The evolution of the terrestrial-terminating Irish Sea glacier during the last glaciation

Here we reconstruct the last advance to maximum limits and retreat of the Irish Sea Glacier (ISG), the only land-terminating ice lobe of the western British Irish Ice Sheet. A series of reverse bedrock slopes rendered proglacial lakes endemic, forming time-transgressive moraine- and bedrock-dammed basins that evolved with ice marginal retreat. Combining, for the first time on glacial sediments, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) bleaching profiles for cobbles with single grain and small aliquot OSL measurements on sands, has produced a coherent chronology from these heterogeneously bleached samples. This chronology constrains what is globally an early build-up of ice during late Marine Isotope Stage 3 and Greenland Stadial (GS) 5, with ice margins reaching south Lancashire by 30 ± 1.2 ka, followed by a 120-km advance at 28.3 ± 1.4 ka reaching its 26.5 ± 1.1 ka maximum extent during GS-3. Early retreat during GS-3 reflects piracy of ice sources shared with the Irish-Sea Ice Stream (ISIS), starving the ISG. With ISG retreat, an opportunistic readvance of Welsh ice during GS-2 rode over the ISG moraines occupying the space vacated, with ice margins oscillating within a substantial glacial over-deepening. Our geomorphological chronosequence shows a glacial system forced by climate but mediated by piracy of ice sources shared with the ISIS, changing flow regimes and fronting environments.     

The Ultimate CCD for Laser Guide Star Wavefront Sensing on Extremely Large Telescopes

All of the extremely large telescopes (ELTs) will utilize sodium laser guide star (LGS) adaptive optics (AO) systems. Most of these telescopes plan to use the Shack-Hartmann approach for wavefront sensing. In these AO systems, the laser spots in subapertures at the edge of the pupil will suffer from spot elongation due to the 10 km extent of the sodium layer and the large separation from the projection laser. This spot elongation will severely degrade the performance of standard geometry wavefront sensing systems. In this paper, we present a CCD with custom pixel morphology that aligns the pixels of each subaperture with the radial extension of the LGS spot. This CCD design will give better performance than a standard geometry CCDs for continuous wave lasers. In addition, this CCD design is optimal for a pulsed sodium laser. The pixel geometry enables each subaperture to follow a laser pulse traversing the sodium layer, providing optimal sampling of a limited number of detected photons. In addition to novel pixel layout, this CCD will also incorporate experimental JFET sense amplifiers and use CMOS design approaches to simplify the routing of biases, clocks and video output. This CCD will attain photon-noise limited performance at high frame rates, and is being incorporated in the plans for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).     

Denitrification and N2O production in near-shore marine sediments

Methods were developed for determining rates of denitrification in coastal marine sediments by measuring the production of N₂ from undisturbed cores incubated in gas-tight chambers. Denitrification rates at summer temperatures (23°C) in sediment cores from Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, were about 50μmol N₂m^?2 hr^?1. This nitrogen flux is equal to approximately one-half of the NH⁺₄flux from the sediments at this temperature and is of the magnitude necessary to account for the anomalously low N/P and anomalously high O/N ratios often reported for benthic nutrient fluxes. The loss of fixed nitrogen as N₂ during the benthic remineralization of organic matter, coupled with the importance of benthic remineralization processes in shallow coastal waters may help to explain why the availability of fixed nitrogen is a major factor limiting primary production in these areas. Narragansett Bay sediments are also a source of N₂O, but the amount of nitrogen involved was only about 0.2 μmol m^?2 hr^?1 at 23°C.     

Quaternary paleolake formation and cataclysmic flooding along the upper Yenisei River

A suite of geomorphological and sedimentological features in the catchment of the upper Yenisei River in the Sayan mountains of southern Siberia testifies to the occurrence of cataclysmic floods that flowed down the river. Evidence of large-scale high-energy flood events includes: 1) gravel dunes, up to a few meters high and spaced 50 to 80 m apart, in the Kyzyl Basin 2) landforms such as hanging valleys and paleochannels and 3) flood sediments in a tributary valley. The origins of the Yenisei floods were likely diverse due to complex hydrological processes operating in the Sayan mountains. The possibilities include failures of multiple, variably impounded (ice, sedimentary, tectonic scarp, and lava flow dams) paleolakes in the two large intermontane basins of Darkhadyn Khotgor and Todza, and other minor basins, in the upper Yenisei River catchment. Dating techniques applied to the paleolakes in the Darkhadyn Khotgor and Todza basins revealed their formation during various periods in the middle–late Pleistocene and Holocene. Flooding from the Darkhadyn Khotgor appears to explain many of the inferred flood features, although contributions by flooding from other paleolake basins cannot be ruled out. Computer simulation of the flooding caused by a Darkhadyn Khotgor paleolake ice-dam failure indicates a probable peak discharge of  3.5 × 10⁶ m³ s^− 1, approximately one-fifth that of the floods that formed the Channeled Scabland in the U.S.A. Many of the outburst events probably occurred in the late Quaternary, but earlier floods could also have occurred.     

Evidence of 6 000-Year Periodicity in Reconstructed Sunspot Numbers

Reconstructed sunspot data are available that extend solar activity back to 11 360 years before the present. We have examined these data using Hurst analysis, a moving average filter, and Fourier analysis. All of the procedures indicate the presence of a long term (≈6 000 year) cycle not previously reported. A number of shorter cycles formerly identified in the literature by using Fourier analysis, Bayes methods, and maximum entropy methods were also detected in the reconstructed sunspot data.