Earthquakes in Switzerland and surrounding regions during 2006

This report of the Swiss Seismological Service summarizes the seismic activity in Switzerland and surrounding regions during 2006. During this period, 572 earthquakes and 91 quarry blasts were detected and located in the region under consideration. Of these earthquakes, two occurred in conjunction with the construction of the new Gotthard railway tunnel and 165 were induced artificially by the stimulation of a proposed geothermal reservoir beneath the city of Basel. With 20 events with M _L ≥ 2.5, five of which were artificially induced, the seismic activity in the year 2006 was far below the average over the previous 31 years. Nevertheless, six events were felt by the public, most prominently the strongest of the induced Basel events (M _L 3.4), which caused some non-structural building damage. Noteworthy are also the two earthquakes near Cortaillod (M _L 3.2), on the shore of Lake Neuchatel, and in Val Mora (M _L 3.5), between the Engadin and Val Müstair, as well as the 42 aftershocks of the M _L 4.9 Vallorcine earthquake, between Martigny and Chamonix, of September 2005. Editorial handling: Stefan Bucher     

Comparison of CO2 Effluxes and Their Driving Factors Between Two Temperate Steppes in Inner Mongolia, China

Soil respiration is a key component of the global terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle. The static opaque chamber method was used to measure the CO2 effluxes from soil of a semiarid Aneurolepidium chinense steppe and a Stipa krylovii steppe in the Xilin River Basin of Inner Mongolia, China from March 2002 to December 2004. The results indicated that the soil respiration rates of the semiarid Aneurolepidium chinense steppe and the Stipa krylovii steppe were both relatively high from mid-May to mid-September of each year and remained low during the rest of the year. The minimum value of soil respiration occurred in December or January and negative effluxes of CO2 appeared for several days during the non-growing season of individual years at the two sampling sites. A high annual variation was found in the two steppes with the coefficients of variance (CV) being over 94%, even high to 131%. The annual sums of soil CO2 efflux of the Aneurolepidium chinense steppe varied between 356.4 gC m?2 yr?1 and 408.8 gC m?2 yr?1, while those of the Stipa krylovii steppe in the three years were in the range of 110.6 gC m?2 yr?1 to 148.6 gC m?2 yr?1. The mean respiration rates of the Aneurolepidium chinense steppe were significantly higher than those of the Stipa krylovii steppe in different statistical periods with the exception of the non-growing season. About 59.9% and 80.6% of the soil respiration variations in both steppes for the whole sampling period were caused by the changes of temperature and soil water content. In the Aneurolepidium chinense steppe, the soil respiration rate has significant or extremely significant positive correlation (r = 0.58 ? 0.85, p < 0.05 or p < 0.01) with air temperature and ground temperature of the topsoil except in 2002; the unique contributions of temperature change to the soil respiration variation of the three years were 53.3%, 81.0% and 58.6%, respectively. But, for the Stipa krylovii steppe in the same time interval, the soil water content (especially that of the 10–20 cm layer) has a greater effect on the change of soil respiration, and the unique contributions of the change of the 10–20 cm soil water content to the variations of soil respiration in 2002 and 2003 were 60.0% and 54.3%, respectively. In 2004, in spite of the higher contribution of temperature than soil water content, the contribution of ground temperature at a depth of 10 cm was only 46.2%, much weaker than that of any single year in the Aneurolepidium chinense steppe.     

Long-term stability of planetary orbits between Jupiter and Saturn

We extend our two previous studies on the existence of stable orbits in the Solar System by examining the domain between Jupiter and Saturn. We place (1) a massless object, (2) a Moon-mass object, (3) a Mars-mass object, (4) an Earth-mass object, and (5) a Uranus-mass object in the said region. Note that these objects are considered separately in the framework of our simulations. Our goal is to explore the orbital stability of those objects. We employ the Lie-integration method, which is fast and well established, allowing us to solve the respective differential equations for the $N$-body system. Hence, we consider the celestial bodies spanning from Jupiter to Neptune, including the aforementioned test object, the main focus for our model simulations. The integrations indicate that in some models the test objects placed in the region between Jupiter and Saturn reside in that region for more than 600 Myr. Between 5 and 10 au, mean-motion resonances (MMRs) take place acting upon the test objects akin to simulations of Paper I and II. Our models indicate relatively small differences for the long-term stability of the five test objects notwithstanding their vastly different masses. Generally, it is found that between $a_{\text{ini}}=7.04$ and 7.13 au the orbits become unstable mostly within 5 million years and further out, that is, up to $a_{\text{ini}}=7.29$ au, the duration of stability lengthens to up to hundreds of millions of years.     

Major and trace elements in German bottled water,their regional distribution,and accordance with national and international standards

The market for mineral water has been growing steadily over the last few years. Germany is the country with the highest number of bottled mineral water brands (908 bottled water samples from 502 wells/brands were analyzed). The per capita consumption of mineral water in Germany in 2003 was 129 L. A wide range of values of one to seven orders of magnitude was determined for 71 elements in the bottled water samples analyzed by ICP-QMS, ICP-AES, IC, titration, photometric, conductometric and potentiometric methods. A comparison of the element concentrations and the legal limits for both bottled and tap water (EU, Germany, US EPA, WHO) shows that only 70% of the 908 mineral water samples fulfill the German and EU drinking water (i.e., tap water) regulations for all parameters (not including pH) for which action levels are defined. Nearly 5% of the bottled water samples not fulfill the German and EU regulations for mineral and table water. Comparison of our results with the current German and European action levels for mineral and table water shows that only 42 of the bottled water samples exceed the limits for one or more of the following elements: arsenic, nitrate, nitrite, manganese, nickel and barium concentrations. Ten of the bottled water samples contain uranium concentrations above the 10 μg/L recommended limit.     

Generation and evaluation of multitemporal digital terrain models of the Mt. Everest area from different optical sensors

Multitemporal digital terrain models (DTM) are an important source for many purposes such as the detection of areas, which are susceptible to natural hazards such as landslides and glacial lake outburst floods, or for the examination of changes in glacier thickness. To exploit the potential of stereo satellite and aerial imagery for time series analysis, the employed methodology and software can be critical. A statistical analysis based on quartiles is presented to eliminate the influence of registration and elevation errors in DTMs. For our analysis, we used multi-temporal airborne and spaceborne stereoscopic images. The oldest images were recorded in the 1960s by the US American reconnaissance satellite Corona, while the most recent imagery are 2007 Cartosat-1 stereo scenes, along with one ASTER stereo pair. Complex panoramic distortion and limited spatial resolution resulted in the Corona and ASTER DTMs having the highest RMSEz. Due to differing acquisition techniques, applied software packages and temporal differences DTMs will never be identical. Therefore, we propose a relative vertical accuracy assessment with a master DTM. We chose the Cartosat-1 DTM as it showed the highest absolute accuracy. Inaccuracies between the master and the slave DTMs were adjusted by means of trend surfaces and outliers were successfully eliminated applying the interquartile range.     

Assimilation of Earth rotation parameters into a global ocean model: length of day excitation

Changes in the oceanic current system and in the oceanic mass distribution alter, together with other processes, the state of the Earth’s rotation. This state is characterized by the length of day (LOD) and the tilt of the pole-to-pole axis. The aim of our study was to derive the respective governing physical mechanisms in the ocean. Therefore, Earth rotation observations were assimilated into a global circulation model of the ocean. Although assimilation is a well-established tool in climate science, the assimilation of Earth rotation observations into a global ocean model was done here for the first time. Prior to the assimilation, the Earth rotation observations were projected onto the angular momentum of the ocean. Non-oceanic contributions were removed. The result of the subsequent assimilation procedure is a time varying ocean model state that reproduces the projected Earth rotation observations well. This solution was studied to understand the oceanic generation of Earth rotation deviations and to identify governing physical mechanisms. This paper focuses on LOD anomalies although polar motion was assimilated simultaneously. Our results indicate that changes in the oceanic LOD excitation are mostly attributed to changes in total ocean mass. Changes in the spatial distribution of ocean mass turned out to have a minor contribution to the LOD deviations. The same applies to changes in the current system.