Kimberlites distribution in Angola and prospective areas for new discoveries

Based on a comprehensive analysis of kimberlite pipes of Angola, including the near surface structural setting, deep lithospheric structure, pipe morphology and emplacement, mineralogical and petrographic features, diamond characteristics and locations of secondary deposits four geographical regions have been outlined within Angola representing four types of diamond bearing potential. These areas include high diamond bearing potential pipes, possible potential, no potential, and unclear potential areas. It was found that the depth of magmatism and diamond potential of kimberlites increases from the Atlantic coast in southwestern Angola into the continent in the north-easterly direction. Areas prospective for the discovery of new primary diamond deposits have been identified.

     

Integer ambiguity resolution in precise point positioning: method comparison

Integer ambiguity resolution at a single receiver can be implemented by applying improved satellite products where the fractional-cycle biases (FCBs) have been separated from the integer ambiguities in a network solution. One method to achieve these products is to estimate the FCBs by averaging the fractional parts of the float ambiguity estimates, and the other is to estimate the integer-recovery clocks by fixing the undifferenced ambiguities to integers in advance. In this paper, we theoretically prove the equivalence of the ambiguity-fixed position estimates derived from these two methods by assuming that the FCBs are hardware-dependent and only they are assimilated into the clocks and ambiguities. To verify this equivalence, we implement both methods in the Position and Navigation Data Analyst software to process 1 year of GPS data from a global network of about 350 stations. The mean biases between all daily position estimates derived from these two methods are only 0.2, 0.1 and 0.0 mm, whereas the standard deviations of all position differences are only 1.3, 0.8 and 2.0 mm for the East, North and Up components, respectively. Moreover, the differences of the position repeatabilities are below 0.2 mm on average for all three components. The RMS of the position estimates minus those from the International GNSS Service weekly solutions for the former method differs by below 0.1 mm on average for each component from that for the latter method. Therefore, considering the recognized millimeter-level precision of current GPS-derived daily positions, these statistics empirically demonstrate the theoretical equivalence of the ambiguity-fixed position estimates derived from these two methods. In practice, we note that the former method is compatible with current official clock-generation methods, whereas the latter method is not, but can potentially lead to slightly better positioning quality.     

An absolute calibration site for radar altimeters in the continental domain: Lake Issykkul in Central Asia

Altimetry missions such as Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, GFO and ENVISAT have been widely used in the continental domain over lakes, rivers and wetland although they were mostly dedicated to oceanic studies. Knowledge of the instrumental biases is a key issue. Numerous sites have been dedicated to calibration purposes, either in the oceanic domain (Harvest offshore platform in California, Corsica, Bass Strait in Australia) or over lakes (Lake Erie in United States). A new site (Lake Issykkul in Kirghizstan) is proposed for calibration in the continental domain. This lake is covered by past (T/P) and current radar altimetry satellites (Jason-1, T/P, GFO, and ENVISAT). Several in situ water levels and local meteorological variables are available at the site. Located in a mountainous area, it offers an opportunity for calibration far away from all other existing sites and very different environment contexts. Two GPS campaigns have been conducted on the lake in 2004 and in 2005. They consisted of cruises with stations installed onboard a boat following the satellite ground tracks, and onshore settings. This enabled estimating a bias for each altimeter and each tracking algorithm available. Biases obtained for Envisat, GFO, T/P and Jason-1 using the default ocean tracker (respectively, 48.1 ± 6.6, 7.5 ± 4.0, 0 ± 4.3 and 7.0 ± 5.5 cm) agree with biases published at the other calibration sites. For Jason-1, there is a significant disagreement with results obtained in the ocean field (7 cm instead of 13 cm) but is coherent with bias obtained on the Lake Erie site. Erroneous estimates of the sea state bias correction from non-oceanic-like waveforms is discussed as a possible explanation. Errors in the ionospheric, wet and dry tropospheric corrections for the continental domain are also highlighted and quantified.     

Investigation of Kinnekulle K-bentonite aimed at assessing the long-term stability of bentonites under repository conditions

Müller-Vonmoos, M., Kahr, G., Bucher, F. and Madsen, F.T., 1990. Investigation of Kinnekulle K. bentonite aimed at assessing the long-term stability of bentonites under repository conditions. Eng. Geol., 28: 269–280.

The mineral formula, the content of fixed potassium and the average interlayer charge of the montmorillonite–illite mixed layer part of four Ordovician K-bentonite samples from Kinnekulle (Sweden) were investigated. The content of fixed potassium was found to decrease from 84% to 50% with increasing depth and distance from the Permian basalt intrusion about 100 m above the bentonite beds. The interlayer charge of the mixed layer is smectitic, i.e. below 0.5 charges per formula unit. The swelling pressures of air-dried, gently grinded and uniaxially compressed specimens with dry densities between 1.5 Mg/m³ and 2 Mg/m³ range from 1 N/mm² to 15 N/mm². This is about 20% of the swelling pressure values of identically treated Ca-montmorillonite. Following ultrasonic treatment, air-drying, gently grinding and compaction, increased swelling pressures of of about 70% of those Ca-montmorillonite were obtained. The reason for this increase in swelling pressure was investigated by dispersion experiments and determinations of water vapour adsorption isotherms of ultrasonically treated and untreated material.     

A generic approach to modelling flexible confined boundary conditions in SPH and its application

In this paper, a new approach to applying confining stress to flexible boundaries in the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is developed to facilitate its applications in geomechanics. Unlike the conventional SPH methods that impose confining boundary conditions by creating extra boundary particles, the proposed approach makes use of kernel truncation properties of SPH approximations that occur naturally at free-surface boundaries. Therefore, it does not require extra boundary particles and, as a consequence, can be utilised to apply confining stresses onto any boundary with arbitrary geometry without the need for tracking the curvature change during the computation. This enables more complicated problems that involve moving confining boundaries, such as confining triaxial tests, to be simulated in SPH without difficulties. To further enhance SPH applications in elasto-plastic computations of geomaterials, a robust numerical procedure to implement Mohr-Coulomb plasticity model in SPH is presented for the first time to avoid difficulties associated with corner singularities in Mohr-Coulomb model. The proposed approach was first validated against two-dimensional finite element (FE) solutions for confining biaxial compression tests to demonstrate its predictive capability at small deformation range when FE solutions are still valid. It is then further extended to three-dimensional conditions and utilised to simulate triaxial compression experiments. Simulation results predicted by SPH show good agreement with experiments, FE solutions, and other numerical results available in the literature. This suggests that the proposed approach of imposing confining stress boundaries is promising and can handle complex problems that involve moving confining boundary conditions.     

Interplay between scintillation and ionization in liquid xenon Dark Matter searches

We provide a new way of constraining the relative scintillation efficiency L_eff for liquid xenon. Using a simple estimate for the electronic and nuclear stopping powers together with an analysis of recombination processes we predict both the ionization and the scintillation yields. Using presently available data for the ionization yield, we can use the correlation between these two quantities to constrain L_eff from below. Moreover, we argue that more reliable data on the ionization yield would allow to verify our assumptions on the atomic cross sections and to predict the value of L_eff. We conclude that the relative scintillation efficiency should not decrease at low nuclear recoil energies, which has important consequences for the robustness of exclusion limits for low WIMP masses in liquid xenon Dark Matter searches.     

Mineralogy of the lower mantle: A review of ‘super-deep’ mineral inclusions in diamond

Starting from the late 1980s, several groups of lower-mantle mineral inclusions in diamond have been found. Three associations were established among them: juvenile ultramafic, analogous to eclogitic, and carbonatitic. The juvenile ultramafic association strongly predominates, and it is composed of ferropericlase, MgSi-, CaSi- and CaTi-perovskites, stishovite, tetragonal almandine-pyrope phase (TAPP), and some others. The association analogous to the upper-mantle eclogitic association, formed from subducting lithosphere, comprises: majorite, CaSi-perovskite bearing compositional Eu anomalies, phase ‘Egg’ with a tetragonal structure, and stishovite. The carbonatitic association is represented by various carbonates, halides, and associated minerals. Some mineral associations (wüstite + periclase and native iron + iron carbides) are, possibly, related to the D″ layer at the core/mantle boundary. The mineralogical composition of the lower mantle is now understood to be more complex than had been suggested in theoretic and experimental works. The proportion of ferropericlase in the lower mantle is higher than it was suggested before, and its composition is more iron-rich (mg = 0.36–0.90) as compared to experimental and theoretical data. Free silica (stishovite) is always present in lower-mantle associations, and a separate aluminous phase (TAPP) has been identified in several areas. These discrepancies suggest that the composition of the lower mantle differs to that of the upper-mantle, and experiments based solely on ‘pyrolitic’ compositions are not, therefore, applicable to the lower mantle. These data indicate a probability of an alternative to the CI-chondrite model of the Earth's formation, for example, an enstatite-chondrite model.