Moho undulations and high Poisson’s ratio beneath volcanic areas,west of Saudi Arabia: indication of asymmetric lithospheric uplift

Journal of Seismology - By utilizing teleseismic data, the P-wave receiver functions (RFs) have been computed for 20 broadband seismic station deployed in Harrat Khaybar and Ithnayn, in the Arabian...     

A field study investigating the potential use of phosphorus combined with organic amendments on cadmium accumulation by wheat and subsequent rice

A field study was performed to determine the efficiency of diammonium phosphate (DAP) applied alone or combined with biochar, lignite, and farmyard manure (FYM) on growth and cadmium (Cd) accumulation in wheat and rice. Before crop sowing, different treatments were applied in the field such as a control (T₁), DAP alone (0.1%, T₂), DAP + lignite (0.05% each, T₃), DAP + FYM (0.05% each, T₄), and DAP + biochar (0.05% each, T₅). Afterwards, the wheat seeds were sown in the soil. At wheat postharvest, rice was sown without any further treatment. Raw effluent was applied as an irrigation source during the whole growth period of both crops since it is the common practice of the farmers of study area. It was revealed that the use of amendments enhanced the yield and photosynthesis but lowered the Cd contents in straw as well as grains of both crops. In both crops, the highest yield of straw and grain was found in DAP + FYM whereas the lowest Cd concentration was found in DAP alone. The ammonium bicarbonate-DTPA extractable Cd of post wheat and post rice soils were decreased while the soil pH and immobilization index were increased in all treatments as compared with the control. The present field study highlighted that the DAP + FYM can be effective in increasing yield with decreased Cd concentrations in crop grains.     

HYDROLOGICAL CHANGES DURING THE PAST 50 YEARS OVER THE TIBETAN PLATEAU AND ITS REGIONAL DIFFERENCE

基于气象台站、再分析资料分析以及过去研究成果的综合,系统总结了过去50年青藏高原水文环境变化趋势及其区域差异性.显著、同步的地表升温是青藏高原水分循环最为显著驱动特征.日照、风速的下降形成大气驱动因子的减弱,表现为蒸发力下降.大气水汽含量与其他因子造成降水量微弱增加,但区域差异明显.随着地表气温上升,最大积雪水当量减少、冻土活动层厚度增加.尽管蒸发力下降,地表土壤湿度的增加依然导致蒸散发微弱增加.     

Land subsidence pattern controlled by old alpine basement faults in the Kashmar Valley, northeast Iran: results from InSAR and levelling

Fluid storage systems, such as oil, gas, magma or water reservoirs, are often controlled by the host rock structure and faulted terrain. In sedimentary basins, where no direct information about underlying structure is available, the pattern of ground deformation may allow us to assess the buried fault arrangement. We provide an example in the semi-arid area of Iran, in the Kashmar Valley, a region subject to land subsidence due to water overexploitation. Geodetically determined subsidence rates in the Kashmar Valley exceed 15–30 cm yr⁻¹. The pattern of surface deformation is strongly non-uniform and displays NE–SW elongated bowls of subsidence. The trend resembles old Cretaceous-to-Tertiary faults that evolved during early alpine tectonic deformation. Although these early alpine structures are considered tectonically inactive in the present day, the observed land subsidence pattern indicates significant structural control on the geometry of the aquifer basin and its deformation during reservoir drainage.     

Adaptive state estimation of groundwater contaminant boundary input flux in a 2-dimensional aquifer

In many circumstances involving heat and mass transfer issues,it is considered impractical to measure the input flux and the resulting state distribution in the domain.Therefore,the need to develop techniques to provide solutions for such problems and estimate the inverse mass flux becomes imperative.Adaptive state estimator(ASE)is increasingly becoming a popular inverse estimation technique which resolves inverse problems by incorporating the semi-Markovian concept into a Bayesian estimation technique,thereby developing an inverse input and state estimator consisting of a bank of parallel adaptively weighted Kalman filters.The ASE is particularly designed for a system that encompasses independent unknowns and/or random switching of input and measurement biases.The present study describes the scheme to estimate the groundwater input contaminant flux and its transient distribution in a conjectural two-dimensional aquifer by means of ASE,which in particular is because of its unique ability to efficiently handle the process noise giving an estimation of keeping the relative error range within 10%in 2-dimensional problems.Numerical simulation results show that the proposed estimator presents decent estimation performance for both smoothly and abruptly varying input flux scenarios.Results also show that ASE enjoys a better estimation performance than its competitor,Recursive Least Square Estimator(RLSE)due to its larger error tolerance in greater process noise regimes.ASE's inherent deficiency of being slower than the RLSE,resulting from the complexity of algorithm,was also noticed.The chosen input scenarios are tested to calculate the effect of input area and both estimators show improved results with an increase in input flux area especially as sensors are moved closer to the assumed input location.     

An Upper Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian) actinopterygian fish assemblage from the marginal marine Adaffa Formation of Saudi Arabia

Actinopterygian remains have been recovered from Upper Cretaceous (lower Campanian to lower Maastrichtian) marginal marine deposits of the Adaffa Formation in northwestern Saudi Arabia. The fossils comprise gars (Lepisosteidae), pachycormids (cf. Protosphyraena sp.), indeterminate pycnodontiforms, enchodontid teleosts (cf. Enchodus sp.) and other indeterminate Teleostei. This assemblage is significant because it includes a novel occurrence for the Middle East (Pachycormidae) together with taxa (Lepisosteidae, Pycnodontiformes, Enchodontidae) that have been previously recorded from Late Cretaceous faunas elsewhere in the Mediterranean Tethyan region.     

Prevailing trends of climatic extremes across Indus-Delta of Sindh-Pakistan

This study examines the variability and change in the patterns of climatic extremes experienced in Indus-Delta of Sindh province of Pakistan, comprising regions of Karachi, Badin, Mohenjodaro, and Rohri. The homogenized daily minimum and maximum temperature and precipitation data for a 36-year period were used to calculate 13 and 11 indices of temperature and precipitation extremes with the help of RClimDex, a program written in the statistical software package R. A non-parametric Mann–Kendall test and Sen’s slope estimates were used to determine the statistical significance and magnitude of the calculated trend. Temperatures of summer days and tropical nights increased in the region with overall significant warming trends for monthly maximum temperature as well as for warm days and nights reflecting dry conditions in the study area. The warm extremes and nighttime temperature indices showed greater trends than cold extremes and daytime indices depicting an overall warming trends in the Delta. Historic decrease in the acreage of major crops and over 33% decrease in agriculture credit for Sindh are the indicators of adverse impacts of warmer and drier weather on Sindh agriculture. Trends reported for Karachi and Badin are expected to decrease rice cultivation, hatching of fisheries, and mangroves forest surrounding these cities. Increase in the prevailing temperature trends will lead to increasingly hotter and drier summers resulting to constraints on cotton, wheat, and rice yield in Rohri and Mohenjodaro areas due to increased crop water requirements that may be met with additional groundwater pumping; nonetheless, the depleted groundwater resources would have a direct impact on the region’s economy.     

Influence of saturation on rainfall generated landslides in shale along Murree-Kohala road,Pakistan

On August 10, 2010 a series of landslides of more than 90,000 m³ occurred along the Muree-Kohala road in the northern area of Pakistan. A study was undertaken to evaluate the likely impacts of percent saturation and bulk density on mobilized shear strength along the basal rupture surface of the landslide. A series of unconfined compression test and unconsolidated undrained triaxial tests were performed on remolded samples of different densities with varied percentages of saturation. The results of these tests suggest that soil cohesion and friction decreases with increasing saturation. The tests also showed that the shear strength parameters tend to increase with increasing dry density; however, all the samples exhibited a noticeable loss of shear strength with increasing degree of saturation, independent of soil density.Limit equilibrium slope stability analyses were performed along the most probable failure planes, based on shear strength parameters corresponding to degrees of saturation, which varied between 30% to about 100%. This resulted in drop of factor of safety from FS = 1.64 down to 0.51 as the degree of saturation approaches unity.These results suggest that the causative factor in triggering the landslide along Murree-Kohala was the partial saturation of the zone that developed the basal rupture plane. As rain infiltrated the slope, the bulk unit weight of the soil increased, while the shear strength along the developing plane of rupture decreased sufficiently to concentrate shear strain when the material became more than 60% saturation (FS < 1.0).     

A neural network approach for the real-time detection of faults

Fault detection is an essential part of the operation of any chemical plant. Early detection of faults is important in chemical industry since a lot of damage and loss can result before a fault present in the system is detected. Even though fault detection algorithms are designed and implemented for quickly detecting incidents, most these algorithms do not have an optimal property in terms of detection delay with respect to false alarm rate. Based on the optimization property of cumulative sum (CUSUM), a real-time system for detecting changes in dynamic systems is designed in this paper. This work is motivated by combining two fault detection (FD) strategies; a simplified procedure of the incident detection problem is formulated by using both the artificial neural networks (ANN) and the CUSUM statistical test (Page–Hinkley test). The design of a model-based residual generator is intended to reveal any drift from the normal behavior of the process. In order to obtain a reliable model for the normal process dynamics, the neural black-box modeling by means of a nonlinear auto-regressive with eXogenous input (NARX) model has been chosen in this study. This paper also shows the choice and the performance of the neural network in the training and test phases. After describing the system architecture and the proposed methodology of the fault detection, we present a realistic application in order to show the technique’s potential. The purpose is to develop and test the fault detection method on a real incident data, to detect the change presence, and pinpoint the moment it occurred. The experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the FD method.     

Coral bleaching and habitat effects on colonisation of reef fish assemblages: An experimental study

Degradation and mortality of corals is increasing worldwide and is expected to have significant effects on coral reef fish; hence studies on these effects are essential. In the present study, a field experiment was set up within Mafia Island Marine Park in Tanzania (East Africa) to examine the effects of bleaching and habitat structure on colonisation of coral reef fish assemblages. Live and bleached staghorn coral Acropora formosa was transplanted onto plots in a site dominated by sand and rubble, and the experimental design comprised of three treatments: live coral, bleached coral and eroded coral rubble. There was an immediate increase (within 24 h) in fish abundance and diversity in the two treatments with standing corals. Overall, live and bleached coral plots showed similar effects, but differed from the eroded coral plots which had a much lower abundance and diversity of fish. In general, fish species diversity changed with time over the study period while fish abundance did not. Multivariate analyses showed that while there were differences in fish assemblage structure between standing corals and the eroded coral treatment, there was neither a difference between live and bleached coral treatments nor any temporal effects on fish assemblage structure. Our findings suggest that physical structure and complexity of habitat have stronger effects on colonisation of reef fish assemblages than changes in coral health (such as bleaching) which do not affect coral structure. This may have important implications for appropriate coral reef management.