Rock albedo and monitoring of thermal conditions in respect of weathering: some expected and some unexpected results

Broadly speaking, there is, at least within geomorphic circles, a general acceptance that rocks with low albedos will warm both faster and to higher temperatures than rocks with high albedos, reflectivity influencing radiative warming. Upon this foundation are built notions of weathering in respect of the resulting thermal differences, both at the grain scale and at the scale of rock masses. Here, a series of paving bricks painted in 20 per cent reflectivity intervals from black through to white were used to monitor albedo‐influenced temperatures at a site in northern Canada in an attempt to test this premise. Temperatures were collected, for five months, for the rock surface and the base of the rock, the blocks being set within a mass of local sediment. Resulting thermal data did indeed show that the dark bricks were warmer than the white but only when their temperatures were equal to or cooler than the air temperature. As brick temperature exceeded that of the air, so the dark and light bricks moved to parity; indeed, the white bricks frequently became warmer than the dark. It is argued that this ‘negating’ of the albedo influence on heating is a result of the necessity of the bricks, both white and black, to convect heat away to the surrounding cooler air; the darker brick, being hotter, initially convects faster than the white as a product of the temperature difference between the two media. Thus, where the bricks become significantly hotter than the air, they lose energy to that air and so their respective temperatures become closer, the albedo influence being superceded by the requirement to equilibrate with the surrounding air. It is argued that this finding will have importance to our understanding of weathering in general and to our perceptions of weathering differences between different lithologies. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evolution of a Carboniferous carbonate-hosted sphalerite breccia deposit,Isle of Man

A newly discovered, extensive sphalerite-bearing breccia (~7.5 wt.% Zn) is hosted in dolomitised Carboniferous limestones overlying Ordovician–Silurian metasedimentary rocks on the Isle of Man. Although base metal sulphide deposits have been mined historically on the island, they are nearly all quartz vein deposits in the metamorphic basement. This study investigates the origin of the unusual sphalerite breccia and its relationship to basement-hosted deposits, through a combination of petrographic, cathodoluminescence, fluid inclusion, stable isotope and hydrogeologic modelling techniques. Breccia mineralisation comprises four stages, marked by episodes of structural deformation and abrupt changes in fluid temperature and chemistry. In stage I, high-temperature (T _h > 300°C), high-salinity (20–45 wt.% equiv. NaCl) fluid of likely basement origin deposited a discontinuous quartz vein. This vein was subsequently dismembered during a major brecciation event. Stages II–IV are dominated by open-space filling sphalerite, quartz and dolomite, respectively. Fluid inclusions in these minerals record temperatures of ~105–180°C and salinities of ~15–20 wt.% equiv. NaCl. The δ³⁴S values of sphalerite (6.5–6.9‰ Vienna-Canyon Diablo troilite) are nearly identical to those of ore sulphides from mines in the Lower Palaeozoic metamorphic rocks. The δ¹⁸O values for quartz and dolomite indicate two main fluid sources in the breccia’s hydrothermal system, local Carboniferous-hosted brines (~0.5–6.0‰ Vienna standard mean ocean water) and basement-involved fluids (~5.5–11.5‰). Ore sulphide deposition in the breccia is compatible with the introduction and cooling of a hot, basement-derived fluid that interacted with local sedimentary brines.     

Spatial Modeling of Geometallurgical Properties: Techniques and a Case Study

High-resolution spatial numerical models of metallurgical properties constrained by geological controls and more extensively by measured grade and geomechanical properties constitute an important part of geometallurgy. Geostatistical and other numerical techniques are adapted and developed to construct these high-resolution models accounting for all available data. Important issues that must be addressed include unequal sampling of the metallurgical properties versus grade assays, measurements at different scale, and complex nonlinear averaging of many metallurgical parameters. This paper establishes techniques to address each of these issues with the required implementation details and also demonstrates geometallurgical mineral deposit characterization for a copper–molybdenum deposit in South America. High-resolution models of grades and comminution indices are constructed, checked, and are rigorously validated. The workflow demonstrated in this case study is applicable to many other deposit types.     

shinyNORRRM: A Cross-Platform Software to Calculate the CIPW Norm

In this paper, a novelty-free software to assess an efficient CIPW Norm (± 0.006 wt.% in differences between input and output data) is presented. The package is available in the official repository for user-contributed R packages (CRAN: Comprehensive R Archive Network). The software is able to handle big data sets and considers minor and trace element compositions. The algorithm can calculate odd minerals in igneous rocks, such as cancrinite and calcite, adjust the Fe⁺³/Fe⁺² ratio in different standard approaches, and recalculate the compositions of the rocks in an anhydrous basis (100 ± 0.003 wt.% volatile-free adjusted). Furthermore, the package calculates several petrological parameters, and the graphical outputs are displayed following IUGS scheme standards. The prime aspect of shinyNORRRM is the symbiosis of native R functions with the R package’s shiny (Web Application Framework for R) to run the norm in a user-friendly interface. shinyNORRRM can be executed in any operating system and requires no previous programming knowledge, thus promising to be the universal computational program in this matter. The output data are printed in the standard comma-separated values (*.csv) format, which is highly compatible with general spreadsheet editors. In this work, the algorithm of our program is validated using already compiled whole-rock geochemical databases.

     

The Enso-Fire Dynamic in Insular Southeast Asia

We examined the spatiotemporal patterns of fire in insular Southeast Asia from July 1996 to December 2001 using a set of consistent, nighttime fire observations provided by the Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) sensor. Monthly ATSR fire counts were analyzed relative to georeferenced climatic and land-cover data from a variety of sources. We found that fires were strongly correlated with Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) (r = ?0.75) and Niño 3.4 index (r = 0.72) in forested land-cover types within the equatorial belt (5.5^°S–5.5^°N). Cross-correlation analysis revealed that detrended SOI was modestly correlated (r = 0.42) with detrended monthly fire count with a positive lag of four months. However, our analysis also revealed that fire counts reached their maximum 6 months before the absolute maximum of SOI. Annual sums of SOI (∑_SOI) and fire counts revealed linearity for ∑_SOI≤ 0. Overall, the results suggest that ENSO indices may have limited predictive utility at a monthly time scale, but that temporal aggregation and additional fire observations may enhance our capacity to forecast fires in different cover types based on ENSO data.     

Nationalism, Populism, Dependency: Southeast Asia and Responses to the Asian Crisis

Opposition to neoliberal globalisation has been especially intense since the Asian crisis. This paper assesses three responses to the crisis: a broad localist reaction in Thailand, and the approaches adopted by two major Asian-based organisations, the Third World Network (TWN) and the Focus on the Global South. The discussion of these approaches focuses on the issues of nationalism and populism; dependency; industrialisation and the state; and liberalisation, international institutions, and local society. Their critiques range from the conservative populism of the localists, to reformism of TWN, and to the more radical "deglobalisation" approach of the Focus group. However, none have been able to free themselves of the influence of dependency models. Their populism and "progressive nationalism" prevents an accurate location of the causes of exploitation in capitalist processes. This paper questions whether the national-global dichotomy of these approaches is an adequate way to conceptualise capitalist production and exploitation in the era of globalisation.     

Racism and Intolerance in Eastern Australia: a geographic perspective

Racism has become a fact of life in Australia over the past decade or so, yet there are relatively few studies of its nature or extent, and still fewer on its geography. Using a social constructivist approach, this study draws on a survey of 5056 respondents to investigate attitudes to racism and cultural diversity in New South Wales and Queensland, and of perceptions of out-groups as instances of ‘strangers in our midst’. On racism, results show the presence of a continuum of attitudes ranging from generally tolerant to generally intolerant, a presence which cuts across compositional (social or aspatial) characteristics to emphasise the existence of a distinctive geography, an everywhere different nature to racist and non-racist attitudes which transcends urban–rural and traditional social layers. On the other hand, perceptions of out-groups are not uniformly correlated with presence or absence of cultural diversity. In many cases, the ability to make judgements about significant ‘others’ or out-groups has been shown to relate more to abstract notions of self and national identity, reproduced in public by mainstream news media and political leaders. In particular, it may reflect an Anglo (or Anglo-Celtic) view on nationalism, which is a hallmark of the ‘new racism’: an assimilationist or ethnocultural view of Australian society which is different from the ‘civic nation’ ideal envisaged by multiculturalism. That the geography of attitudes and perceptions people have towards and about different cultural groups is so ‘everywhere different’ has important implications for attempts to address and redress issues of intolerance in Australia.     

Analyzing Accessibility Using Parcel Data: Is There Still an Access–Space Trade-Off in Long Beach,California?

This article analyzes the impact of changing housing and neighborhood characteristics on the accessibility of neighborhood businesses using Long Beach, California, as a case study. Although advocates of smart growth and New Urbanism encourage land use mixing, aggregate-level analysis can be too coarse to pick up on fine-grained aspects of urban streetscapes. This study uses assessor parcel records and a point-based business establishment data set to analyze city-wide patterns of accessibility from individual dwelling units to thirty-one types of neighborhood businesses, including grocery stores, service shops, drug stores, doctor's offices, and banks. Regression results compare parcel-level and neighborhood-level drivers of accessibility between 2006 and 2015 to gauge the aggregated effect of recent economic, demographic, and built environment changes on this aspect of urban spatial structure. Larger homes in older, multiunit buildings and higher income neighborhoods show substantial increases in accessibility to most establishment types, suggesting a trend toward both greater accessibility and larger dwelling units—despite the traditional trade-off between access and space. Although gradual increases in home and business density increased overall accessibility over this period, weaker neighborhood-level results indicate that this trend is less pronounced in high-poverty and non-white areas.