A new method to estimate ice age temperatures

On glacial time scales, the waxing and waning of the Eurasian and North American ice sheets depend largely on variations in atmospheric temperature. As global sea level is primarily determined by the volume of these ice sheets, there is a direct (yet complex) relation between global sea level and the northern hemispheric (NH) temperature. This relation is essentially represented by a model of the NH ice sheets. We use a thermomechanical ice-sheet–ice shelf–bedrock model in conjunction with an inverse method to deduce a time series of NH temperature (from 120 kyr BP until present) that is consistent with the observed global sea level record. The advantage of this method is that it provides the annual mean surface air temperature averaged over the NH continents north of 40°N. The results reveal that ice age temperatures were 4–10°C lower than today, which agrees with other temperature reconstructions. However, reconstructed temperatures are comparitively low during the early stages of the glacial, a feature that is consistent with the rapid growth of the ice sheets. The sensitivity of the results for uncertainties in precipitation rate, in observed sea level and in some other model parameters is examined to quantify the error in reconstructed temperature. During the glacial period (120–15 kyr BP), surface air temperatures in the NH (north of 40°N) were 7.2±1.5°C lower than todays (interglacial) temperatures.     

Edward Sabine,ein großer Geophysiker des 19. Jahrhunderts

Zusammenfassung Das soeben beendete dritte Internationale Geophysikalische Jahr, bisheriger Höhepunkt in der Erforschung der uns zugänglichen Hydro- und Atmosphäre der Erde, führt notwendigerweise zu der Frage nach der Vorgeschichte unserer heutigen geophysikalischen Erkenntnisse und Arbeitsmethoden. Als repräsentativ für die erste Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts dürfen wir den englischen Forscher Sir Edward Sabine ansehen, der als erster moderner All-round-Geophysiker gravimetrisch in den Tropen und in der Arktis tätig war, besonders hochgeschätzt von A. v. Humboldt, dessen erdmagnetisches Werk er ausbaute; auch durch wertvolle ozeanographische und meteorologische Untersuchungen rühmlich bekannt.

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Edward Sabine, a great geophysicist of the nineteenth century

Summary The past third International Geophysical Year, up to now culminating point in the research for the hydrosphere and the atmosphere of the earth, makes us, necessarily, desirous to learn something about the early development of to-day's geophysical knowledge and working methods. As representative of the first half of the nineteenth century we may regard the English explorer and scientist Sir Edward Sabine, who as the first all-round geophysicist in the modern sense of the word carried out gravimetric measurements in the tropics and in the arctic regions. Alexander von Humboldt whose geomagnetic work he has been developing, held him in high esteem; besides, he is famous for his research work in the oceanographic and meteorological fields.

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Edward Sabine, grand géophysicien au dix-neuvième siècle

Résumé La troisième Année géophysique internationale écoulée, jusqu'ici point culminant des recherches sur l'hydrosphère et l'atmosphère de la terre, fait nécessairement naître en nous le désir d'étendre nos connaissances du développement primaire de la science et des méthodes de travail de la géophysique actuelle. Nous sommes tenus de considérer l'explorateur et le savant anglais Sir Edward Sabine comme le représentant de la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle. Il fut le premier à effectuer des mesures gravimétriques dans les tropiques et dans les zones arctiques en qualité de géophysicien universel au sens moderne de ce mot. Il jouissait de l'estime profond d'Alexander von Humboldt, dont il a développé l'uvre géomagnétique. De plus, Sabine est fameux pour ses études dans les domaines de l'océanographie et de la météorologie.

     

Application of ray-traced tropospheric slant delays to geodetic VLBI analysis

The correction of tropospheric influences via so-called path delays is critical for the analysis of observations from space geodetic techniques like the very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). In standard VLBI analysis, the a priori slant path delays are determined using the concept of zenith delays, mapping functions and gradients. The a priori use of ray-traced delays, i.e., tropospheric slant path delays determined with the technique of ray-tracing through the meteorological data of numerical weather models (NWM), serves as an alternative way of correcting the influences of the troposphere on the VLBI observations within the analysis. In the presented research, the application of ray-traced delays to the VLBI analysis of sessions in a time span of 16.5 years is investigated. Ray-traced delays have been determined with program RADIATE (see Hofmeister in Ph.D. thesis, Department of Geodesy and Geophysics, Faculty of Mathematics and Geoinformation, Technische Universität Wien. http://resolver.obvsg.at/urn:nbn:at:at-ubtuw:1-3444, 2016) utilizing meteorological data provided by NWM of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In comparison with a standard VLBI analysis, which includes the tropospheric gradient estimation, the application of the ray-traced delays to an analysis, which uses the same parameterization except for the a priori slant path delay handling and the used wet mapping factors for the zenith wet delay (ZWD) estimation, improves the baseline length repeatability (BLR) at 55.9% of the baselines at sub-mm level. If no tropospheric gradients are estimated within the compared analyses, 90.6% of all baselines benefit from the application of the ray-traced delays, which leads to an average improvement of the BLR of 1 mm. The effects of the ray-traced delays on the terrestrial reference frame are also investigated. A separate assessment of the RADIATE ray-traced delays is carried out by comparison to the ray-traced delays from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA GSFC) (Eriksson and MacMillan in http://lacerta.gsfc.nasa.gov/tropodelays, 2016) with respect to the analysis performances in terms of BLR results. If tropospheric gradient estimation is included in the analysis, 51.3% of the baselines benefit from the RADIATE ray-traced delays at sub-mm difference level. If no tropospheric gradients are estimated within the analysis, the RADIATE ray-traced delays deliver a better BLR at 63% of the baselines compared to the NASA GSFC ray-traced delays.     

Hydraulic fracturing in unconventional gas reservoirs: risks in the geological system, part 2

Hydraulic fracturing is a method used for the production of unconventional gas resources. Huge amounts of so-called fracturing fluid (10,000–20,000 m³) are injected into a gas reservoir to create fractures in solid rock formations, upon which mobilised methane fills the pore space and the fracturing fluid is withdrawn. Hydraulic fracturing may pose a threat to groundwater resources if fracturing fluid or brine can migrate through fault zones into shallow aquifers. Diffuse methane emissions from the gas reservoir may not only contaminate shallow groundwater aquifers, but also escape into the atmosphere where methane acts as a greenhouse gas. The working group “Risks in the Geological System” as part of ExxonMobil’s hydrofracking dialogue and information dissemination processes was tasked with the assessment of possible hazards posed by migrating fluids as a result of hydraulic fracturing activities. In this work, several flow paths for fracturing fluid, brine and methane are identified and scenarios are set up to qualitatively estimate under what circumstances these fluids would leak into shallower layers. The parametrisation for potential hydraulic fracturing sites in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony (both in Germany) is derived from literature using upper and lower bounds of hydraulic parameters. The results show that a significant fluid migration is only possible if a combination of several conservative assumptions is met by a scenario.     

Navigating the dilemmas of climate policy in Europe: evidence from policy evaluation studies

Climate change is widely recognised as a ‘wicked’ policy problem. Agreeing and implementing governance responses is proving extremely difficult. Policy makers in many jurisdictions now emphasise their ambition to govern using the best available evidence. One obvious source of such evidence is the evaluations of the performance of existing policies. But to what extent do these evaluations provide insights into the difficult dilemmas that governors typically encounter? We address this question by reviewing the content of 262 evaluation studies of European climate policies in the light of six kinds of dilemma found in the governance literature. We are interested in what these studies say about the performance of European climate policies and in their capacity to inform evidence-based policy-making. We find that the evaluations do arrive at common findings: that climate change is framed as a problem of market and/or state failure; that voluntary measures tend to be ineffective; that market-based instruments tend to be regressive; that EU-level policies have driven climate policies in the latecomer EU Member States; and that lack of monitoring and weak enforcement are major obstacles to effective policy implementation. However, we also conclude that the evidence base these studies represent is surprisingly weak for such a high profile area. There is too little systematic climate policy evaluation work in the EU to support systematic evidence-based policy making. This reduces the scope for sound policy making in the short run and is a constraint to policy learning in the longer term.     

The high-pressure stability of chlorite and other hydrates in subduction mélanges: experiments in the system Cr<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>3</Subscript>–MgO–Al<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>3</Subscript>–SiO<Subscript>2</Subscript>–H<Subscript>2</Subscript>O

The solubility of chromium in chlorite as a function of pressure, temperature, and bulk composition was investigated in the system Cr₂O₃–MgO–Al₂O₃–SiO₂–H₂O, and its effect on phase relations evaluated. Three different compositions with X _Cr = Cr/(Cr + Al) = 0.075, 0.25, and 0.5 respectively, were investigated at 1.5–6.5 GPa, 650–900 °C. Cr-chlorite only occurs in the bulk composition with X _Cr = 0.075; otherwise, spinel and garnet are the major aluminous phases. In the experiments, Cr-chlorite coexists with enstatite up to 3.5 GPa, 800–850 °C, and with forsterite, pyrope, and spinel at higher pressure. At P > 5 GPa other hydrates occur: a Cr-bearing phase-HAPY (Mg_2.2Al_1.5Cr_0.1Si_1.1O₆(OH)₂) is stable in assemblage with pyrope, forsterite, and spinel; Mg-sursassite coexists at 6.0 GPa, 650 °C with forsterite and spinel and a new Cr-bearing phase, named 11.5 Å phase (Mg:Al:Si = 6.3:1.2:2.4) after the first diffraction peak observed in high-resolution X-ray diffraction pattern. Cr affects the stability of chlorite by shifting its breakdown reactions toward higher temperature, but Cr solubility at high pressure is reduced compared with the solubility observed in low-pressure occurrences in hydrothermal environments. Chromium partitions generally according to \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{spinel}}\) ? \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{opx}}\) > \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{chlorite}}\) ≥ \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{HAPY}}\) > \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{garnet}}\). At 5 GPa, 750 °C (bulk with X _Cr = 0.075) equilibrium values are \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{spinel}}\) = 0.27, \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{chlorite}}\) = 0.08, \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{garnet}}\) = 0.05; at 5.4 GPa, 720 °C \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{spinel}}\) = 0.33, \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{HAPY}}\) = 0.06, and \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{garnet}}\) = 0.04; and at 3.5 GPa, 850 °C \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{opx}}\) = 0.12 and \(X_{\text{Cr}}^{\text{chlorite}}\) = 0.07. Results on Cr–Al partitioning between spinel and garnet suggest that at low temperature the spinel- to garnet-peridotite transition has a negative slope of 0.5 GPa/100 °C. The formation of phase-HAPY, in assemblage with garnet and spinel, at pressures above chlorite breakdown, provides a viable mechanism to promote H₂O transport in metasomatized ultramafic mélanges of subduction channels.     

Effects of rice straw on the cell viability,photosynthesis, and growth of Microcystis aeruginosa

Rice straw is supposed to be an environment-friendly biomaterial for inhibiting the growth of harmful blooms of the cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa. However, its potential mechanism is not well known. To explore this mechanism, the growth, cell viability （esterase activity, membrane potential, and membrane integrity）, photosynthesis, and cell size ofM. aeruginosa were determined using flow cytometry and Phyto-PAM after exposure to rice straw extracts （RSE）. The results show that doses from 2.0 to 10.0 g/L of RSE efficiently inhibited the alga for 15 days, while the physiologic and morphologic responses of the cyanobacteria were time-dependent. RSE interfered with the cell membrane potential, cell size, and in vivo chlorophyll-a fluorescence on the first day. After 7 days of exposure, RSE was transported into the cytosol, which disrupted enzyme activity and photosynthesis. The cyanobacteria then started to repair its physiology （enzyme activity, photosynthesis） and remained viable, suggesting that rice straw act as an algistatic agent.     

Land degradation is not a necessary outcome of communal pastoralism in arid Namibia

In Otjimbingwe, a region of arid south-central Namibia, human population densities are high and these communal pastoralists own large numbers of livestock. Such situations are commonly perceived to lead to the ‘tragedy of the commons'. This region lends itself to a comparison of the effects of communal and commercial farming (with private land ownership) because the communal area is completely surrounded by commercial farms. In spite of far higher stocking densities on the communal areas and the absence of an overall grazing strategy, we found no evidence of the ‘tragedy of the commons' on Otjimbingwe. Indeed, the communal areas did not differ in a number of soil and vegetation parameters from the commercial farms. These results point both to the resilience of arid environments to high stocking levels and the over-riding influence of abiotic variables on environmental quality.