Internal architecture and mobility of tidal sand ridges in the East China Sea

On the basis of bathymetric and seismic data and data from piston cores collected by the Chinese–French marine geology and geophysics investigation of 1996, we discuss the internal architecture and mobility of tidal sand ridges in the East China Sea (ECS). We characterized the sand ridges on the middle to outer shelf of the ECS as tide-dominated sand ridges with southwest dipping beds, indicating that the regional net sediment transport is toward the southwest. As the sand ridges gradually migrate toward the southwest, new sand ridges are continually replacing old ones, and several generations of sand ridges have developed in the study area.     

Volume contents

Volume Contents

Volume contents     

Ecological primordialism: the human–environment nexus in Soqotra

This article depicts the initial human–environmental relations that prevailed during the pre-modern period of Soqotra’s history prior to its incorporation into a state-led modernization process and its subsequent enclosure within a United Nations-designed conservation zoning plan and ecotourism economy. The term ecological primordialism is coined to highlight the primacy of the environment as the enabling and constraining context for the constitution of the Soqotran community. It entails a symbiotic relationship between an ecosystem and a human social system, which structured the contingent relations between the raw materials for livelihood making and community formation: people, resources and space. The article elucidates how Soqotrans managed this mostly constraining human–environment nexus through a series of adaptive practices: their taxonomic appropriation and practical domestication of the island’s environmental resources; their transformation of the landscape into a domain of livelihood; their organization of dispersed settlements into a socio-political unit; their demarcation of the island into geographical zones of cultural differentiation; and their establishment of mutual aid institutions that simultaneously regulated resource use while integrating all islanders into relations of social kinship. The article concludes with a cautionary tale about the use of anachronistic human–environment relations as the basis of conservation policy.     

Institutional dimensions of the developing REDD+ process in Cameroon

The reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) initiative has emerged in recent years as a mechanism to simultaneously address climate change, biodiversity, and poverty reduction challenges at the margins of tropical forests. Congo Basin countries, including Cameroon, have embraced the opportunities that REDD+ provides, with great expectations. Yet, it needs to be investigated whether the enabling institutional environment, which is required for implementing REDD+, is present. Understanding is still limited on how to build adequate and strong institutional relations that could shape the reforms towards the establishment of efficient emissions reductions schemes. Furthermore, uncertainty remains on the operational mechanisms of REDD+, suggesting that, to catalyse effectiveness, there is a need to come up with a governance model nested in relevant policy frameworks. This study builds on a modified ‘4Is’ framework – Institutions, Interests, Ideas and Information – to analyse REDD+ and explore stakeholders' perceptions on the local forest governance potential. A structural implementation model to optimize the effectiveness of REDD+ is developed. Findings suggest that governments need to review existing policies to take into account participation, local people rights, and information access as a way to stimulate actors' willingness to contribute to emissions reductions and carbon stock increases under REDD+ regimes.     

Comparison of numerical methods for simulating strongly nonlinear and heterogeneous reactive transport problems—the MoMaS benchmark case

Although multicomponent reactive transport modeling is gaining wider application in various geoscience fields, it continues to present significant mathematical and computational challenges. There is a need to solve and compare the solutions to complex benchmark problems, using a variety of codes, because such intercomparisons can reveal promising numerical solution approaches and increase confidence in the application of reactive transport codes. In this contribution, the results and performance of five current reactive transport codes are compared for the 1D and 2D subproblems of the so-called easy test case of the MoMaS benchmark (Carrayrou et al., Comput Geosci, 2009, this issue). This benchmark presents a simple fictitious reactive transport problem that highlights the main numerical difficulties encountered in real reactive transport problems. As a group, the codes include iterative and noniterative operator splitting and global implicit solution approaches. The 1D easy advective and 1D easy diffusive scenarios were solved using all codes, and, in general, there was a good agreement, with solution discrepancies limited to regions with rapid concentration changes. Computational demands were typically consistent with what was expected for the various solution approaches. The differences between solutions given by the three codes solving the 2D problem are more important. The very high computing effort required by the 2D problem illustrates the importance of parallel computations. The most important outcome of the benchmark exercise is that all codes are able to generate comparable results for problems of significant complexity and computational difficulty.     

Some aspects of the correlation between lightning and rain activities in thunderstorms

The lightning activity of convective systems is a sometimes fruitful indicator of their precipitation production. The present study compares rain volume with different types of lightning activity in several convective systems. The study uses data obtained in the Paris area where two lightning detection systems coexist. The Météorage network provides the location and the polarity of cloud-to-ground flashes, while the SAFIR system detects the total flash activity: cloud-to-ground, intra-cloud flashes and VHF individual sources within a given time window. The overall spatial correlation between rain and lightning appears to be very consistent for all lightning types. A pixel-to-pixel study shows that positive CG flashes are associated with higher rainwater volume than negative flashes. Introducing a weight coefficient for positive CG flashes considerably improves the correlation between rain amount and lightning production. Taking into account the specific contribution of each type of lightning flash, the amount of rain can be estimated from the total electrical activity of each system. Comparison with the amount derived from radar measurement shows reasonable agreement. Finally, the parallel time evolutions of rain and lightning rates display quite similar characteristics.     

Weather regimes over Senegal during the summer monsoon season using self-organizing maps and hierarchical ascendant classification. Part II: interannual time scale

The aim of this work is to define over the period 1979–2002 the main synoptic weather regimes relevant for understanding the daily variability of rainfall during the summer monsoon season over Senegal. “Interannual” synoptic weather regimes are defined by removing the influence of the mean 1979–2002 seasonal cycle. This is different from Part I where the seasonal evolution of each year was removed, then removing also the contribution of interannual variability. As in Part I, the self-organizing maps approach, a clustering methodology based on non-linear artificial neural network, is combined with a hierarchical ascendant classification to compute these regimes. Nine weather regimes are identified using the mean sea level pressure and 850?hPa wind field as variables. The composite circulation patterns of all these nine weather regimes are very consistent with the associated anomaly patterns of precipitable water, mid-troposphere vertical velocity and rainfall. They are also consistent with the distribution of rainfall extremes. These regimes have been then gathered into different groups. A first group of four regimes is included in an inner circuit and is characterized by a modulation of the semi-permanent trough located along the western coast of West Africa and an opposite modulation on the east. This circuit is important because it associates the two wettest and highly persistent weather regimes over Senegal with the driest and the most persistent one. One derivation of this circuit is highlighted, including the two driest regimes and the most persistent one, what can provide important dry sequences occurrence. An exit of this circuit is characterised by a filling of the Saharan heat low. An entry into the main circuit includes a southward location of the Saharan heat low followed by its deepening. The last weather regime is isolated from the other ones and it has no significant impact on Senegal. It is present in June and September, and missing in July and August, meaning that this is a weather regime more specific of the intermediate seasons than the summer. It is included in a large-scale pattern covering the northern latitudes of Europe. The correspondence between these “interannual” synoptic weather regimes and the “pure” synoptic regimes defined in Part I has been established. By selecting a high statistical significance level for these correspondences, each of five out of nine “interannual” weather regimes has a close correspondence with one “pure” synoptic weather regime, one out of them have links with two “pure” regimes, and the last three regimes have no significant correspondence in terms of “pure” regimes. However when considering more moderate links, two out of these three regimes show a connection with a “pure” regime, and the last one remains isolated. The ensemble of the weather regimes occurrences can explain a significant part of interannual variability of summer rainfall amount over Senegal, especially linked to the driest and the wettest weather regimes occurrences. It is also shown that Senegal rainfall state is very sensitive to a small displacement or deformation of the weather regime patterns.     

Japan Sea: a pull-apart basin?

Recent field work in the Hokkaido Central Belt and marine geology studies along the eastern margin of Japan Sea in addition to previously published data lead us to propose a new model of opening of the Japan Sea. The synthesis of both on-land and offshore structural data gives new constraints about the structural evolution of the system. The rhombohedral shape of the Japan Basin and the particular tectonic behaviour of the margins on both east and west sides can be explained by an early Eo-Oligocene rifting of a pull-apart basin accommodated along two large right-lateral shear zones, east of Korea and west of northeast Japan and Sakhalin. It is followed, during Upper Oligocene/Lower Miocene, by the main opening of the Japan Basin as a mega pull-apart. Then a back-arc spreading probably related to the subduction process, induced the creation of the Yamato and Tsushima Basins at the end of Lower Miocene and in Middle Miocene. Clockwise rotation of southwest Japan larger than 20° or major bending of Honshu mainland deduced from paleomagnetic studies is unlikely at this time. Since 1 or 2 My B.P. to Present, compression prevails along the eastern margin of the Japan Sea. The generation of marginal basins as pull-apart basins along intracontinental strike-slip faults is a mechanism which has been proposed by other authors concerning the South China Sea, the question then is whether the fragmentation of the Asiatic continent is an intracontinental deformation related process as proposed here or a subduction related one.