Buddha from space—An ancient object of art made of a Chinga iron meteorite fragment*

Abstract– The fall of meteorites has been interpreted as divine messages by multitudinous cultures since prehistoric times, and meteorites are still adored as heavenly bodies. Stony meteorites were used to carve birds and other works of art; jewelry and knifes were produced of meteoritic iron for instance by the Inuit society. We here present an approximately 10.6 kg Buddhist sculpture (the “iron man”) made of an iron meteorite, which represents a particularity in religious art and meteorite science. The specific contents of the crucial main (Fe, Ni, Co) and trace (Cr, Ga, Ge) elements indicate an ataxitic iron meteorite with high Ni contents (approximately 16 wt%) and Co (approximately 0.6 wt%) that was used to produce the artifact. In addition, the platinum group elements (PGEs), as well as the internal PGE ratios, exhibit a meteoritic signature. The geochemical data of the meteorite generally match the element values known from fragments of the Chinga ataxite (ungrouped iron) meteorite strewn field discovered in 1913. The provenance of the meteorite as well as of the piece of art strongly points to the border region of eastern Siberia and Mongolia, accordingly. The sculpture possibly portrays the Buddhist god Vai?ravana and might originate in the Bon culture of the eleventh century. However, the ethnological and art historical details of the “iron man” sculpture, as well as the timing of the sculpturing, currently remain speculative.     

Small‐Scale ASR Between Flow Barriers in a Saline Aquifer

Regular aquifer storage recovery, ASR, is often not feasible for small‐scale storage in brackish or saline aquifers because fresh water floats to the top of the aquifer where it is unrecoverable. Flow barriers that partially penetrate a brackish or saline aquifer prevent a stored volume of fresh water from expanding sideways, thus increasing the recovery efficiency. In this paper, the groundwater flow and mixing is studied during injection, storage, and recovery of fresh water in a brackish or saline aquifer in a flow‐tank experiment and by numerical modeling to investigate the effect of density difference, hydraulic conductivity, pumping rate, cyclic operation, and flow barrier settings. Two injection and recovery methods are investigated: constant flux and constant head. Fresh water recovery rates on the order of 65% in the first cycle climbing to as much as 90% in the following cycles were achievable for the studied configurations with constant flux whereas the recovery efficiency was somewhat lower for constant head. The spatial variation in flow velocity over the width of the storage zone influences the recovery efficiency, because it induces leakage of fresh water underneath the barriers during injection and upconing of salt water during recovery.     

The future of containerization: perspectives from maritime and inland freight distribution

As containerization enters its peak growth years, its potential future developments over maritime and inland freight transport systems are being questioned. A series of issues can either further accelerate the adoption of containerization worldwide or, alternatively, could impose an upper limit to the extraordinary contribution that containers have implied for logistics systems and global commodity chains. These mainly include macro-economic, technical/operational and governance factors. Future containerization will be largely determined by interactions within and between four domains ranging from a functional to a spatial perspective. The logistical domain involves the functional organization of transport chains and their integration in supply chains. The transport domain involves the operation of transport services and intermodal operations. The infrastructural domain involves the provision and management of basic infrastructure for both links and nodes in the transport system. The locational domain relates to the geographical location of nodes and sites in the economic space and forms a basic element for their intrinsic accessibility in terms of centrality or intermediacy. It is underlined that the future of containerization will dominantly be shaped by inland transport systems.     

Measuring the goodness-of-fit of decision-tree models of discrete and continuous activity-travel choice: methods and empirical illustration

The use of decision tree models for predicting activity-travel choice is receiving increasing attention, but raises two related problems that are considered in this study. First, commonly used deterministic action-assignment rules should be replaced by probabilistic action-assignment rules. We develop such probabilistic rules for both discrete and continuous choice problems. Second, common goodness-of-fit measures such as the hit-ratio need to be replaced by likelihood measures. In this paper, we develop and empirically illustrate the interrelated methods and measures. The findings suggest that the new measures add information to existing statistics for discrete as well as the continuous choice.     

The ecology of hazardousness,the experience of South America

In many parts of South America, the socio-economic condition of the population is such that in many respects the people, because of their vulnerable state, are a disaster waiting to occur. The triggering action of the disaster will be an extreme physical or biophysical event. If any advance is to be made in natural hazard management, then the focus must be upon people first. Halt the process of underdevelopment in South American societies and you have taken a major step forward in natural hazard management. The major concern of this paper is not so much with the competition for first place in hazard proneness in South America, but rather the elaboration of the total ecology of what we commonly designate as disasters, which ordinarily occur at the interface of extreme natural phenomena and vulnerable settlement patterns, and which should be seen, as the extreme situation which is implicit in the everyday condition of the population. Vulnerability is the key concept in this relationship. South American nations vary greatly in their hazard proneness, in the vulnerability of sectors in their societies, in the losses and general repercussions of hazardous events, and in their ability to cope effectively with the post-disaster situation, either alone or with international aid.     

Towards a new concept of the tectogenesis of the Pyrenees

Crustal structures of the Central and Eastern Pyrenees are compared with those of the Alps and Carpathians. By analogy, northward subduction/underthrusting in the Central and Eastern Pyrenees is proposed. Southward subduction/underthrusting is found along the North Iberian margin and Western Pyrenees. Hence, a flip—a change in the direction of subduction/underthrusting—is postulated between the Central and Western Pyrenees.     

Bayesian Deep Learning for Spatial Interpolation in the Presence of Auxiliary Information

Mathematical Geosciences - Earth scientists increasingly deal with ‘big data’. For spatial interpolation tasks, variants of kriging have long been regarded as the established...     

Non-linear effects in internal-tide beams, and mixing

A non-linear non-hydrostatic model (MIT-gcm) is used to study the generation and propagation of internal tides. The model domain covers a continental slope and neighbouring parts of the deep ocean and shelf. Uniformity in the along-slope direction is assumed. We focus on the non-linear evolution of the internal tide once generated. In particular, we show that in the main region of generation, over the upper part of the slope, small-scale features occur, indicative of breaking and mixing. Far from the generation region, non-linear processes are important in the reflection of the beam at the bottom, where higher harmonics are generated. This implies an energy transfer toward higher frequencies and the resulting shape of the energy spectra is consistent with observations. Turbulent and mixing processes are analysed by employing an adiabatic sorting method; thus, we calculate the development in time of the available potential energy, the variation in the background potential energy due to irreversible processes, and the distribution of the Cox number (the local turbulent diffusivity normalized by the background diffusivity) over the slope. With rotation, the transfer of energy to higher harmonics is reduced.