Earthquakes in Switzerland and surrounding regions during 2012

This report of the Swiss Seismological Service summarizes the seismic activity in Switzerland and surrounding regions during 2012. During this period, 497 earthquakes and 88 quarry blasts were detected and located in the region under consideration. With a total of only 13 events with M_L ≥ 2.5, the seismic activity in the year 2012 was far below the average over the previous 37 years. Most noteworthy were the earthquake sequence of Filisur (GR) in January with two events of M_L 3.3 and 3.5, the M_L 4.2 and M_L 3.5 earthquakes at a depth of 32 km below Zug in February and the M_L 3.6 event near Vallorcine in October. The epicentral intensity of the M_L 4.2 event close to Zug was IV, with a maximum intensity of V reached in a few areas, probably due to site amplification effects.     

Single hydrophone source localization

The method presented in this paper assumes that the received signal is a linear combination of delayed and attenuated uncorrelated replicas of the source emitted waveform. The set of delays and attenuations, together with the channel environmental conditions, provide sufficient information for determining the source location. If the transmission channel is assumed known, the source location can be estimated by matching the data with the acoustic field predicted by the model conditioned on the estimated delay set. This paper presents alternative techniques that do not directly attempt to estimate time delays from the data but, instead, estimate the subspace spanned by the delayed source signal paths. Source Localization is then done using a family of measures of the distance between that subspace and the subspace spanned by the replicas provided by the model. Results obtained on the INTIMATE'96 data set, in a shallow-water acoustic channel off the coast of Portugal, show that a sound source emitting a 300-800-Hz LFM sweep could effectively be localized in range or depth over an entire day     

Experimental Design for the Laboratory Simulation of Magnetized Astrophysical Jets

Concepts of several experimental configurations for the investigation of magnetized jets and their interaction with magnetized environments are presented. In the planned experiments, the plasma jets will be created by laser ablation of shaped targets, while magnetic and electric fields with the required configurations will be produced independently by a pulsed power generator. In particular, the recently coupled Terawatt laser Tomcat and Terawatt pulsed power generator Zebra will be used for experiments.     

The POETICs of industrial carbon dioxide emissions in Japan: an urban and institutional extension of the IPAT identity

Background  

This study applies the POETICs framework (population, organization, environment, technology, institutions and culture) to an analysis of industrial carbon dioxide emissions in Japanese cities. The inclusion of institutional variables in the form of International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives membership, ISO 14001 implementation, and non-profit sector activity addresses the ecological limitations of the often used IPAT (impact = population × affluence × technology) approach.     

Dated Paleontological cave sites of Central Europe from Late Middle Pleistocene to early Upper Pleistocene (OIS 5 to OIS 8)

Caves are terrestrial depositories that preserve a large variety of organic and inorganic remains. These may contain important Quaternary climatic and ecological information. Most of the faunal remains, however, cannot be linked to any Interglacial or Glacial period exclusively. Reliable dating of such remains is therefore required. Experience has, however, shown that ESR dating of speleothems or ²³⁰Th/U dating of bones are of disputable value. Only TIMS-²³⁰Th/U dating of speleothems appears to yield reliable ages. Dating the bottom and top of speleothem layers permit assigning Pleistocene faunal remains to the OIS chronology if the deposition of the speleothems and the faunal remains are clearly correlated. Care must be taken to consider the depositional situation of each site before interpreting any age dates. In this paper we present an overview of all numerically dated paleontological cave sites in Central Europe between OIS 5 and OIS 8. A total of 25 strata were dated from 13 sites, most of them deposited during OIS 5; the rest belonging to OIS 6 and 7. Numerically dated paleontological sites older than OIS 8 are not known.