The impact of vertebrate herbivores on wetland vegetation in Atchafalaya Bay, Louisiana

Delta islands in the Atchafalaya and Wax Lake deltas in Atchafalaya Bay, Louisiana, are in an extremely dynamic successional phase. These islands initially supported large marshes dominated by the pioneering plant species Sagittaria latifolia and Sagittaria platyphylla. A general decrease in vegetated areas has occurred in the delta island marshes in the Atchafalaya Delta since about 1980, while in the Wax Lake Delta portion of the complex the vegetation still flourished. The Atchafalaya Delta provides an interesting setting for the study of herbivory because of the complex interaction of biotic and physical factors operating in this delta. We hypothesized that grazing by herbivores has a marked effect on vegetation in these developing marshes. To test this hypothesis, exclosures were erected on islands in both deltas in September 1985 and January 1986. Each set of exclosure treatments included an openly-grazed control area, an ungrazed area, an area allowing nutria grazing, and one allowing waterfowl grazing in each site. Results of the experiment, based on field sampling of vegetation, indicated decreases in plant biomass and changes in plant species composition in grazed treatments. Waterfowl and nutria reduced biomass aboul equally, but there was a more marked effect in the openly grazed areas. These findings may be extrapolated to sediment diversion areas along the Mississippi River.     

Variangular wind spirals

The term variangular is introduced to emphasize a significant difference between the present and certain earlier solutions to the problem of organized airmotion within the planetary boundary layer. The latter belong to the family of equiangular wind spirals and have the characteristic that the angle () formed by the vectors of shearing stress and geostrophic departure is invariant with height; it is shown that in this spiral-family, parabolic height-dependency of the effective (eddy) diffusivity (K) alone is permitted, including the asymptotic case of constant K; the famous Ekman spiral as well as the Rossby spiral are two prominent members of the family of equiangular wind spirals. The new variangular theory, as the name implies, permits variation of with height (z) and produces more versatile profiles of wind and stress due to less restraint in K (z). As an example of comparison with observed data, monthly mean wind profiles obtained at Plateau Station, Antarctica, are selected since they exhibit a noteworthy degree of variangularity, in relatively satisfactory agreement with properties of the new theoretical model for wind spirals.National Research Council Visiting Scientist Research Associate, Regional Environments Division, Earth Sciences Laboratory.     

Geodesic polygons on surfaces of revolution

This paper presents a way for computing geodesic polygons on real surfaces of revolution with partly continuous curvature and gives an application to coordinate transformations in geodesic coordinate systems. The specific formulas for an ellipsoid of revolution are briefly mentioned.     

Water Circulation Off the Northeastern Coast of Sakhalin during the Passage of Three Types of Deep Cyclones over the Sea of Okhotsk

Based on the numerical simulation of water circulation in the Sea of Okhotsk in 1986 to 2015, the impact of deep cyclones on the circulation off the northeastern coast of Sakhalin is studied. The circulation in the Sea of Okhotsk is simulated with the COSMO-Ru-INMOM-CICE model configuration, where the COSMO-Ru and INMOM resolve explicitly the mesoscale atmosphere and ocean dynamics and the CICE resolves the ice cover evolution. The extreme atmospheric events associated with the intensive cyclone activity over the Sea of Okhotsk during the cold season are classified. It is found that high velocity is typical of the cyclones coming to the sea from Sakhalin, and wind speed on the periphery is higher for the cyclones coming to the Sea of Okhotsk from the south and southwest. The analysis of water circulation response off the northeastern coast of Sakhalin demonstrates that the meridional current velocity on the shelf increased by several times from the sea surface to the bottom for all types of cyclones. On the edge of the shelf, southern currents intensified in the surface and bottom layers during the passage of cyclones and at the intermediate depths during the passage of fronts. On the continental slope, southern currents intensified in the surface, intermediate, and bottom layers depending on the type of extreme events.

     

Period–luminosity relations for red supergiant variables – I.The calibration

We present CCD photometry of red supergiant long-period variables (LPVs) in the Per OB1 association, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and M33. The photometry was obtained in the Kron–Cousins R and I bandpasses and in a narrow bandpass ( λ ₀=8250 Å, FWHM=300 Å) chosen to avoid TiO bands in the spectral energy distribution of the LPVs. Because the strength of the TiO bands varies greatly with temperature, which varies with the phase of an LPV, avoiding TiO reduces the amplitude of the photometric variations seen in LPVs. The result is a lower dispersion and a well defined period–luminosity (PL) relation.
For the LMC sample we find an rms dispersion of 0.27 mag in the narrow-band PL relation and slightly larger dispersions for the LPVs in Per OB1 and M33. This dispersion is comparable to that of the Cepheid PL relation at similar wavelengths. Adopting a distance modulus of 18.5±0.1 mag for the LMC, we obtain distance moduli of 11.68±0.15 mag for Per OB1 and 24.85±0.13 mag for M33. These distances agree well with those based on main sequence fitting for Per OB1 and the Cepheid distance for M33. Since LPVs are ∼ 5 times more common than Cepheids and have a well defined PL relation, LPVs provide a promising method for estimating Galactic and extra galactic distances.     

A hydrothermal deposit from explorer ridge in the northeast Pacific Ocean

Crusts composed of nontronite and ferromanganese oxides were recovered from Explorer Ridge, a spreading ridge segment in the northeastern Pacific Ocean located off the west coast of Canada. The chemical and mineralogical composition of the crusts closely resembles that of the mound-like hydrothermal deposits recently discovered at the FAMOUS site on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and on the Galapagos spreading centre. Compositional anomalies suggest that the crusts are precipitates of hydrothermal vent solutions which were ejected discontinuously and subsequently mixed with seawater.     

Ionosphere Disturbances Preceding Earthquakes according to the Data of Ground Based Station of the Vertical Ionospheric Sounding Wakkanai

The paper analyzes the data of manual ionograms processing of hourly measurements of the critical frequency foF2 of the F2 ionospheric layer at the Wakkanai ionospheric vertical sounding station (Japan) in a geomagnetically quiet environment before a series of earthquakes with magnitude M > 6.0, for which the station entered the earthquake preparation zone, in order to detect possible Ionospheric Disturbances Preceding Earthquakes (IDPE), and to determine their quantitative characteristics. Detected IDPE, in the opinion of the authors, can be related to the processes of preparation of the corresponding earthquakes, i.e., to be Ionospheric Precursors of Earthquakes (IPE).