The meteorite collection sites of Antarctica

Abstract— Antarctic meteorites have been and are being well studied but the potential for glaciological and climatological information in the sites where they are found is only beginning to be realized. To date, meteorite stranding surfaces have been identified only in East Antarctica: (1) The MacKay Glacier/David Glacier region contains the Allan Hills and the Reckling Moraine/Elephant Moraine stranding surfaces. Because the Allan Hills Main Icefield has a large proportion of meteorites with long terrestrial ages, these concentrations of meteorites must have had catchment areas extending well inland, in contrast to the present. Where known, bedrock topography is mesa-like in form and influences ice flow directions. Ice levels at the Allan Hills may have been higher by 50–100 m in the past. Reckling Moraine and Elephant Moraine are located on a long patch of ice running westward from Reckling Peak; the ice appears to be pouring over a bedrock escarpment. (2) In North Victoria Land, ice diverges around Frontier Mountain and flows into a site behind the barrier where ablation occurs extensively. It is proposed that meteorites and rocks were dumped by ice flow at the mouth of a valley in the lee of the mountain at the site where a meltwater pond existed, in a depression produced by ablation. Later, the pond migrated headward along the valley to a point where it is today, leaving a morainal deposit with the meteorites at a higher level. (3) Between the Beardmore and Law Glaciers, ice flows sluggishly into the southwestern margin of the Walcott Névé. Northeastern sections of the Walcott are virtually barren of meteorites. The entering Plateau ice is diverted northward to flow along the base of Lewis Cliff. This flow apparently terminates in an ice tongue protruding into a vast moraine, where a very large concentration of meteorites was found on the ice. This final segment of flowing ice is called the Lewis Cliff Ice Tongue. Meteorite Moraine, a subsidiary occurrence 2 km to the northeast, is also found against morainal deposits. The origin of the moraines and the history of meteorite concentration at this site is the subject of some debate. (4) The Transantarctic Mountains are submerged along one segment many hundreds of km in length by ice flowing off the Polar Plateau. The Thiel Mountains, Pecora Escarpment and Patuxent Range are the only surface indications of the underlying mountains along this interval, and meteorite stranding surfaces are found at each of these sites. Little is yet known about ice dynamics at these sites. (5) The immense Yamato Mountains meteorite stranding surface covers an area of about 4000 km². So far, most meteorites have been recovered in the upper reaches of this blue ice field, where ice flow is slowed by outlying subice barriers of the Yamato Mountains. Individual massifs in this range extend northward over 50 km, and the Yamato Meteorite Icefield loses 1100 m in elevation over this distance. (6) The Sør Rondane Mountains form a barrier to ice flow off the Polar Plateau. The major meteorite stranding surface associated with this barrier is the Nansenisen Icefield, a large ablation area about 50 km upstream of the mountains. The existence of a meteorite stranding surface at this site has not been explained so far. Most meteorite stranding surfaces have been functioning for a long time. They are sites where net ablation of the surface is occurring; the ice at these sites is stagnant or flowing only slowly, and the numbers of meteorites with great terrestrial ages decrease exponentially. Concentration mechanisms operating at these sites involve ablation, direct infall, time, low temperatures, moderate weathering and wind ablation. Detrimental to concentration are ice flow out of the area and extreme weathering. In spite of the fact that the Antarctic Ice Sheet is thought to be over 10 Ma old, we do not find stranding surfaces with meteorites having greater terrestrial ages than 1 Ma. This suggests that stranding surfaces are transient features, affected on a continental scale by possible extreme warming during late Pliocene and on a smaller scale by regional changes that produce differential effects between icefields. The latter effect is suggested by differences in the average terrestrial age of meteorites at different stranding surfaces. In either case, these sites seem to appear as a result of thinning near the edges of the ice sheet, and stratigraphic sequences may be exposed in the ice at stranding surfaces. We review five models for the production of meteorite stranding surfaces: (1) simple deflation of the ice sheet, in which ablation removes great thicknesses of overlying ice, exposing the contained meteorites while allowing direct falls to accumulate, (2) simple accumulation of direct falls on a bare ice surface that is not deflating, (3) ablation of ice trapped against a barrier, in which meteorites accumulate by direct infall while inflowing ice contributes meteorites by ablation discovery, (4) deceleration of ice by a subice barrier, which allows ablation discovery of meteorites in incoming ice and accumulation of other meteorites on the surface by direct infall and (5) stagnation of ice by encounter with an ice mass able to produce an opposing flow vector, in which ablation discovery and direct infall accumulation processes operate to build the meteorite concentration.     

BiSON performance

Since 1981 we have been operating the Birmingham Solar-Oscillations Network (BiSON), a global network of resonant-scattering spectrometers, observing the low-l solar p modes. Here we discuss historical developments, culminating in the establishment of a 6-station network in 1992 September, and the subsequent performance of that network. The data record of each station from 1992 to 1994 has been analysed in terms of weather and equipment breakdowns. Our early experience suggests that the best long-term coverage possible with a 6-station network is limited in practice to about 80%, which falls short of previous predictions.     

Storylines: an alternative approach to representing uncertainty in physical aspects of climate change

Investigating the relationships between climate extremes and crop yield can help us understand how unfavourable climatic conditions affect crop production. In this study, two statistical models, multiple linear regression and random forest, were used to identify rainfall extremes indices affecting wheat yield in three different regions of the New South Wales wheat belt. The results show that the random forest model explained 41–67% of the year-to-year yield variation, whereas the multiple linear regression model explained 34–58%. In the two models, 3-month timescale standardized precipitation index of Jun.–Aug. (SPI_JJA), Sep.–Nov. (SPI_SON), and consecutive dry days (CDDs) were identified as the three most important indices which can explain yield variability for most of the wheat belt. Our results indicated that the inter-annual variability of rainfall in winter and spring was largely responsible for wheat yield variation, and pre-growing season rainfall played a secondary role. Frequent shortages of rainfall posed a greater threat to crop growth than excessive rainfall in eastern Australia. We concluded that the comparison between multiple linear regression and machine learning algorithm proposed in the present study would be useful to provide robust prediction of yields and new insights of the effects of various rainfall extremes, when suitable climate and yield datasets are available.     

A spatial and statistical analysis of the impact of transformation of raster cost surfaces on the variation of least-cost paths

Planners who are involved in locational decision-making often use raster-based geographic information systems to quantify the value of land in terms of suitability or cost for a certain use. From a computational point of view, this process can be seen as a transformation of one or more sets of values associated with a grid of cells into another set of such values through a function reflecting one or more criteria. While it is generally anticipated that different transformations lead to different ‘best’ locations, little has been known on how such differences arise (or do not arise). The paper attempts to answer this question in the context of path planning through a series of computational experiments using a number of random landscape grids with a variety of spatial and nonspatial structures. In the experiments, we generated least-cost paths on a number of cost grids transformed from the landscape grids using a variety of transformation parameters and analyzed the locations and (weighted) lengths of those paths. Results show that the same pair of terminal cells may well be connected by different least-cost paths on different cost grids though derived from the same landscape grid and that the variation among those paths is affected by how given values are distributed in the landscape grid as well as by how derived values are distributed in the cost grids. Most significantly, the variation tends to be smaller when the landscape grid contains more distinct patches of cells potentially attracting or distracting cost-saving passage or when the cost grid contains a smaller number of low-cost cells.     

Rapid transport of anthropogenic lead through soils in southeast Missouri

To investigate Pb transport and cycling, soils from the forest floor and cores from White Oaks (Quercus alba L.) were collected near a Pb smelter in SE Missouri at varying depths from the surface and varying distances. Lead concentrations in soil samples at the surface drop dramatically with distance from approximately 1500 mg/kg at less than 2 km from the smelter to around 100 mg/kg at localities greater than 2 km from the smelter. Lead contents in tree rings are below 0.5 mg/kg in samples dated prior to 1970, and rapidly increase in 1975–1990 samples. Isotopic compositions of soils and tree rings exhibit systematic variations of Pb isotopic compositions with depth and tree ring age. Distinguishable isotopic signatures for Pb sources allowed quantification of the contribution of smelter Pb to the soils. At depths where Pb concentrations decreased and approached constant values (10–25 cm, 10–30 mg/kg), 50–90%, 40–50% and 10–50% of the Pb could be derived from the smelter for the samples at locations less than 2, 2–4 and over 4 km from the smelter, respectively. The remaining portion was attributable to automobile emission and bedrock sources. Because the smelter operated from 1963 to 2003 and samples were collected in 1999, it is estimated that smelter Pb infiltrates at rates of 1 cm/yr (30 cm in 30 yr). At distances less than 1.5 km from the smelter, even though Pb concentrations become asymptotic at a depth of 30 cm, isotopic evidence suggests that Pb has migrated below this depth, presumably through exchange with naturally occurring Pb in the soil matrix. This implies that soils heavily polluted by Pb can exceed their Pb carrying capacity, which could have potential impacts on shallow groundwater systems and risk further exposure to human and ecological receptors.     

A hybrid genetic algorithm with local optimiser improves calibration of a vegetation change cellular automata model

Cellular automata (CA) models are commonly used to model vegetation dynamics, with the genetic algorithm (GA) being one method of calibration. This article investigates different GA settings, as well as the combination of a GA with a local optimiser to improve the calibration effort. The case study is a pattern-calibrated CA to model vegetation regrowth in central Victoria, Australia. We tested 16 GA models, varying population size, mutation rate, and level of allowable mutation. We also investigated the effect of applying a local optimiser, the Nelder?Mead Downhill Simplex (NMDS) at GA convergence. We found that using a decreasing mutation rate can reduce computational cost while avoiding premature GA convergence, while increasing population size does not make the GA more efficient. The hybrid GA-NMDS can also reduce computational cost compared to a GA alone, while also improving the calibration metric. We conclude that careful consideration of GA settings, including population size and mutation rate, and in particular the addition of a local optimiser, can positively impact the efficiency and success of the GA algorithm, which can in turn lead to improved simulations using a well-calibrated CA model.     

User comments on climate stories: impacts of anecdotal vs. scientific evidence

Both statistical and dynamical downscaling methods are well established techniques to bridge the gap between the coarse information produced by global circulation models and the regional-to-local scales required by the climate change Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (IAV) communities. A number of studies have analyzed the relative merits of each technique by inter-comparing their performance in reproducing the observed climate, as given by a number of climatic indices (e.g. mean values, percentiles, spells). However, in this paper we stress that fair comparisons should be based on indices that are not affected by the calibration towards the observed climate used for some of the methods. We focus on precipitation (over continental Spain) and consider the output of eight Regional Climate Models (RCMs) from the EURO-CORDEX initiative at 0.44^° resolution and five Statistical Downscaling Methods (SDMs) —analog resampling, weather typing and generalized linear models— trained using the Spain044 observational gridded dataset on exactly the same RCM grid. The performance of these models is inter-compared in terms of several standard indices —mean precipitation, 90th percentile on wet days, maximum precipitation amount and maximum number of consecutive dry days— taking into account the parameters involved in the SDM training phase. It is shown, that not only the directly affected indices should be carefully analyzed, but also those indirectly influenced (e.g. percentile-based indices for precipitation) which are more difficult to identify. We also analyze how simple transformations (e.g. linear scaling) could be applied to the outputs of the uncalibrated methods in order to put SDMs and RCMs on equal footing, and thus perform a fairer comparison.     

The challenge of numerically implementing numerous force–resultant models in the stability analysis of long on-bottom pipelines

Plasticity models written directly in terms of force and displacement are finding increased popularity in describing the behaviour of offshore foundations. However, when applied to the on-bottom stability analysis of pipelines under random storm loading, hundreds, if not thousands, of models must be incorporated with structural elements in a three-dimensional analysis and simultaneously solved. This necessitates extremely efficient and accurate numerical integration techniques. This paper scrutinizes constitutive integration algorithms within both explicit and implicit frameworks, and applies them to a two-surface mixed hardening model that describes the force–displacement behaviour of a pipe partially embedded in sand. Detailed solutions are provided, allowing implementation of the pipe–soil model into any standard structural finite-element program. Through use of practical examples, the efficiency and accuracy of the solution methods are assessed.