Agents of landscape change in southern New Zealand, 1896–1920

The records of two large stock and station agents, Loan & Mercantile Agency in Dunedin and Wright Stephenson in Invercargill, allowed us to track the timing, nature, magnitude and rate of landscape change in southern New Zealand between 1896 and 1920. This period extends from the final years of subdivision of large estates, and includes closer settlement, the shift from pastoral farming to intensive agriculture, growth of dairying, and increasing mechanisation of agriculture. These changes are reflected in clients’ annual expenditures on capital items such as fencing and building materials, tools and implements, materials for drains.     

An extreme wave event in eastern Yucatán,Mexico: Evidence of a palaeotsunami event during the Mayan times

The Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, has typically been considered a tectonically stable region with little significant seismic activity. The region though, is one that is regularly affected by hurricanes. A detailed survey of ca 100 km of the eastern Yucatán and Cozumel coast identified the presence of ridges containing individual boulders measuring >1 m in length. The boulder ridges reach 5 m in height and their origin is associated with extreme wave event activity. Previously modelled tsunami waves from known seismically active zones in the region (Muertos Thrust Belt and South Caribbean Deformed Belt) are not of sufficient scale in the area of the Yucatán Peninsula to have produced the boulder ridges recorded in this study. The occurrence of hurricanes in this region is more common, but two of the most destructive (Hurricane Gilbert 1988 and Hurricane Wilma 2005) produced coastal waves too small to have created the ridges recorded here. In this paper, a new tsunami model with a source area located on the Motagua/Swan Island Fault System has been generated that indicates a tsunami event may have caused the extreme wave events that resulted in the deposition of the boulder ridges.     

Design,simulation, and large‐scale testing of an innovative vibration mitigation device employing essentially nonlinear elastomeric springs

This study proposes an innovative passive vibration mitigation device employing essentially nonlinear elastomeric springs as its most critical component. Essential nonlinearity denotes the absence (or near absence) of a linear component in the stiffness characteristics of these elastomeric springs. These devices were implemented and tested on a large‐scale nine‐story model building structure. The main focus of these devices is to mitigate structural response under impulse‐like and seismic loading when the structure remains elastic. During the design process of the device, numerical simulations, optimizations, and parametric studies of the structure‐device system were performed to obtain stiffness parameters for the devices so that they can maximize the apparent damping of the fundamental mode of the structure. Pyramidal elastomeric springs were employed to physically realize the optimized essentially nonlinear spring components. Component‐level finite element analyses and experiments were conducted to design the nonlinear springs. Finally, shake table tests using impulse‐like and seismic excitation with different loading levels were performed to experimentally evaluate the performance of the device. Experimental results demonstrate that the properly designed devices can mitigate structural vibration responses, including floor acceleration, displacement, and column strain in an effective, rapid, and robust fashion. Comparison between numerical and experimental results verified the computational model of the nonlinear system and provided a comprehensive verification for the proposed device. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A high-amplitude thermal inertia anomaly of probable magnetospheric origin on Saturn’s moon Mimas

Spectral maps of Mimas’ daytime thermal emission show a previously unobserved thermal anomaly on Mimas’ surface. A sharp V-shaped boundary, centered at 0°N and 180°W, separates relatively warm daytime temperatures from a cooler anomalous region occupying low- to mid-latitudes on the leading hemisphere. Subsequent observations show the anomalous region is also warmer than its surroundings at night, indicating high thermal inertia. Thermal inertia in the anomalous region is , compared to < outside the anomaly. Bolometric Bond albedos are similar between the two regions, in the range 0.49-0.70. The mapped portion of the thermally anomalous region coincides in shape and location to a region of high-energy electron deposition from Saturn’s magnetosphere, which also has unusually high near-UV reflectance. It is therefore likely that high-energy electrons, which penetrate Mimas’ surface to the centimeter depths probed by diurnal temperature variations, also alter the surface texture, dramatically increasing its thermal inertia.     

Timing and magnitude of tetrapod extinctions across the Permo-Triassic boundary

A review of the tetrapod (amphibian and amniote) record across the Permo-Triassic boundary (PTB) indicates a global evolutionary turnover of tetrapods close to the PTB. There is also a within-Guadalupian tetrapod extinction here called the dinocephalian extinction event, probably of global extent. The dinocephalian extinction event is a late Wordian or early Capitanian extinction based on biostratigraphic data and magnetostratigraphy (the extinction precedes the Illawara reversal), so it is not synchronous with the end-Guadalupian marine extinction. The Russian PTB section documents two tetrapod extinction events, one just before the dinocephalian extinction event and the other at the base of the Lystrosaurus assemblage. However, generic diversity across the latter extinction remains essentially the same despite a total evolutionary turnover of tetrapod genera. The Chinese and South African sections document the stratigraphic overlap of Dicynodon and Lystrosaurus. In the Karoo basin, the lowest occurrence of Lystrosaurus is in a stratigraphic interval of reversed magnetic polarity, which indicates it predates the marine-defined PTB, so, as previously suggested by some workers, the lowest occurrence of Lystrosaurus cannot be used to identify the PTB in nonmarine strata. Correlation of the marine PTB section at Meishan, southern China, to the Karoo basin based primarily on magnetostratigraphy indicates that the main marine extinction preceded the PTB tetrapod extinction event. The ecological severity of the PTB tetrapod extinction event has generally been overstated, and the major change in tetrapod assemblages that took place across the PTB was the prolonged and complex “replacement” of therapsids by archosaurs that began before the end of the Permian and was not complete until well into the Triassic. The tetrapod extinctions are not synchronous with the major marine extinctions at the end of the Guadalupian and just before the end of the Permian, so the idea of catastrophic causes of synchronous PTB extinctions on land and sea should be reconsidered.     

The May 2005 eruption of Fernandina volcano,Galápagos: The first circumferential dike intrusion observed by GPS and InSAR

The May 2005 eruption of Fernandina volcano, Galápagos, occurred along circumferential fissures parallel to the caldera rim and fed lava flows down the steep southwestern slope of the volcano for several weeks. This was the first circumferential dike intrusion ever observed by both InSAR and GPS measurements and thus provides an opportunity to determine the subsurface geometry of these enigmatic structures that are common on Galápagos volcanoes but are rare elsewhere. Pre- and post- eruption ground deformation between 2002 and 2006 can be modeled by the inflation of two separate magma reservoirs beneath the caldera: a shallow sill at ~1 km depth and a deeper point-source at ~5 km depth, and we infer that this system also existed at the time of the 2005 eruption. The co-eruption deformation is dominated by uplift near the 2005 eruptive fissures, superimposed on a broad subsidence centered on the caldera. Modeling of the co-eruption deformation was performed by including various combinations of planar dislocations to simulate the 2005 circumferential dike intrusion. We found that a single planar dike could not match both the InSAR and GPS data. Our best-fit model includes three planar dikes connected along hinge lines to simulate a curved concave shell that is steeply dipping (~45–60°) toward the caldera at the surface and more gently dipping (~12–14°) at depth where it connects to the horizontal sub-caldera sill. The shallow sill is underlain by the deep point source. The geometry of this modeled magmatic system is consistent with the petrology of Fernandina lavas, which suggest that circumferential eruptions tap the shallowest parts of the system, whereas radial eruptions are fed from deeper levels. The recent history of eruptions at Fernandina is also consistent with the idea that circumferential and radial intrusions are sometimes in a stress-feedback relationship and alternate in time with one another.     

Joint patterns and their relationship to regional trends

An analysis of joint patterns in the Grampians Group rocks o£ Western Victoria has established that the dominant directions are north‐north‐west, east‐north‐east, west‐north‐west, north‐north‐east and north. The master joints are steeply‐dipping structures which formed after the sediments were lithified and folded. The joint‐formation is not genetically related to the folding and post‐dates the emplacement of the igneous intrusions. Joint orientation is independent of lithology and the sediments have reacted as a uniform mass to an applied stress.

The joint pattern conforms with the regional tectonic pattern of faults and lineaments which includes directions of the regmatic shear pattern of Sonder (1947). The jointing and major faulting took place during the Kanimblan Orogeny. The faulting and joint‐formation may have been contemporaneous, the faults being directions along which displacement occurred; conversely the actual movements along faults may have induced the jointing into the sediments.     

Evaluation of real-time flash flood forecasts for Haiti during the passage of Hurricane Tomas, November 4–6, 2010

The January 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti left its population ever more vulnerable to rainfall-induced flash floods. A flash flood guidance system has been implemented to provide real-time information on the potential of small (~70 km²) basins for flash flooding throughout Haiti. This system has components for satellite rainfall ingest and adjustment on the basis of rain gauge information, dynamic soil water deficit estimation, ingest of operational mesoscale model quantitative precipitation forecasts, and estimation of the times of channel flow at bankfull. The result of the system integration is the estimation of the flash flood guidance (FFG) for a given basin and for a given duration. FFG is the amount of rain of a given duration over a small basin that causes minor flooding in the outlet of the basin. Amounts predicted or nowcasted that are higher than the FFG indicate basins with potential for flash flooding. In preparation for Hurricane Tomas’ landfall in early November 2010, the FFG system was used to generate 36-h forecasts of flash flood occurrence based on rainfall forecasts of the nested high-resolution North American Model of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. Assessment of the forecast flood maps and forecast precipitation indicates the utility and value of the forecasts in understanding the spatial distribution of the expected flooding for mitigation and disaster management. It also highlights the need for explicit uncertainty characterization of forecast risk products due to large uncertainties in quantitative precipitation forecasts on hydrologic basin scales.     

Earth system curator: metadata infrastructure for climate modeling

The Earth System Curator is a National Science Foundation sponsored project developing a metadata formalism for describing the digital resources used in climate simulations. The primary motivating observation of the project is that a simulation/model’s source code plus the configuration parameters required for a model run are a compact representation of the dataset generated when the model is executed. The end goal of the project is a convergence of models and data where both resources are accessed uniformly from a single registry. In this paper we review the current metadata landscape of the climate modeling community, present our work on developing a metadata formalism for describing climate models, and reflect on technical challenges we have faced that require new research in the area of Earth Science Informatics.