The design and testing of small,low-cost GPS-tracked surface drifters

We have designed and constructed drifters appropriate for use in regions characterized by limited horizontal extent. The drifters follow the upper 30 cm of surface currents, but can be modified to follow water at any depth. The drifters store their latitude and longitude internally, and transmit their current latitude and longitude to a handheld Global Positioning System (GPS)-radio receiver, making their location and subsequent retrieval straight forward A field test of six drifters in Hog Island Bay, Virginia, United States, in August 2003 was successful and led to several design improvements. With simple construction and a total materials cost of under U.S.$200 this design will make drifters an accessible part of interdisciplinary experiments, provide a potentially valuable educational tool, and make experiments that require large numbers of drifters more cost-effective.     

Indoor Air Background Levels of Volatile Organic Compounds and Air-Phase Petroleum Hydrocarbons in Office Buildings and Schools

A background indoor air study has been completed which includes the collection of indoor air samples from office buildings and schools. The anonymous study was designed with input from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. The sampling was implemented in 2013, 2014, and 2015 and included the collection of 25 school building samples and 61 office building samples. The study generated 14,668 new indoor air background data points, with samples collected from buildings located in 26 cities in 18 states, including Arizona, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Utah, and Washington. Indoor air background concentrations of target compound volatile organic compounds (VOCs) ranged from less than the laboratory method reporting limit of 0.044 μg/m³ to concentrations up to 1190 μg/m³, with hydrocarbon ranges from less than the reporting method limit of 10 μg/m³ to concentrations up to 3000 μg/m³. Some VOCs were identified ubiquitously in indoor air background, and some were identified at concentrations which exceeded risk-based regulatory screening levels. These study results provide useful and updated information on indoor air background and air quality in offices and schools and can be used in future regulatory guidance update considerations, for further examination of relationships between these data and residential study data, in human health risk assessments and risk communication, and in planning future studies.     

Shallow seismicity, triggered seismicity, and ambient noise tomography at the long-dormant Uturuncu Volcano, Bolivia

Using a network of 15 seismometers around the inflating Uturuncu Volcano from April 2009 to 2010, we find an average rate of about three local volcano-tectonic earthquakes per day, and swarms of 5–60 events a few times per month with local magnitudes ranging from −1.2 to 3.7. The earthquake depths are near sea level, more than 10 km above the geodetically inferred inflation source and the Altiplano Puna Magma Body. The Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake on 27 February 2010 triggered hundreds of earthquakes at Uturuncu with the onset of the Love and Rayleigh waves and again with the passage of the X2/X3 overtone phases of Rayleigh waves. This is one of the first incidences in which triggering has been observed from multiple surface wave trains. The earthquakes are oriented NW–SE similar to the regional faults and lineaments. The b value of the catalog is 0.49, consistent with a tectonic origin of the earthquakes. We perform ambient noise tomography using Love wave cross-correlations to image a low-velocity zone at 1.9 to 3.9 km depth below the surface centered slightly north of the summit. The low velocities are perhaps related to the hydrothermal system and the low-velocity zone is spatially correlated with earthquake locations. The earthquake rate appears to vary with time—a seismic deployment from 1996 to 1997 reveals 1–5 earthquakes per day, whereas 60 events/day were seen during 5 days using one seismometer in 2003. However, differences in analysis methods and magnitudes of completeness do not allow direct comparison of these seismicity rates. The rate of seismic activity at Uturuncu is higher than at other well-monitored inflating volcanoes during periods of repose. The frequent swarms and triggered earthquakes suggest the hydrothermal system is metastable.     

Elastic properties from acoustic and volume compression experiments

Hydrostatic compression data for a number of high-pressure phases of oxides and silicates, which have been studied independently by acoustic techniques, have been analyzed by least-squares fitting of the Birch-Murnaghan equation of state to determine the zero-pressure bulk modulus K₀ and its pressure derivative K′₀ for each material. The standard deviations of K₀ and K′₀ so determined are generally underestimated unless the experimental errors in the measurements of volume and pressure are explicitly included. When the values of K₀ determined from the acoustic and compression techniques are consistent, test results for quartz and rutile demonstrate that constraining K₀ to be equal to the acoustic value significantly improves both the accuracy and the precision of K′₀ obtained from the compression data. Similar analyses for high-pressure phases (e.g., pyrope garnet and silicate spinels) indicate that by combining the acoustic and P-V data, the standard deviation of K′₀ is typically reduced by a factor of three. Thus, we conclude that this approach does allow precise determinations of K′₀ even when neither technique alone is able to resolve this parameter. For some materials, however, the P-V and acoustic experiments do not define mutually consistent values of K₀, invalidating any combination of these data. The compression data for stishovite clearly exhibit run to run effects, and we infer that systematic errors are present in some of the P-V data which are responsible for many of the interlaboratory inconsistencies. Such systematic biases in the P-V data can at least be partially compensated for by performing several duplicate experimental runs.     

Elasticity of pyrope and majorite-pyrope solid solutions to high temperatures

Majorite-garnet solid solutions are major mineral phases in the Earth’s upper mantle and transition zone. Here we present the first Brillouin scattering measurements of the elasticity of majorite (Mj, Mg₄Si₄O₁₂)-pyrope (Py, Mg₃Al₂Si₃O₁₂) solid solutions (Mj₅₀Py₅₀ and Mj₈₀Py₂₀) and single-crystal elasticity of pure synthetic pyrope at temperatures up to 800°C. The temperature derivatives of the adiabatic bulk (K_S) and shear (μ) moduli for all compositions along the Mj-Py join are the same within the experimental uncertainties (−∂K_S/∂T=14.0-14.5(20) MPa/K, −∂μ/∂T=8.3-9.2(10) MPa/K). The temperature dependence of the acoustic velocities for Mj-Py solid solutions is about half that of other major transition zone minerals. This implies that temperature variations in the transition zone, inferred from lateral velocity heterogeneity, can be significantly underestimated if the properties of majoritic garnet are not taken into account.