Lamellar pyroxenes and their petrogenetic significance: Three examples from the Czech Massif

The first event in the crystallization of pyroxenite in nodules from Bory was the growth of clinopyroxene at an uncertain 1,190(30)° C and 2.5(2)GPa. Lamellae of garnet and orthopyroxene in CPX nucleated slightly above 1,000° C and equilibrated at 940(20)° C and 3.9(6)GPa. The growth of lamellae was followed by crystallization of groundmass that corroded lamellar clinopyroxene. Phenocrysts of clinopyroxene and orthopyroxene in olivine pyroxenite from T?i Studně crystallized at 1,290(100)° C and 2.3(1.4)GPa. The lamellae in both phases nucleated between 1,400 and 1,200° C and equilibrated at 860(40)° C and 0.2(3)GPa, before regional metamorphism. (The temperatures of nucleation mentioned rest on uncertain assumptions in the phase-boundary theory and should be viewed with caution.) The serpentinized peridotite-pyroxenite from De?tná contains clinopyroxene relics (the only primary phase) with lamellae of a 1.42 nm sheet silicate topotactically pseudomorphing enstatite, possibly a chlorite or vermiculite. All phases in lamellae are crystallographically oriented in the hosts. The present cases suggest that when applying the theory of phase boundaries, a modified procedure of Robinson et al. should also be considered, in which identity of adjacent areas, rather than just vectors, is the basis of calculation. Spinel lamellae in CPX are bounded not only by faces parallel to coherent interfaces, but also by faces formed by accumulation of incoherent edges of growth ledges.     

A New Pseudo-dynamic Approach for Seismic Active Soil Thrust

A critical review of the existing pseudo-dynamic approach is provided and a new pseudo-dynamic approach is proposed based on a visco-elastic behavior of backfill overlying rigid bedrock subjected to harmonic horizontal acceleration. Considering a planar failure surface, closed form expressions for seismic active soil thrust, soil pressure distribution and overturning moment are obtained. The results of this study indicate that the existing pseudo-dynamic method can strongly underestimate the soil active thrust especially close to the fundamental frequency of the backfill, where the soil response is more sensitive to the damping ratio. The acting point of the total seismic active thrust is always found to be higher than that predicted by the traditional pseudo-dynamic approach. The effect of the shear resistance angle and wall friction angle on the acting point increases as the amplitude of the base acceleration increases, whereas their effect is generally small far from the natural frequencies of the backfill.     

Internal and forced variability along a section between Greenland and Portugal in the CLIPPER Atlantic model

Numerical models are used to estimate the meridional overturning and transports along the paths of two hydrographic cruises, carried out in 1997 and 2002 from Greenland to Portugal. We have examined the influence of the different paths of the two cruises and found that it could explain 0.4 to 2 Sv of difference in overturning (the precise value is model-dependent). Models show a decrease in the overturning circulation between 1997 and 2002, with different amplitudes. The CLIPPER ATL6 model reproduces well the observed weakening of the overturning in density coordinates between the cruises; in the model, the change is due to the combination of interannual and high-frequency forcing and internal variability associated with eddies and meanders. Examination of the -coordinate overturning reveals model–data discrepancies: the vertical structure in the models does not change as much as the observed one. The East Greenland current variability is mainly wind-forced in the ATL6 model, while fluctuations due to eddies and instabilities explain a large part of the North Atlantic Current variability. The time-residual transport of dense water and heat due to eddy correlations between currents and properties is small across this section, which is normal to the direction of the main current.     

Gaussian Processes for history-matching: application to an unconventional gas reservoir

The process of reservoir history-matching is a costly task. Many available history-matching algorithms either fail to perform such a task or they require a large number of simulation runs. To overcome such struggles, we apply the Gaussian Process (GP) modeling technique to approximate the costly objective functions and to expedite finding the global optima. A GP model is a proxy, which is employed to model the input-output relationships by assuming a multi-Gaussian distribution on the output values. An infill criterion is used in conjunction with a GP model to help sequentially add the samples with potentially lower outputs. The IC fault model is used to compare the efficiency of GP-based optimization method with other typical optimization methods for minimizing the objective function. In this paper, we present the applicability of using a GP modeling approach for reservoir history-matching problems, which is exemplified by numerical analysis of production data from a horizontal multi-stage fractured tight gas condensate well. The results for the case that is studied here show a quick convergence to the lowest objective values in less than 100 simulations for this 20-dimensional problem. This amounts to an almost 10 times faster performance compared to the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm that is also known to be a powerful optimization technique. The sensitivities are conducted to explain the performance of the GP-based optimization technique with various correlation functions.