Coasts: the high-risk areas of the world

No other region is more threatened by natural perils than coasts. Fierce winds, storm surges, large waves and tsunamis expend their destructive energy when they reach the coastline. Constituting, in many cases, the boundary between continental plates, coasts experience earthquakes and volcanic eruptions more frequently. The changing climate poses the threat of sea level rise. Most global trade crosses the oceans; ports are the entry and exit points of a nation’s trade. As a consequence, coasts attract people, businesses and industries. Some coastal regions rank among the top places in the world in terms of population and value accumulation. Enormous catastrophe loss potentials have been created and are increasing. Risk is the result of a natural hazard, the values at risk and their vulnerability. Living with and reducing the risk requires awareness at all levels of society and partnership between the public authorities, the people and enterprises concerned, and the financial sector. Great natural events are not avoidable, great disasters are. Catastrophes are not only products of chance but also the outcome of the interaction between political, financial, social, technical and natural circumstances. Effective safeguards are both achievable and indispensable, but they will never provide complete protection. In order to manage the risks faced by a society, we have to be aware of that.     

Adaptation of the torus and Rosborough approach to radial base functions

The most common approach for the processing of data of gravity field satellite missions is the so-called time-wise approach. In this approach satellite data are considered as a time series and processed by a standard least-squares approach. This approach has a very strong flexibility but it is computationally very demanding. To improve the computational efficiency and numerical stability, the so-called torus and Rosborough approaches have been developed. So far, these approaches have been applied only for global gravity field determinations, based on spherical harmonics as basis functions. For regional applications basis functions with a local support are superior to spherical harmonics, because they provide the same approximation quality with much less parameters. So far, torus and Rosborough approach have been developed for spherical harmonics only. Therefore, the paper aims at the development and testing of the torus and Rosborough approach for regional gravity field improvements, based on radial basis functions as basis functions. The developed regional Rosborough approach is tested against a changing gravity field produced by simulated ice-mass changes over Greenland. With only 350 parameters a recovery of the simulated mass changes with a relative accuracy of 5% is possible.     

Adaptive integration of constitutive rate equations

In finite element calculations the constitutive model plays a key role. The evaluation of the stress response of the constitutive relation for a given strain increment, which is a time integration in the case of models of the rate type, is a typical sub task in such calculations. Adaptive behaviour of the time integration is essential to assure numerical stability and to control the accuracy of the solution. An adaptive second order semi-implicit method is developed in this paper. Its numerical behaviour is compared with an adaptive second order explicit scheme. The two proposed methods control the local error and guarantee numerical stability of the time integration. We include several numerical geotechnical element tests using hypoplasticity with intergranular strain. The element tests simulate the behaviour of a finite element method based on the displacement formulation.     

A mesocosm experiment investigating the effects of substratum quality and wave exposure on the survival of fish eggs

In a mesocosm experiment, the attachment of bream (Abramis brama) eggs to spawning substrata with and without periphytic biofilm coverage and their subsequent survival with and without low-intensity wave exposure were investigated. Egg attachment was reduced by 73% on spawning substrata with a natural periphytic biofilm, compared to clean substrata. Overall, this initial difference in egg numbers persisted until hatching. The difference in egg numbers was even increased in the wave treatment, while it was reduced in the no-wave control treatment. Exposure to a low-intensity wave regime affected egg development between the two biofilm treatments differently. Waves enhanced egg survival on substrata without a biofilm but reduced the survival of eggs on substrata with biofilm coverage. In the treatment combining biofilm-covered substrata and waves, no attached eggs survived until hatching. In all treatments, more than 75% of the eggs became detached from the spawning substrata during the egg incubation period, and <1% of these detached eggs survived within the substratum interstices. Hence, detached eggs contributed little to the reproductive success we observed. The implications of these results on the spawning success of fish species that use freshly inundated spawning substrata in shallow waters are discussed.     

Early angiosperm diversification: evidence from southern South America

In this report, we analyze the angiosperm fossil record (micro- and megafossil) from the central and southern basins of Argentina, southern South America, deposited between the late Barremian (128.3 Ma) to the end of the Coniacian (85.8 Ma). Based on this analysis, three major stages in the evolution of the angiosperms in the southernmost region of South America are established as follows: the late Barremian–Aptian, the latest Aptian-earliest Albian, and the middle Albian- Coniacian. The comparison between our fossil data set and those from Australia, North America, Asia and Europe suggest that the evolution and diversification of the angiosperms at mid and high latitudes in both hemispheres occurred roughly synchronously.     

Susceptibility of lakeside phragmites reeds to environmental stresses: Examples from Lake Constance-Untersee (SW-Germany)

The lakeside border of Phragmites reeds is under the control of many environmental factors, among which the flooding height and the degree of mechanical load by waves and washes are the most prominent. Examples from Lake Constance-Untersee show that the reed front retreats under enhanced stresses. Models are presented that describe the susceptibility of lakeside reeds to mechanical damage and to flooding events. A monitoring programme which ran from 1984/85 to 1992/93 showed a slow lakeward progression of the reeds in a decade of abnormally low water conditions.     

Insights to magmatic-hydrothermal processes in the Manus back-arc basin as recorded by anhydrite

Microchemical analyses of rare earth element (REE) concentrations and Sr and S isotope ratios of anhydrite are used to identify sub-seafloor processes governing the formation of hydrothermal fluids in the convergent margin Manus Basin, Papua New Guinea. Samples comprise drill-core vein anhydrite and seafloor massive anhydrite from the PACMANUS (Roman Ruins, Snowcap and Fenway) and SuSu Knolls (North Su) active hydrothermal fields. Chondrite-normalized REE patterns in anhydrite show remarkable heterogeneity on the scale of individual grains, different from the near uniform REE_N patterns measured in anhydrite from mid-ocean ridge deposits. The REE_N patterns in anhydrite are correlated with REE distributions measured in hydrothermal fluids venting at the seafloor at these vent fields and are interpreted to record episodes of hydrothermal fluid formation affected by magmatic volatile degassing. ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios vary dramatically within individual grains between that of contemporary seawater and that of endmember hydrothermal fluid. Anhydrite was precipitated from a highly variable mixture of the two. The intra-grain heterogeneity implies that anhydrite preserves periods of contrasting hydrothermal versus seawater dominant near-seafloor fluid circulation. Most sulfate δ³⁴S values of anhydrite cluster around that of contemporary seawater, consistent with anhydrite precipitating from hydrothermal fluid mixed with locally entrained seawater. Sulfate δ³⁴S isotope ratios in some anhydrites are, however, lighter than that of seawater, which are interpreted as recording a source of sulfate derived from magmatic SO₂ degassed from underlying felsic magmas in the Manus Basin. The range of elemental and isotopic signatures observed in anhydrite records a range of sub-seafloor processes including high-temperature hydrothermal fluid circulation, varying extents of magmatic volatile degassing, seawater entrainment and fluid mixing. The chemical and isotopic heterogeneity recorded in anhydrite at the inter- and intra-grain scale captures the dynamics of hydrothermal fluid formation and sub-seafloor circulation that is highly variable both spatially and temporally on timescales over which hydrothermal deposits are formed. Microchemical analysis of hydrothermal minerals can provide information about the temporal history of submarine hydrothermal systems that are variable over time and cannot necessarily be inferred only from the study of vent fluids.     

Petrology, geochemistry and zircon age for redwitzite at Abertamy, NW Bohemian Massif (Czech Republic): tracing the mantle component in Late Variscan intrusions

A small body of mafic texturally and compositionally varied igneous intrusive rocks corresponding to redwitzites occurs at Abertamy in the Western pluton of the Krušné hory/Erzgebirge granite batholith (Czech Republic). It is enclosed by porphyritic biotite granite of the older intrusive suite in the southern contact zone of the Nejdek-Eibenstock granite massif. We examined the petrology and geochemistry of the rocks and compared the data with those on redwitzites described from NE Bavaria and Western Bohemia.The redwitzites from Abertamy are coarse- to medium-grained rocks with massive textures and abundant up to 2 cm large randomly oriented biotite phenocrysts overgrowing the groundmass. They are high in MgO, Cr and Ni but have lower Rb and Li contents than the redwitzites in NE Bavaria. Compositional linear trends from redwitzites to granites at Abertamy indicate crystal fractionation and magma mixing in a magma chamber as possible mechanisms of magma differentiation. Plots of MgO versus SiO₂, TiO₂, Al₂O₃, FeO, CaO, Na₂O, and K₂O indicate mainly plagioclase and orthopyroxene fractionation as viable mechanisms for in situ differentiation of the redwitzites.The porphyritic biotite monzogranite enclosing the redwitzite is the typical member of the early granitic suite (Older Intrusive Complex, OIC ) with strongly developed transitional I/S-type features. The ages of zircons obtained by the single zircon Pb-evaporation method suggest that the redwitzites and granites at Abertamy originated during the same magmatic period of the Variscan plutonism at about 322 Ma.The granitic melts have been so far mainly interpreted to be formed by heat supply from a thickened crust or decompression melting accompanying exhumation and uplift of overthickened crust in the Krušné hory/Erzgebirge due to a previous collisional event at ca. 340 Ma. The presence of mafic bodies in the Western pluton of the Krušné hory/Erzgebirge batholith confirms a more significant role of mantle-derived mafic magmas in heating of the sources of granitic melts than previously considered.