Geochemistry and origin of albite gneisses,northeastern Adirondack Mountains,New York

Albite gneisses containing up to 8.7 percent Na₂O and as little as 0.1% K₂O comprise a significant part of the Proterozoic Lyon Mountain Gneiss in the Ausable Forks Quadrangle of the northeastern Adirondacks, New York State. Two distinct types of albite gneisses are present. One is a trondhjemitic leucogneiss (LAG) consisting principally of albite (Ab95–Ab98) and quartz with minor magnetite and, locally, minor amounts of amphibole or acmiterich pyroxene. LAG probably originated by metamorphism of a rhyolitie or rhyodacitic ash-flow tuff with A-type geochemical affinities, following post-depositional analcitization in a saline or saline-alkaline environment. The other type is a mafic albite gneiss (MAG) containing albite and pyroxene along with 0–45 percent quartz, minor amphibole, and titanite. MAG locally displays pinstripe banding and contains albite (Ab98) megacrysts up to 5 cm across. Its precursor may have been a sediment composed of diagenetic analcite or albite, dolomite, and quartz. Both types of albite gneiss are interlayered with granitic gneisses (LMG) of variable composition derived from less altered tuffs. A potassium-rich (up to 9.7% K₂O) microcline gneiss facies may have had a protolith rich in diagenetic K feldspar. We propose that the albite gneisses and associated granitic gneisses are the granulite-facies metamorphic equivalent of a bimodal, dominantly felsic, volcanic suite with minor intercalated sediments, probably including evaporites. The volcanics were erupted in an anorogenic setting, such as an incipient or failed intracontinental rift. Deposition took place in a closed-basin, playa lake environment, where diagenetic alteration resulted in redistribution of the alkalis and strong oxidation.     

Heat balance and eddies in the Peru-Chile current system

The Peru-Chile current System (PCS) is a region of persistent biases in global climate models. It has strong coastal upwelling, alongshore boundary currents, and mesoscale eddies. These oceanic phenomena provide essential heat transport to maintain a cool oceanic surface underneath the prevalent atmospheric stratus cloud deck, through a combination of mean circulation and eddy flux. We demonstrate these behaviors in a regional, quasi-equilibrium oceanic model that adequately resolves the mesoscale eddies with climatological forcing. The key result is that the atmospheric heating is large (>50 W m^?2) over a substantial strip >500 km wide off the coast of Peru, and the balancing lateral oceanic flux is much larger than provided by the offshore Ekman flux alone. The atmospheric heating is weaker and the coastally influenced strip is narrower off Chile, but again the Ekman flux is not sufficient for heat balance. The eddy contribution to the oceanic flux is substantial. Analysis of eddy properties shows strong surface temperature fronts and associated large vorticity, especially off Peru. Cyclonic eddies moderately dominate the surface layer, and anticyclonic eddies, originating from the nearshore poleward Peru-Chile Undercurrent (PCUC), dominate the subsurface, especially off Chile. The sensitivity of the PCS heat balance to equatorial intra-seasonal oscillations is found to be small. We demonstrate that forcing the regional model with a representative, coarse-resolution global reanalysis wind product has dramatic and deleterious consequences for the oceanic circulation and climate heat balance, the eddy heat flux in particular.     

加里福尼亚南部岸外泥火山的甲烷成因方解石、13C亏损的双壳类贝壳以及气水合物

沿大陆边缘的气体和流体通量与构造—沉积过程和(产生冷泉、温泉和甲烷水合物的)物化条件有关(如Obzhirov等,2004)。我们对水合物进行了深入研究,因为它对块体坡移、能源、全球气候突然变化以及全球的碳质量平衡具有潜在的贡献。其中冷泉尤其重要,因为其与大的气体和流体通量、     

Concurrent Drainage Network Rendering for Automated Pen‐and‐ink Style Landscape Illustration

Pen‐and‐ink style geomorphological illustrations render landscape elements critical to the understanding of surface processes within a viewshed and, at their highest levels of execution, represent works of art, being both practical and beautiful. The execution of a pen‐and‐ink composition, however, requires inordinate amounts of time and skill. This article will introduce an algorithm for rendering creases – linework representing visually significant morphological features – at animation speeds, made possible with recent advances in graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures and rendering APIs. Beginning with a preprocessed high‐resolution drainage network model, creases are rendered from selected stream segments if their weighted criteria (slope, flow accumulation, and surface illumination), attenuated by perspective distance from the viewpoint, exceed a threshold. The algorithm thus provides a methodology for crease representation at continuous levels of detail down to the highest resolution of the preprocessed drainage model over a range of surface orientation and illumination conditions. The article also presents an implementation of the crease algorithm with frame rates exceeding those necessary to support animation, supporting the proposition that parallel processing techniques exposed through modern GPU programming environments provide cartographers with a new and inexpensive toolkit for constructing alternative and attractive real‐time animated landscape visualizations for spatial analysis.     

Trends in phosphatase activity along a successional gradient of tidal freshwater marshes on the Cooper River South Carolina

Phosphatase activity was measured in sediments from tidal freshwater habitats adjacent to the Cooper River in South Carolina representing different stages of ecological succession. It was found that sediment (0–5 cm) acid phosphatase activity, alkaline phosphatase activity and phosphodiesterase activity increased with increasing successional stage and phytomass. Acid phosphatase activity in creased from 7.5±1.2 (±1 SD) in subtidal sediment from a shallow open water habitat without vegetation to 61.2±4.9 μmol g⁻¹ hr⁻¹ (μmol of p-nitrophenol released per gram of dry sediment per hour) in intertidal sediments colonized by emergent macrophytes, while alkaline phosphatase activity increased from 2.1±0.1 to 19.01±1.5 μmol g⁻¹ hr⁻¹. Phosphodiesterase activity increased from 1.8±0.1 to 20.2±2.0 μmol g⁻¹ hr⁻¹ along the same gradient. Acid phosphatase activity was highly correlated (R²=0.92, P<0.001) with the organic matter content of the sediment. A study of phosphatase kinetics showed that V_max of all phosphatases also increased along the successional gradient. Trends in phosphatase activity and V_max correlated positively with plant biomass and negatively with concentrations of soluble reactive phosphorus in porewater, sediment extractable phosphorus, and total phosphourus. The porewater N∶P atom ratio decreased along the succession gradient from 25.3 in an early stage, open water community to 13.0 in a community dominated by emergent vegetation. The data also show that the distribution of the forms of phosphorus changed with successional stage. The change in distribution and the increased biological demand for phosphorus that paralleled succession were mediated by the activity of phosphatase enzymes.     

Effects of detailed soil spatial information on watershed modeling across different model scales

Hydro-ecological modelers often use spatial variation of soil information derived from conventional soil surveys in simulation of hydro-ecological processes over watersheds at mesoscale (10–100 km²). Conventional soil surveys are not designed to provide the same level of spatial detail as terrain and vegetation inputs derived from digital terrain analysis and remote sensing techniques. Soil property layers derived from conventional soil surveys are often incompatible with detailed terrain and remotely sensed data due to their difference in scales. The objective of this research is to examine the effect of scale incompatibility between soil information and the detailed digital terrain data and remotely sensed information by comparing simulations of watershed processes based on the conventional soil map and those simulations based on detailed soil information across different simulation scales. The detailed soil spatial information was derived using a GIS (geographical information system), expert knowledge, and fuzzy logic based predictive mapping approach (Soil Land Inference Model, SoLIM). The Regional Hydro-Ecological Simulation System (RHESSys) is used to simulate two watershed processes: net photosynthesis and stream flow. The difference between simulation based on the conventional soil map and that based on the detailed predictive soil map at a given simulation scale is perceived to be the effect of scale incompatibility between conventional soil data and the rest of the (more detailed) data layers at that scale. Two modeling approaches were taken in this study: the lumped parameter approach and the distributed parameter approach. The results over two small watersheds indicate that the effect does not necessarily always increase or decrease as the simulation scale becomes finer or coarser. For a given watershed there seems to be a fixed scale at which the effect is consistently low for the simulated processes with both the lumped parameter approach and the distributed parameter approach.     

Indirect Effects of Salinity and Temperature on Kuwait’s Shrimp Stocks

Discharge of the Shatt Al-Arab is believed to be a dominating component of the northern Arabian Gulf’s ecology and largely responsible for productivity of Kuwait’s fisheries. With major construction of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Turkey, river discharge has been substantially reduced, and flooding essentially eliminated. We attempted to relate river flow and shrimp landings indirectly by correlating 19 years of salinity and temperature data from Kuwait’s waters with corresponding annual shrimp landings. For green tiger prawns (Penaeus semisulcatus), the combination of October salinities and January temperatures provided the best correlation (r = 0.67) with landings in the following shrimping season. For the combined landings of jinga and kiddi shrimps (Metapenaeus affinis and Parapenaeopsis stylifera, respectively), December salinity during season and May temperature prior to season resulted in the best correlation (r = 0.87). Landings of these two species also correlated well with spring and summer temperatures. Under normal conditions, late winter or early spring temperatures prior to fishing season influence recruitment of the green tiger prawn, whereas December salinities during harvest season influence the abundance of jinga–kiddi shrimps. With further reductions in the Shatt Al-Arab discharge and the elimination of flood events, Kuwait’s shrimp landings will most likely decrease over time.     

Scales and causes of heterogeneity in bars in a large multi‐channel river: Río Paraná, Argentina

To date, published studies of alluvial bar architecture in large rivers have been restricted mostly to case studies of individual bars and single locations. Relatively little is known about how the depositional processes and sedimentary architecture of kilometre‐scale bars vary within a multi‐kilometre reach or over several hundreds of kilometres downstream. This study presents Ground Penetrating Radar and core data from 11, kilometre‐scale bars from the Río Paraná, Argentina. The investigated bars are located between 30 km upstream and 540 km downstream of the Río Paraná – Río Paraguay confluence, where a significant volume of fine‐grained suspended sediment is introduced into the network. Bar‐scale cross‐stratified sets, with lengths and widths up to 600 m and thicknesses up to 12 m, enable the distinction of large river deposits from stacked deposits of smaller rivers, but are only present in half the surface area of the bars. Up to 90% of bar‐scale sets are found on top of finer‐grained ripple‐laminated bar‐trough deposits. Bar‐scale sets make up as much as 58% of the volume of the deposits in small, incipient mid‐channel bars, but this proportion decreases significantly with increasing age and size of the bars. Contrary to what might be expected, a significant proportion of the sedimentary structures found in the Río Paraná is similar in scale to those found in much smaller rivers. In other words, large river deposits are not always characterized by big structures that allow a simple interpretation of river scale. However, the large scale of the depositional units in big rivers causes small‐scale structures, such as ripple sets, to be grouped into thicker cosets, which indicate river scale even when no obvious large‐scale sets are present. The results also show that the composition of bars differs between the studied reaches upstream and downstream of the confluence with the Río Paraguay. Relative to other controls on downstream fining, the tributary input of fine‐grained suspended material from the Río Paraguay causes a marked change in the composition of the bar deposits. Compared to the upstream reaches, the sedimentary architecture of the downstream reaches in the top ca 5 m of mid‐channel bars shows: (i) an increase in the abundance and thickness (up to metre‐scale) of laterally extensive (hundreds of metres) fine‐grained layers; (ii) an increase in the percentage of deposits comprised of ripple sets (to >40% in the upper bar deposits); and (iii) an increase in bar‐trough deposits and a corresponding decrease in bar‐scale cross‐strata (<10%). The thalweg deposits of the Río Paraná are composed of dune sets, even directly downstream from the Río Paraguay where the upper channel deposits are dominantly fine‐grained. Thus, the change in sedimentary facies due to a tributary point‐source of fine‐grained sediment is primarily expressed in the composition of the upper bar deposits.