North Sea along the Denmark–Netherlands coast is actually the coastal set-up response to wind stress forcing with a periodicity of around 14 months. We find no need to invoke a geophysical explanation involving resonance enhancement of the pole tide in the North Sea to explain the observations.     

The Hubble constant from galaxy lenses: impacts of triaxiality and model degeneracies

The Hubble constant can be constrained using the time delays between multiple images of gravitationally lensed sources. In some notable cases, typical lensing analyses assuming isothermal galaxy density profiles produce low values for the Hubble constant, inconsistent with the result of the HST Key Project  (72 ± 8 km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹)  . Possible systematics in the values of the Hubble constant derived from galaxy lensing systems can result from a number of factors, for example, neglect of environmental effects, assumption of isothermality, or contamination by line-of-sight structures. One additional potentially important factor is the triaxial structure of the lensing galaxy halo; most lens models account for halo shape simply by perturbing the projected spherical lensing potential, an approximation that is often necessary but that is inadequate at the levels of triaxiality predicted in the cold dark matter paradigm. To quantify the potential error introduced by this assumption in estimates of the Hubble parameter, we strongly lens a distant galaxy through a sample of triaxial softened isothermal haloes and use an Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to constrain the lensing halo profile and the Hubble parameter from the resulting multiple image systems. We explore the major degeneracies between the Hubble parameter and several parameters of the lensing model, finding that without a way to accurately break these degeneracies accurate estimates of the Hubble parameter are not possible. Crucially, we find that triaxiality does not significantly bias estimates of the Hubble constant, and offer an analytic explanation for this behaviour in the case of isothermal profiles. Neglected triaxial halo shape cannot contribute to the low Hubble constant values derived in a number of galaxy lens systems.     

Visual Event Screening of Continuous Seismic Data by Supersonograms

We present a new visualization method for human inspection of seismic data called supersonograms, which maximizes the amount of time and stations visible on screen while retaining the possibility to detect short and low-signal to noise ratio (SNR) signals. This visualization approach is integrated into a seismological software suite used in the seismic aftershock monitoring system (SAMS) of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) on-site inspections (OSI) to detect suspicious events eventually representing aftershocks from an underground nuclear explosion (UNE). During an OSI, huge amounts of continuous waveform data accumulate from up to 50 six-channel mini-arrays covering an inspection area of 1,000 square kilometers. Sought-after events can have magnitude as low as $\hbox{M}_{\rm L}\,{-2.0}$ and duration of just a few seconds, which makes it particularly hard to discover them in large, noisy datasets. Therefore, the data visualization is based on nonlinearly scaled, noise-adapted spectrograms, i.e., sonograms, which help to distinguish weak signal energy from stationary background noise. Four single-trace sonograms per mini-array can be combined into supersonograms, since the array aperture is small and sonograms suppress differences of local site noise, allowing an analyst to check array-wide signal coherence quickly. In this paper, we present the supersonograms and the software on the basis of a dataset from a creeping, inhabited landslide in Austria where the same station layout is used as in an OSI. Detected signals are fracture processes in the sedimentary landslide, i.e., slidequakes, with $\hbox{M}_{\rm L}\,{-0.5} \,\hbox{\,to}\,{-2.5}$ between July 2009 and July 2011. These signals are comparable in magnitude and duration to expected weak UNE aftershocks.     

A laboratory study on the kinetics of the formation of oil-suspended particulate matter aggregates using the NIST-1941b sediment

The formation of oil-suspended particulate matter aggregates (OSAs) results from the heteroaggregation between dispersed oil droplets and suspended particulate matter present in coastal waters. This process has been recognized by the oil spill remediation community to enhance natural cleansing of oiled shorelines and oil dispersion in the water column. While several studies have been conducted on the formation and characteristics of OSAs, few studies have addressed the kinetics of OSA formation. Operationally, this has left decision-makers lacking information on the time scale of this process and its significance to oil dispersion in real spills. A laboratory study was conducted to investigate the kinetics of OSA formation as a function of mixing energy and the sediment-to-oil ratio using the standard reference material 1941b. Results showed that formation of OSAs increased exponentially with the mixing time and reached a maximum within 4 h. When the shaking rate increased from 2.0 to 2.3 Hz, the maximum oil trapping efficiency increased from 20% to 42% and the required shaking time decreased from 3.7 to 0.7 h.     

Local and remote response of the North Sea dynamics to morphodynamic changes in the Wadden Sea

The response of the tidal system in the southern North Sea to morphodynamic changes was investigated in a modelling study using fine resolution bathymetric observations available for 1982–2011. The Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydroscience Integrated System Model (SCHISM) was set up for the different sets of bathymetries. One set of bathymetry was compiled from a large number of bathymetric measurements over many years, while the other two reflected bathymetry state in the area of Wadden Sea during 2000 and 2011, respectively. The temporal and spatial evolution of bathymetry was dominated by migration of tidal channels. The M4 tide showed larger sensitivity to bathymetric change in the Wadden Sea than the M2 tide, whereas the structure of the latter remained rather robust. The largest change of the tidal wave due to the differences in bathymetries was located off the North Frisian Wadden Sea. Traces of changes were also found far away from the regions of their origin because the tidal waves in the North Sea propagate the local disturbances basin-wide. This illustrated an efficient physical mechanism of teleconnectivity, i.e. effecting the local responses to the larger-scale or remote change of ocean bottom caused by erosion and deposition. The tidal distortion resulting from the relatively small bathymetric changes was substantial, particularly in the coastal zone. This is a manifestation of the nonlinear tidal transformation in shallow oceans and is crucial for the sediment transport and the morphodynamic feedback, because of the altered tidal asymmetry.