Central England's journey through time: the geological evolution of Warwickshire

The central English county of Warwickshire has been shaped by a 600 million‐year history of deposition, erosion, tectonism, continental drift, environmental change and biological evolution. The Neoproterozoic and Lower Palaeozoic rocks indicate island arc accretion, marine transgression and subduction‐related intrusive igneous activity. Upper Palaeozoic through to Triassic times witnessed mainly continental environments, as central England drifted north across the equator. Late Triassic marine transgression led to deposition of richly fossiliferous Jurassic sediments. The bedrock geology shows evidence for the influence of deep‐seated structural lineaments within the central English basement. Influenced by these structures, the modern landscape has been shaped largely by Palaeogene and Neogene uplift and erosion, further alteration by Quaternary erosion and weathering, and glacial and fluvial deposition.     

A 6000 year tropical cyclone record from Western Australia

This study provides the first long-term tropical cyclone record from the Indian Ocean region. Multiple shore parallel ridges composed entirely of one species of marine cockle shell (Fragum eragatum) standing between 3 and 6 m above mean sea level occur at Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay, Western Australia. The ridges record a tropical cyclone history between approximately 500 cal BP and 6000–7000 cal BP. Numerical storm surge and shallow water wave modelling techniques have been applied to determine the intensity (central pressure with uncertainty margins) of the storms responsible for deposition of the ridges, which has occurred approximately every 190–270 years. The ridges also record a 1700 year gap in tropical cyclone activity, between approximately 5400 cal BP and 3700 cal BP, where ridges deposited prior to this time were buried by a substantial deposit of aeolian fine-grained terrestrial sediment. The presence of this sedimentary unit suggests that this 1700 year period was characterised by a very dry climate; possibly the driest phase experienced in this region since the mid-Holocene. The absence of tropical cyclones at this time and the occurrence of this mega-drought may be linked.     

Constraints on the Formation Regions of Comets from their D:H Ratios

Studies of the D:H ratio in H₂O within the Solar nebula provide a relationship between the degree of enrichment of deuterium and the distance from the young Sun. In the context of cometary formation, such models suggest that comets which formed in different regions of the Solar nebula should have measurably different D:H ratios. We aim to illustrate how the observed comets can give information about the formation regions of the reservoirs in which they originated. After a discussion of the current understanding of the regions in which comets formed, simple models of plausible formation regions for two different cometary reservoirs (the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt and the Oort Cloud) are convolved with a deuterium-enrichment profile for the pre-solar nebula. This allows us to illustrate how different formation regions for these objects can lead to great variations in the deuterium enrichment distributions that we would observe in comets today. We also provide an illustrative example of how variations in the population within a source region can modify the resulting observational profile. The convolution of a deuterium-enrichment profile with examples of proto-cometary populations gives a feel for how observations could be used to draw conclusions on the formation region of comets which are currently fed into the inner Solar system from at least two reservoirs. Such observations have, to date, been carried out on only three comets, but future work with instruments such as ALMA and Herschel should vastly improve the dataset, leading to a clearer consensus on the formation of the Oort cloud and Edgeworth–Kuiper belt.     

Primary production of Inner Mongolia, China, between 1982 and 1999 estimated by a satellite data-driven light use efficiency model

Declining biological production as a part of an ongoing land degradation process is considered a severe environmental problem in the dry northern and northwestern regions of China. The aim of this study is to develop and adapt a satellite data-driven gross primary production model called Lund University light use efficiency model (LULUE) to temperate conditions in order to map gross primary production (GPP) for the Grasslands of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), China, from 1982 to 1999. The water stress factor included in the original model has been complemented with two temperature stress factors. In addition, algorithms that allocate the proportions of C3/C4 photosynthetic pathways used by plants and that compute temperature-based C3 maximum efficiency values have been incorporated in the model.The applied light use efficiency (LUE) model is using time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), CLouds from AVHRR (CLAVR) from the 8-km resolution NOAA Pathfinder Land Data Set (PAL). Quasi-daily rainfall and monthly minimum and maximum temperatures, together with soil texture information, are used to compute water limitations to plant growth. The model treats bare soil evaporation and actual transpiration separately, a refinement that is more biophysically realistic, and leads to enhanced precision in our water stress term, especially across vegetation gradients.Based on ground measurements of net primary production (NPP) at one site, the LULUE reproduces the variability of primary production better than CENTURY or NDVI alone. Mean annual GPP between 1982 and 1999 range from about 100 g/m² in desert regions in the west to about 4000 g/m² in the northeast of IMAR, and the coefficient of variation for GPP is highest near the margins of the deserts in the west where rainfall is erratic. Linear trends fitted through the 18-year time series reveal that the western regions have encountered no change, while a large area in the center of the IMAR shows marked increases in GPP. In the northeast, negative trends in GPP are noted and coincide with rainfall trends. Though the high inter-annual variability in primary production undermines the identification of significant trends, we could not isolate any general decline in grassland primary production.     

A millennial‐scale Late Pleistocene–Holocene palaeoclimatic record from the western Chihuahua Desert,Mexico

We present elemental concentrations and magnetic susceptibility data from a new 270‐cm‐long sediment core collected from the western part of palaeolake Babicora and infer millennial‐scale hydrological variations over the last 27 cal. ka in the western Chihuahua Desert. Variations in the available water content at the sediment–air interface of the watershed, lake salinity and lake productivity are inferred from values of the chemical index of alteration (CIA), CaCO ₃ and C_org, respectively. An abrupt increase in runoff at c. 24 cal. ka BP appears correlative with the Heinrich 2 (H2) event. Except for this event, diminished runoff between c. 27 and 19 cal. ka BP indicates lower annual precipitation (weak summer rainfall) during the Last Glacial Maximum. The deposition of chemically altered sediments between c. 25 and 22 cal. ka BP results from the higher sediment–water interaction in the watershed owing to lower evaporation, cooler conditions and higher precipitation during the H2 event. Since 19 cal. ka BP the runoff has been characterized by high‐amplitude fluctuations with intervals of reduced precipitation identified at c. 19, 18, 17.5, 13–14, 11.5, 10, 7.5 and 3 cal. ka BP.     

Disorder and the extent of polymerization in calcium silicate and aluminosilicate glasses: O-17 NMR results and quantum chemical molecular orbital calculations

Estimation of the framework connectivity and the atomic structure of depolymerized silicate melts and glasses (NBO/T > 0) remains a difficult question in high-temperature geochemistry relevant to magmatic processes and glass science. Here, we explore the extent of disorder and the nature of polymerization in binary Ca-silicate and ternary Ca-aluminosilicate glasses with varying NBO/T (from 0 to 2.67) using O-17 NMR at two different magnetic fields of 9.4 and 14.1 T in conjunction with quantum chemical calculations. Non-random distributions among framework cations (Si and Al) are demonstrated in the variation of relative populations of oxygen sites with NBO/T. The proportion of non-bridging oxygen (NBO, Ca-O-Si) in the binary and ternary aluminosilicate glasses increases with NBO/T. While the trend is consistent with predictions from composition, the detailed fractions apparently deviate from the predicted values, suggesting further complications in the nature of polymerization. The proportion of each bridging oxygen in the glasses also varies with NBO/T. The fractions of Al-O-Si and Al-O-Al increase with increasing polymerization as CaO is replaced with Al₂O₃, while that of Si-O-Si seems to decrease, implying that activity of silica may decrease from calcium silicate to polymerized aluminosilicates (X_SiO2=constant). Quantum chemical molecular orbital calculations based on density functional theory show that a silicate chain with Al-NBO (Ca-O-Al) has an energy penalty (calculated cluster energy difference) of about 108 kJ/mol compared with the cluster with Ca-O-Si, consistent with preferential depolymerization of Si-networks, reported in an earlier O-17 NMR study [Allwardt, J., Lee, S.K., Stebbins, J.F., 2003. Bonding preferences of non-bridging oxygens in calcium aluminosilicate glass: Evidence from O-17 MAS and 3QMAS NMR on calcium aluminate glass. Am. Mineral.88, 949-954]. These prominent types of non-randomness in the distributions suggest significant chemical order in silicate glasses that leads to a decrease in silica activity coefficient and will be useful in modeling transport properties of melts.