Picoplankton distribution in different water masses of the East China Sea in autumn and winter

Picoplankton distribution was investigated in different water masses of the East China Sea in November,2006 and February,2007.The autumn and winter cruises crossed three major water masses:the coastal water mass(CWM),the mixed water mass(MWM),which forms on the continental shelf,and the Kuroshio water mass(KWM).Picoplankton composition was resolved into four main groups by flow cytometry,namely Synechococcus,Prochlorococcus,picoeukaryotes,and heterotrophic bacteria.The average abundances of Synechococcus,picoeukaryotes,and heterotrophic bacteria were(0.63±10.88)×103,(1.61±1.16)×103,(3.39±1.27)×105 cells/mL in autumn and(6.45±8.60)×103,(3.23±2.63)×103,(3.76±1.37)×105 cells/mL in winter,respectively.Prochlorococcus was not found in the CWM and seldom observed in surface samples in either season.However,Prochlorococcus was observed in the MWM and KWM(approximately 10 3 cells/mL) in both autumn and winter.Synechococcus distribution varied considerably among water masses,with the highest levels in KWM and lowest levels in CWM.The depth-averaged integrated abundance of Synechococcus was approximately 5-fold higher in KWM than in CWM,which may be due primarily to water temperature.In the MWM,Synechococcus was resolved as two subgroups;the presence of both subgroups was more common in autumn.Picoeukaryote abundance varied less among water masses than Synechococcus,and heterotrophic bacteria depth-averaged integrated abundance exhibited the smallest seasonal variations with respect to water mass.Correlation analysis showed that relationships between picoplankton abundances and environmental factors(temperature,nutrients,and chlorophyll a) differed among the three water masses,suggesting that the three water masses have different effects on picoplankton distribution(particularly Synechococcus).     

Geophysical investigation of the Sandalp rock avalanche deposits

In the study of rock avalanche phenomena, numerical modelling makes use of back analyses of the rock avalanche propagation for calibration of the modelling assumptions and parameters. The back analyses require knowledge of the run-out area boundaries and the thickness distribution of the deposit. Geophysical methods can be applied to retrieve the thickness distribution, but, due to strong heterogeneities and logistic problems they are seldom applied. The aim of this work is to assess the potential of integrated geophysical methods to recognise and characterise a deposit created by two rock avalanches which occurred in the Sandalp valley (Switzerland) in 1996. The topography of the site before and after the rock avalanche is known and can be used as a benchmark. Resistivity tomography, seismic P-wave tomography, and active and passive surface wave analysis have been applied on several profiles deployed both on the rock avalanche deposit and in the surrounding area. Innovative approaches for surface wave analysis based on laterally constrained inversion and multimodal inversion have been applied to the data. A comparison of the results of the geophysical investigations with the topographic benchmark has shown the capability of the geophysical methods to locate the bottom of the deposit in the areas where the contrast with the host sediments properties is significant. In these areas, the deposit has higher resistivities and lower seismic velocities than the underlying materials. In the areas where the deposit is thicker and richer in fine-grained materials the geophysical parameters are not able to discriminate between the rock avalanche deposit and the underlying sediments. As a secondary task, the geophysical methods also allowed the bedrock pattern to be outlined.     

Length of the day and evolution of the Earth's core in the geological past

In this paper, we study quantitatively the effect of the Earth's core formation on the secular rate of change of the length of day (LOD). We find that for the present epoch, a growth rate of the core comprised between 1 and 10 mm/cy seems to be a plausible guess, leading to a relative de crease of LOD comprised roughly between 10 and 100 μs/cy. Such values do not affect significantly the observed secular in crease of LOD caused by tidal braking, which amounts to about 1.79 ms/cy. However, in the remote geological past, before the Phanerozoic, the effects of core growth may have been much more important, because the total change of LOD associated with core formation has been estimated by Birch in 1965 to be 2.4 hours for an initially undifferentiated cold Earth, and 3.1 hours for an initially undifferentiated hot Earth. We consider a number of scenarios, some of them corresponding to very early and/or very fast core formation, others corresponding to slow and/or late core formation. We show that palaeo‐LOD measurements seem to favour slow core formation during the Proterozoic, contrarily to the now largely prevailing hypothesis based on geochemical arguments that the iron core formed very early in the Earth's history and during a geologically short time interval (© 2011 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)