Triaxial strength behavior of carbide sludge (CS)–ground-granulated blastfurnace slag (GGBS)-treated clay slurry

Acta Geotechnica - Dredging activities generate a huge amount of dredged clay slurry, and the treatment of it has been a challenge. Carbide sludge (CS)-activated ground-granulated blastfurnace slag...     

Insights on social learning and collaborative action plan development for disaster risk reduction: practicing Yonmenkaigi System Method (YSM) in flood-prone Mumbai

Natural Hazards - Recent decades have seen an increasing recognition and consensus among researchers and planners in disaster management in the need to foster social learning...     

Redox potential (Eh) and anion effects of pyrite (FeS2) leaching at pH 1

Pyrite plays the central role in the environmental issue of acid rock drainage. Natural weathering of pyrite results in the release of sulphuric acid which can lead to further leaching of heavy and toxic metals from other associated minerals. Understanding how pyrite reacts in aqueous solution is critical to understanding the natural weathering processes undergone by this mineral. To this end an investigation of the effect of solution redox potential (Eh) and various anions on the rate of pyrite leaching under carefully controlled conditions has been undertaken.Leaching of pyrite has been shown to proceed significantly faster at solution Eh of 900 mV (SHE) than at 700 mV, at pH 1, for the leach media of HCl, H₂SO₄ and HClO₄. The predominant effect of Eh suggests electrochemical control of pyrite leaching with similar mechanism(s) at Eh of 700 and 900 mV albeit with different kinetics. Leach rates at 700 mV were found to decrease according to HClO₄ > HCl > H₂SO₄ while at 900 mV the leach rate order was HCl > HClO₄ > H₂SO₄. Solution Fe³⁺ activity is found to continually increase during all leaches; however, this is not accompanied by an increase in leach rate.Synchrotron based photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) measurements showed a localised distribution of adsorbed and oxidised surface species highlighting that pyrite oxidation and leaching is a highly site specific process mediated by adsorption of oxidants onto specific surface sites. It appears that rates may be controlled, in part, by the propensity of acidic anions to bind to the surface, which varies according to , thus reducing the reactive or effective surface area. However, anions may also be involved in specific reactions with surface leach products. Stoichiometric dissolution data (Fe/S ratio), XPS and XRD data indicate that the highest leach rates (in HCl media at 900 mV Eh) correlate with relatively lower surface S abundance. Furthermore, there are indications that solution Cl⁻ assists oxidation especially at higher Eh through the prevention of surface S⁰ buildup at reactive surface sites.     

The b-value and fractal dimension of local seismicity around Koyna Dam (India)

Earthquakes began to occur in Koyna region (India) soon after the filling of Koyna Dam in 1962. In the present study, three datasets 1964–1993, 1993–1995, and 1996–1997 are analyzed to study the b-value and fractal dimension. The b-value is calculated using the Gutenberg–Richter relationship and fractal dimension D _corr. using correlation integral method. The estimated b-value and D _corr. of this region before 1993 are found to be in good agreement with previously reported studies. In the subsequent years after 1995, the b-value shows an increase. The estimated b-values of this region are found within the limits of global average. Also, the pattern of spatial clustering of earthquakes show increase in clustering and migration along the three zones called North-East Zone, South-East Zone (SEZ), and Warna Seismic Zone. The earthquake events having depth ≤5 km are largely confined to SEZ. After 1993, the D _corr. shows decrease, implying that earthquake activity gets clustered. This seismic clustering could be helpful for earthquake forecasting.     

A parallel computing approach to viewshed analysis of large terrain data using graphics processing units

Viewshed analysis, often supported by geographic information system, is widely used in many application domains. However, as terrain data continue to become increasingly large and available at high resolutions, data-intensive viewshed analysis poses significant computational challenges. General-purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPUs) provides a promising means to address such challenges. This article describes a parallel computing approach to data-intensive viewshed analysis of large terrain data using GPUs. Our approach exploits the high-bandwidth memory of GPUs and the parallelism of massive spatial data to enable memory-intensive and computation-intensive tasks while central processing units are used to achieve efficient input/output (I/O) management. Furthermore, a two-level spatial domain decomposition strategy has been developed to mitigate a performance bottleneck caused by data transfer in the memory hierarchy of GPU-based architecture. Computational experiments were designed to evaluate computational performance of the approach. The experiments demonstrate significant performance improvement over a well-known sequential computing method, and an enhanced ability of analyzing sizable datasets that the sequential computing method cannot handle.     

Lunar regolith breccia Dhofar 287B: A record of lunar volcanism

Abstract— Dhofar 287 (Dho 287), a recently found lunar meteorite, consists in large part (95%) of low‐Ti mare basalt (Dho 287A) and a minor, attached portion (?5%) of regolith breccia (Dho 287B). The present study is directed mainly at the breccia portion of this meteorite. This breccia consists of a variety of lithic clasts and mineral fragments set in a fine‐grained matrix and minor impact melt. The majority of clasts and minerals appear to have been mainly derived from the low‐Ti basalt suite, similar to that of Dho 287A. Very low‐Ti (VLT) basalts are a minor lithology of the breccia. These are significantly lower in Mg# and slightly higher in Ti compared to Luna 24 and Apollo 17 VLT basalts. Picritic glasses constitute another minor component of the breccia and are compositionally similar to Apollo 15 green glasses. Dho 287B also contains abundant fragments of Mg‐rich pyroxene and anorthite‐rich plagioclase grains that are absent in the lithic clasts. Such fragments appear to have been derived from a coarse‐grained, Mg#‐rich, Na‐poor lithology. A KREEP component is apparent in chemistry, but no highlands lithologies were identified. The Dho 287 basaltic lithologies cannot be explained by near‐surface fractionation of a single parental magma. Instead, magma compositions are represented by a picritic glass; a low‐Ti, Na‐poor glass; and a low‐Ti, Na‐enriched source (similar to the Dho 287A parental melt). Compositional differences among parent melts could reflect inhomogeneity of the lunar mantle. Alternatively, the low‐Ti, Na‐poor, and Dho 287A parent melts could be of hybrid compositions, resulting from assimilation of KREEP by picritic magma. Thus, the Dho 287B breccia contains lithologies from multiple magmatic eruptions, which differed in composition, formational conditions, and cooling histories. Based on this study, the Dho 287 is inferred to have been ejected from a region located distal to highlands terrains, possibly from the western limb of the lunar nearside, dominated by mare basalts and KREEP‐rich lithologies.     

Application of Global Particle Swarm Optimization for Inversion of Residual Gravity Anomalies Over Geological Bodies with Idealized Geometries

A global particle swarm optimization (GPSO) technique is developed and applied to the inversion of residual gravity anomalies caused by buried bodies with simple geometry (spheres, horizontal, and vertical cylinders). Inversion parameters, such as density contrast of geometries, radius of body, depth of body, location of anomaly, and shape factor, were optimized. The GPSO algorithm was tested on noise-free synthetic data, synthetic data with 10% Gaussian noise, and five field examples from different parts of the world. The present study shows that the GPSO method is able to determine all the model parameters accurately even when shape factor is allowed to change in the optimization problem. However, the shape was fixed a priori in order to obtain the most consistent appraisal of various model parameters. For synthetic data without noise or with 10% Gaussian noise, estimates of different parameters were very close to the actual model parameters. For the field examples, the inversion results showed excellent agreement with results from previous studies that used other inverse techniques. The computation time for the GPSO procedure is very short (less than 1 s) for a swarm size of less than 50. The advantage of the GPSO method is that it is extremely fast and does not require assumptions about the shape of the source of the residual gravity anomaly.     

Growth and decay of the Arabian Sea mini warm pool during May 2000: Observations and simulations

Oceanographic surveys were carried out in the southeastern Arabian Sea in two phases during 14–17 May and 23–27 May 2000 to study the evolution of the Arabian Sea mini warm pool. The hydrographic data collected during these experiments, satellite imagery of sea surface temperature for the corresponding period and ship drift data were utilized for this purpose. Both satellite and in situ observations indicated the presence of a mini warm pool up to 14 May and its dissipation thereafter. The Arabian Sea mini warm pool region was characterized by low-salinity Bay of Bengal water (<22 sigma-t). This watermass was advected into the southeastern Arabian Sea by the East India Coastal Current mainly during November–January and recirculated in this region in an anticyclonic eddy. Immediately after the dissipation of the mini warm pool, this watermass could not be traced in this region. Simulation of mini warm pool characteristics using the Princeton Ocean Model (POM) agreed well with in situ and satellite observations. Moreover, the model showed strengthening of southerly currents in the warm pool region during its dissipation period, which caused the disappearance of the Bay of Bengal watermass. Specific experiments with the POM revealed the significance of heat flux components, low wind speed and salinity stratification in the formation and sustenance of the mini warm pool.     

Feasibility of Coupled Pattern Reconstruction Technique in the Detection of Internal Waves

A key problem of contemporary static and kinematic positioning is the problem of transformation of conformai coordinates of universal Mercator projection (UMP) type from a local datum (regional, national) to a global datum, for instance, the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84) with reference to Boyle (1987). Such a problem is met if we use WGS 84 GPS‐derived ellipsoidal coordinates of a point for localization in a local chart of UMP type. In this article we derive and test the equations of a curvilinear datum transformation of ellipsoidal GPS coordinates in a global datum to conformai coordinates of UMP type in a local datum. The curvilinear datum transformation includes three parameters for translation, three parameters for rotation, one scale parameter, and two form parameters which account for a change in the semimajor axis and in the relative eccentricity of the reference ellipsoid.     

Cosmic microwave background power spectrum estimation with non-circular beam and incomplete sky coverage

Over the last decade, measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy have spearheaded the remarkable transition of cosmology into a precision science. However, addressing the systematic effects in the increasingly sensitive, high-resolution, 'full' sky measurements from different CMB experiments poses a stiff challenge. The analysis techniques must not only be computationally fast to contend with the huge size of the data, but the higher sensitivity also limits the simplifying assumptions which can then be invoked to achieve the desired speed without compromising the final precision goals. While maximum likelihood is desirable, the enormous computational cost makes the suboptimal method of power spectrum estimation using pseudo-C _l unavoidable for high-resolution data. The debiasing of the pseudo-C _l needs account for non-circular beams, together with non-uniform sky coverage. We provide a (semi)analytic framework to estimate bias in the power spectrum due to the effect of beam non-circularity and non-uniform sky coverage, including incomplete/masked sky maps and scan strategy. The approach is perturbative in the distortion of the beam from non-circularity, allowing for rapid computations when the beam is mildly non-circular. We advocate that it is computationally advantageous to employ 'soft' azimuthally apodized masks whose spherical harmonic transform die down fast with m . We numerically implement our method for non-rotating beams . We present preliminary estimates of the computational cost to evaluate the bias for the upcoming CMB anisotropy probes  ( l _max∼ 3000)  , with angular resolution comparable to the Planck surveyor mission. We further show that this implementation and estimate are applicable for rotating beams on equal declination scans, and can possibly be extended to simple approximations to other scan strategies.