Classification and interpretation of piezometer well hydrographs in parts of southeastern peninsular India

Well hydrographs from 275 piezometers between 1998 and 2001 in the southeastern parts of peninsular India were used in this study. The area has a monsoon-type climate. Hard rocks cover 85% of the area. The form (shape) of the hydrograph depends upon (1) climatic and hydrogeologic parameters and (2) the scale of the graph. Therefore, hydrographs are drawn to a defined and standardised scale, which allows comparison of hydrographs and helps in bringing out reasons for different forms of the hydrographs. Hydrographs can be divided into seasonal segments and the slope of each segment then used as the basic element of a classification scheme. Slopes are classed as flat (inclination <20°), obtuse (between 20 and 45°), acute (45 and 80°), right angled (80 and 90°) and homoclinal (segments of hydrographs are either rising or falling during one complete water year). Hydrographs are assigned names that are a combination of these classes and begin with the rising segment, such as acute-obtuse. Seventy-six percent of segments were homoclinal-falling in 1999, which had a poor monsoon. Flat segments constitute 27% of all segments in confined Mesozoic aquifer systems. Water table fluctuations suggest an approximate recharge of 120 to 180 mm per annum constituting 18% of the annual precipitation. Cumulative rainfall required to affect a rise in water table is between 45 to 200 mm and lag time varies from 30 minutes to 200 rainy days, which suggests that moisture in the vadose zone holds a part of the annual replenishment for these aquifers.     

Slow mass movement in the Kangchenjunga area, eastern Nepal Himalaya

Abstract   The rates of the accumulated and continuous displacement of solifluction lobes in the Kangchenjunga area, eastern Nepal Himalaya, were determined using glass fiber tubes and a strain probe. Ground temperature, precipitation and soil moisture were monitored at two sites, whose altitude differed by approximately 100 m, to understand the solifluction process. The average movement rate of the glass fiber tubes on a 31° slope at altitudes of 5412–5414 m a.s.l. was approximately 11 mm/year, being almost threefold greater than that observed on a 22° slope at 5322–5325 ma.s.l. There was no significant difference in the depth of displacement at these sites. The continuous displacement measurement near the ground surface at 5414 m showed permanent downslope movement from early July. Such movement may be attributed to additional moisture supply during the monsoon season. The amplitude of the displacement cycle was highest at the ground surface, and decreased to virtually zero at and below 20 cm in depth. Probable factors leading to the relatively slow rates of downslope displacement at the surface and depth at the studied altitudes are the lack of concurrence of the freeze–thaw cycles and the high moisture condition in the soil, and the low moisture retention capacity of the soil because of steep slopes and superficial desiccation. The rate of displacement may be more pronounced at altitudes above 5600 m because of the freeze–thaw cycles during the summer season.     

A Review of the Bentong-Raub Suture vis-à-vis New Insight of the Tectonic Evolution of Malay Peninsula, South East Asia

As a milestone of the entire energy industry, unconventional resources have inevitably swept the world in the last decade, and will certainly dominate the global oil and gas industry in the near future. Eventually, the “unconventional” will become “conventional”. Along with the rapid development, however, some issues have emerged, which are closely related to the viability of unconventional resources development. Under the current circumstances of low crude oil and gas price, coupled with the prominent environmental concerns, the arguments about the development and production of unconventional resources have been recently heated up. This work introduced the full-blown aspects of unconventional resources especially shale reservoirs, by discussing their concepts and definitions, reviewing the shale gas and shale oil development history and necessity, analyzing the shale plays’ geology and petroleum systems with respects to key hydrocarbon accumulation elements and mechanisms, and summarizing the technology resolution. This study also discussed the relevant key issues, including significant estimation uncertainty of technically recoverable resources, the equivocal understanding of complex geology preventing the production and technologies implementation optimization, the difficulties of experiences and technologies global expanding, and the corresponding risks and uncertainties. In addition, based on the latest production and exploration data, the future perspective of the unconventional resources was depicted from global unconventional resources assessments, technology development, and limitations constraining the development.     

Automatic identification of fake patterns caused by short-width wavelets in seismic data

Despite the popularity of using the Haar wavelet filter in many applications, it sometimes introduces fake patterns into the multi resolution analysis (MRA) of seismic data. In this work, we compared different wavelet filters to demonstrate that these patterns are fake and not part of the original waveforms and to show that they are a result of using the Haar wavelet filter as a short-width wavelet. To achieve this, many seismic waveforms from two different sources: the Egyptian National Seismic Network (ENSN) and the High Sensitivity Seismograph Network Japan (Hi-net) are used with different wavelet filters. We propose an algorithm based on an autoregressive (AR) model to detect these patterns automatically and fully.