Paleo-redox boundaries in fractured granite

At the Earth’s surface, Fe(II) often oxidises and forms insoluble Fe(III)-(oxyhydr)oxides, whose particle size and structure depend on solution composition and temperature during formation and afterwards. Bacterial processes and exposure to reducing environments reduces them again, releasing dissolved iron to the groundwater. During such cycling, the Fe isotopes fractionate to an extent that is expected to depend on temperature. In this study, we report on the use of Fe-oxides as paleo-redox indicators, using their structure, morphology and Fe-composition as a clue for formation conditions. In samples taken from ∼120 m drill cores in granite from SE Sweden, X-ray amorphous, superparamagnetic, nanometre-sized Fe-oxides are confined to fractures of the upper ∼50 m, whereas well-crystalline Fe-oxides, with particle sizes typical for soils, occur down to ∼110 m. We also identified hematite with a particle size of 100 nm, similar to hematite of hydrothermal origin. The Fe isotope composition of the fine-grained Fe-oxides (−1‰ < δ⁵⁶Fe < 1‰, IRMM-14 referenced) scatter significantly compared to the distribution previously observed for hydrothermal material (−0.26‰ < δ⁵⁶Fe < 0.12‰) and they are dominantly heavier than Fe-bearing silicates from fractures (−0.56‰ < δ⁵⁶Fe < −0.35‰). This is consistent with formation by low-temperature weathering, where Fe-silicates dissolve, Fe(II) oxidises and Fe(III)-oxides precipitate. The X-ray amorphous, nanometre-sized nature of near-surface Fe-oxides suggests recent formation. The deeper situated, well-crystalline Fe-oxides are more mature and we interpret that they record earlier oxidising events. They exist in fractures that are not significantly altered, indicating formation during periods of oxidation. Our results show that oxygenated water may reach depths of ∼110 m in fractured granite. The absence of natural, low-temperature Fe-oxides from deeper drill cores suggests that oxygenated waters do not readily penetrate beyond about 100 m and suggests that radioactive waste repositories located at a depth of ∼500 m should be well-protected from oxygenated waters.     

Interannual variability in the biochemical composition of newly hatched larvae of the spider crab Maja brachydactyla (Decapoda,Majidae)

The spider crab Maja brachydactyla is an important commercial species in Europe and supports intensive fisheries in the NE Atlantic. A field survey was performed to assess long‐term and consecutive interannual (2005–2010) variation of the biochemical composition of newly hatched larvae of M. brachydactyla. Larval biochemical profiles differed significantly among years, with pronounced differences being recorded in 2010. Differences among batches of newly hatched larvae were mainly explained by the contribution of triacylglycerols and, to a lesser degree, by protein and lipid content. The use of different nutrition indices is discussed. The biochemical composition of newly hatched larvae from M. brachydactyla was highly variable, even though surveyed broodstock was obtained from the same local population and was always sampled during the same season. The unpredictable biochemical profiles of newly hatched larvae may condition their survival and recruitment. This largely overlooked aspect of larval variability should be considered in future fisheries management strategies and captive production of marine organisms that still rely on wild seeds.     

Holocene environmental reconstruction from deltaic deposits in northeast Greenland

Terraces of different age in the Zackenberg delta, located at 74°N in northeast Greenland, have provided the opportunity for an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of Holocene glacial, periglacial, pedological, biological and archaeological conditions that existed during and after delta deposition. The raised Zackenberg delta accumulated mainly during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, starting slightly prior to 9500 cal. yr BP (30 m a.s.l.) and continued until at least 6300 cal. yr BP (0.5 m a.s.l.). Evidence of sea‐level change is based on conventional ¹⁴C dates of shells from the marine delta bottomsets, ¹⁴C AMS dating of macroscopic plant material from the foresets and of fluvial deposits. Arthropod and plant remains from 7960 cal. yr BP in the delta foresets include the oldest evidence of the arctic hare in Greenland and evidence of a rich herb flora slightly different from the modern flora. Empetrum nigrum and Salix herbacea remains indicate a summer temperature at least as high as today during delta deposition. Post‐depositional nivation activity, dated by luminescence, lichenometry and Schmidt Hammer measurements indicate mainly late Holocene activity, at least since 2900 yr BP, including Little Ice Age (LIA) avalanche activity. Pedological analyses of fossil podsols in the Zackenberg delta, including ¹⁴C AMS dating of selected organic rich B‐horizons, show continued podsol development during the Holocene Climatic Optimum and into the subsequent colder period of the late Holocene, until 3000–2400 yr BP. A Neo‐Eskimo house ruin found on the lower part of the delta, presently being eroded by the sea, is dated to AD 1800. It presumably was abandoned prior to AD 1869, and suggests that some of the last Eskimos that lived in northeast Greenland might have occupied the Zackenberg delta. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A concerted research effort to advance the hydrological understanding of tropical páramos

Páramos, a neotropical alpine grassland-peatland biome of the northern Andes and Central America, play an essential role in regional and global cycles of water, carbon, and nutrients. They act as water towers, delivering water and ecosystem services from the high mountains down to the Pacific, Caribbean, and Amazon regions. Páramos are also widely recognized as a biodiversity and climate change hot spots, yet they are threatened by anthropogenic activities and environmental changes. Despite their importance for water security and carbon storage, and their vulnerability to human activities, only three decades ago, páramos were severely understudied. Increasing awareness of the need for hydrological evidence to guide sustainable management of páramos prompted action for generating data and for filling long-standing knowledge gaps. This has led to a remarkably successful increase in scientific knowledge, induced by a strong interaction between the scientific, policy, and (local) management communities. A combination of well-established and innovative approaches has been applied to data collection, processing, and analysis. In this review, we provide a short overview of the historical development of research and state of knowledge of the hydrometeorology, flux dynamics, anthropogenic impacts, and the influence of extreme events in páramos. We then present emerging technologies for hydrology and water resources research and management applied to páramos. We discuss how converging science and policy efforts have leveraged traditional and new observational techniques to generate an evidence base that can support the sustainable management of páramos. We conclude that this co-evolution of science and policy was able to successfully cover different spatial and temporal scales. Lastly, we outline future research directions to showcase how sustainable long-term data collection can foster the responsible conservation of páramos water towers.     

Do mixing models with different input requirement yield similar streamflow source contributions? Case study: A tropical montane catchment

Hydrogeochemical based mixing models have been successfully used to investigate the composition and source identification of streamflow. The applicability of these models is limited due to the high costs associated with data collection and the hydrogeochemical analysis of water samples. Fortunately, a variety of mixing models exist, requiting different amount of data as input, and in data scarce regions it is likely that preference will be given to models with the lowest requirement of input data. An unanswered question is if models with high or low input requirement are equally accurate. To this end, the performance of two mixing models with different input requirement, the mixing model analysis (MMA) and the end-member mixing analysis (EMMA), were verified on a tropical montane headwater catchment (21.7 km²) in the Ecuadorian Andes. Nineteen hydrogeochemical tracers were measured on water samples collected weekly during 3 years in streamflow and eight potential water sources or end-members (precipitation, lake water, soil water from different horizons and springs). Results based on 6 conservative tracers, revealed that EMMA (using all tracers) and MMA (using pair-combinations out of the 6 conservative ones), identified the same end-members: rainfall, soil water and spring water., as well as, similar contribution fractions to streamflow from rainfall 21.9% and 21.4%, soil water 52.7% and 52.3%, and spring water 26.1% and 28.7%, respectively. Our findings show that a hydrogeochemical mixing model requiring a few tracers can provide similar outcomes than models demanding more tracers as input data. This underlines the value of a preliminary detailed hydrogeochemical characterization as basis to derive the most cost-efficient monitoring strategy.     

Effect of storms during drought on post‐wildfire recovery of channel sediment dynamics and habitat in the southern California chaparral,USA

Current global warming projections suggest a possible increase in wildfire and drought, augmenting the need to understand how drought following wildfire affects the recovery of stream channels in relation to sediment dynamics. We investigated post‐wildfire geomorphic responses caused by storms during a prolonged drought following the 2013 Springs Fire in southern California (USA), using multi‐temporal terrestrial laser scanning and detailed field measurements. After the fire, a dry‐season dry‐ravel sediment pulse contributed sand and small gravel to hillslope‐channel margins in Big Sycamore Creek and its tributaries. A small storm in WY 2014 generated sufficient flow to mobilize a portion of the sediment derived from the dry‐ravel pulse and deposited the fine sediment in the channel, totaling ~0.60 m³/m of volume per unit length of channel. The sediment deposit buried step‐pool habitat structure and reduced roughness by over 90%. These changes altered sediment transport characteristics of the bed material present before and after the storm; the ratio of available to critical shear stress (τ_o/τ_c) increased by five times. Storms during WY 2015 contributed additional fine sediment from tributaries and lower hillslopes and hyperconcentrated flow transported and deposited additional sediment in the channel. Together these sources delivered sediment on the order of six times that in 2014, further increasing τ_o/τ_c. These storms during multi‐year drought following wildfire transformed channel dynamics. The increased sediment transport capacity persisted during the drought period characterized by the longer residence time of relatively fine‐grained post‐fire channel sedimentation. This contrasts with wetter years, when post‐fire sediment is transported from the fluvial system during the same season as the post‐fire sediment pulse. Results of this short‐term study highlight the complex and substantial effects of multi‐year drought on geomorphic responses following wildfire. These responses influence pool habitat that is critical to longer‐term post‐wildfire riparian ecosystem recovery. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A least squares approach for efficient and reliable short-term versus long-term optimization

The uncertainties related to long-term forecasts of oil prices impose significant financial risk on ventures of oil production. To minimize risk, oil companies are inclined to maximize profit over short-term horizons ranging from months to a few years. In contrast, conventional production optimization maximizes long-term profits over horizons that span more than a decade. To address this challenge, the oil literature has introduced short-term versus long-term optimization. Ideally, this problem is solved by a posteriori multi-objective optimization methods that generate an approximation to the Pareto front of optimal short-term and long-term trade-offs. However, such methods rely on a large number of reservoir simulations and scale poorly with the number of objectives subject to optimization. Consequently, the large-scale nature of production optimization severely limits applications to real-life scenarios. More practical alternatives include ad hoc hierarchical switching schemes. As a drawback, such methods lack robustness due to unclear convergence properties and do not naturally generalize to cases of more than two objectives. Also, as this paper shows, the hierarchical formulation may skew the balance between the objectives, leaving an unfulfilled potential to increase profits. To promote efficient and reliable short-term versus long-term optimization, this paper introduces a natural way to characterize desirable Pareto points and proposes a novel least squares (LS) method. Unlike hierarchical approaches, the method is guaranteed to converge to a Pareto optimal point. Also, the LS method is designed to properly balance multiple objectives, independently of Pareto front’s shape. As such, the method poses a practical alternative to a posteriori methods in situations where the frontier is intractable to generate.     

Sharp spatially constrained inversion with applications to transient electromagnetic data

Time‐domain electromagnetic data are conveniently inverted by using smoothly varying 1D models with fixed vertical discretization. The vertical smoothness of the obtained models stems from the application of Occam‐type regularization constraints, which are meant to address the ill‐posedness of the problem. An important side effect of such regularization, however, is that horizontal layer boundaries can no longer be accurately reproduced as the model is required to be smooth. This issue can be overcome by inverting for fewer layers with variable thicknesses; nevertheless, to decide on a particular and constant number of layers for the parameterization of a large survey inversion can be equally problematic. Here, we present a focusing regularization technique to obtain the best of both methodologies. The new focusing approach allows for accurate reconstruction of resistivity distributions using a fixed vertical discretization while preserving the capability to reproduce horizontal boundaries. The formulation is flexible and can be coupled with traditional lateral/spatial smoothness constraints in order to resolve interfaces in stratified soils with no additional hypothesis about the number of layers. The method relies on minimizing the number of layers of non‐vanishing resistivity gradient, instead of minimizing the norm of the model variation itself. This approach ensures that the results are consistent with the measured data while favouring, at the same time, the retrieval of horizontal abrupt changes. In addition, the focusing regularization can also be applied in the horizontal direction in order to promote the reconstruction of lateral boundaries such as faults. We present the theoretical framework of our regularization methodology and illustrate its capabilities by means of both synthetic and field data sets. We further demonstrate how the concept has been integrated in our existing spatially constrained inversion formalism and show its application to large‐scale time‐domain electromagnetic data inversions.     

Methodology for the computation of volcanic susceptibility: An example for mafic and felsic eruptions on Tenerife (Canary Islands)

A new method to calculate volcanic susceptibility, i.e. the spatial probability of vent opening, is presented. Determination of volcanic susceptibility should constitute the first step in the elaboration of volcanic hazard maps of active volcanic fields. Our method considers different criteria as possible indicators for the location of future vents, based on the assumption that these locations should correspond to the surface expressions of the most likely pathways for magma ascent. Thus, two groups of criteria have been considered depending on the time scale (short or long term) of our approach. The first one accounts for long-term hazard assessment and corresponds to structural criteria that provide direct information on the internal structure of the volcanic field, including its past and present stress field, location of structural lineations (fractures and dikes), and location of past eruptions. The second group of criteria concerns to the computation of susceptibility for short term analyses (from days to a few months) during unrest episodes, and includes those structural and dynamical aspects that can be inferred from volcano monitoring. Thus, a specific layer of information is obtained for each of the criteria used. The specific weight of each criterion on the overall analysis depends on its relative significance to indicate pathways for magma ascent, on the quality of data and on their degree of confidence. The combination of the different data layers allows to create a map of the spatial probability of future eruptions based on objective criteria, thus constituting the first step to obtain the corresponding volcanic hazards map. The method has been used to calculate long-term volcanic susceptibility on Tenerife (Canary Islands), and the results obtained are also presented.     

Anmeldelser

Meyer, Marlene: Settlement Patterns and Land-use in Northern Ghana—A Study of the Changes during the period 1963–1991 based on Historical Surveys and recent SPOT-images. Geografisk Tidsskrift 92:101–104. Copenhagen 1992.

A study by Hunter (1966) describes how large areas along the Red Volta River bank, have been abandoned due to river blindness. The mapping of current land-use status and settlements patterns, using multispectral SPOT-satellite images, shows how the border of settlements continue to retreat, whereas new land is being reclaimed for bush fields in the abandoned areas.