An outcrop of the Early–Middle Miocene age Brasso Formation along the Guaico-Tamana Road of Trinidad was logged and sampled for 20 m at 1 m intervals. The log revealed two sand- and silt-rich successions separated by a claystone-rich interval with thinner sands. One horizon yielded gypsum that is concluded to indicate that conditions occasionally became hypersaline. With the exception of one laminated siltstone interval ~1 m thick, all the beds lacked primary sedimentary structures, but many contained much mollusc debris. The lack of primary structures is thought to reflect bioturbation. Pyrite was common throughout much of the section, but replaced by hematite in two intervals. The pyrite is indicative of anoxic conditions in the sediment below the bioturbated layer, while the hematite shows that conditions occasionally became strongly oxic. The development of low-diversity benthonic foraminiferal communities dominated by porcellaneous-walled Quinqueloculina seminulangulata supports a model of occasional hypersalinity. These conditions are concluded to have developed in a leaky lagoon situated between the carbonate bioherms of the Tamana Formation of Central Trinidad and the mountainous allochthon of the Northern Range. Occasional high numbers of planktonic foraminifera are suggested to result from onshore winds blowing surface seawater into the lagoon. The lagoonal interlude came at the end of a tectonically-induced transgressive–regressive cycle. The influence of tectonics on the deposition of the Brasso Formation complicates at least for the Early–Middle Miocene any attempt to tie the sequence stratigraphy of Trinidad to a global sea-level model. It remains to be seen how much this is true for the remainder of the Neogene succession. 相似文献
Debris flows are hazardous phenomena occurring at volcanoes, and monitoring them has proved as challenging as imperative in several cases. The use of seismic instruments to measure and study the physical properties of debris flows has witnessed significant progress in the last years, with the use of improved sensors, innovative methodologies and high-resolution analysis. However, the application of such studies to the practical task of providing early warnings remains limited by the significant amount of infrastructural and technological resources commonly required for their deployment. In Ecuador, debris flows at volcanoes are detected by means of seismic instruments which are usually part of broader monitoring networks, thus requiring calibration to provide quantitative information about the flows and feed early-warning systems. In the present work, a theoretical approach based on the Buckingham Π-theorem is used to determine an expression that linearly correlates the seismic signal produced by a transiting debris flow with its discharge rate, for instruments installed in different substrata and at variable distances from the drainage. The expression is experimentally tested with Acoustic Flow Monitors and Broad-band seismometers installed in the vicinity of drainages at Tungurahua and Cotopaxi volcanoes, where actual debris flows occurred in relation to eruptive activity. The experiments consist in comparing the measured peak amplitude values of the seismic signal envelopes with the estimated peak discharge rates of several events. The results confirm the validity of the theoretical expression with linear correlations observed between the seismic amplitudes and the discharge rates, thus defining calibration expressions that can be generally applied to varied environments and instruments. The seismic instruments calibrated through this methodology can provide instantaneous and reliable predictions of debris flow discharge rates within less than an order of magnitude and only requiring limited data processing and storage. Such level of prediction could help to improve early warning systems based on seismic instruments installed in locations where more developed instrumental arrays are unavailable or unpractical.
Geotechnical and Geological Engineering - Hollow auger piles are a new solution technique being used more often in recent years as a foundation for buildings of 15 floors or less in the coastal... 相似文献
We examine the electromagnetic coupling of a GPS antenna–monument pair in terms of its simulated affect on long GPS coordinate
time series. We focus on the Earth and Polar Observing System (POLENET) monument design widely deployed in Antarctica and
Greenland in projects interested particularly in vertical velocities. We base our tests on an absolute robot calibration that
included the top ~0.15 m of the monument and use simulations to assess its effect on site coordinate time series at eight
representative POLENET sites in Antarctica over the period 2000.0–2011.0. We show that the neglect of this calibration would
introduce mean coordinate bias, and most importantly for velocity estimation, coordinate noise which is highly sensitive to
observation geometry and hence site location and observation period. Considering only sub-periods longer than 2.5 years, we
show vertical site velocities may be biased by up to ±0.4 mm/year, and biases up to 0.2 mm/year may persist for observation
spans of 8 years. Changing between uniform and elevation-dependent observation weighting alters the time series but does not
remove the velocity biases, nor does ambiguity fixing. The effect on the horizontal coordinates is negligible. The ambiguities
fixed series spectra show noise between flicker and random walk with near-white noise at the highest frequencies, with mean
spectral indices (frequencies <20 cycles per year) of approximately −1.3 (uniform weighting) and −1.4 (elevation-dependent
weighting). While the results are likely highly monument specific, they highlight the importance of accounting for monument
effects when analysing vertical coordinate time series and velocities for the highest precision and accuracy geophysical studies. 相似文献