High-resolution climate variability of southwest China during 57-70 ka reflected in a stalagmite δ18O record from Xinya Cave

A 26-cm-long stalagmite (XY2) from Xinya Cave in northeastern Chongqing of China has been ICP-MS ²³⁰Th/U dated, showing a depositional hiatus at 2.3 cm depth from the top. The growth of the 2.3–26 cm interval determined by four dates was between 57 ka and 70 ka, with a linear growth rate of 0.023 mm/a. We have analyzed 190 samples for δ ¹⁸O and δ ¹³C, mostly in the 2.3–26 cm part. The δ ¹⁸O and δ ¹³C values between 57 ka and 70 ka reveal decadal-to-centennial climatic variability during the glacial interval of Marine Isotope Stage 4 (MIS4), exhibiting much higher resolution than that of the published Hulu and Dongge records during this interval. Speleothem δ ¹⁸O in eastern China, including our study area can be used as a proxy of summer monsoon strength, with lighter values pointing to stronger summer monsoon and higher precipitation, and vice versa. Two decreases in the δ ¹⁸O signature of XY2 record around 59.5 and 64.5 Ka are argued to correspond to the Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events 17 and 18 respectively. The Heinrich event 6 (H6) can be identified in the record as a heavy δ ¹⁸O peak around 60 ka, indicating significant weakening of the monsoon in Chongqing during the cold period. The XY2 δ ¹⁸O record shows very rapid change toward to the interstadial condition of the D-O event, but more gradual change toward to the cold stadial condition. This phenomenon found in the Greenland ice core records is rarely observed so clearly in previously published speleothem records. According to SPECMAP δ ¹⁸O record, the glacial maximum of MIS 4 was around 64.5 ka with the boundary of MIS 3/4 around 60 ka. Unlike the marine record, the speleothem record of XY2, China, exhibits much high frequency variations without an apparent glacial maximum during MIS 4. However, the timing of MIS 3/4 boundary seems to be around 60 ka when the H6 terminated, in agreement with the marine chronology. The growth period of sample XY2 during glacial times probably reflects a local karstic routing of water, rather than having climatic significance. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 40672165, 90511004, 40672202) and the Academician Special Project of Chongqing Science Committee (Grant No. 2003-7835)     

Study of a semi‐active stiffness damper under various earthquake inputs

Semi‐active stiffness damper (SASD) is one of many semi‐active control systems with the capability to mitigate the dynamic response using only a small amount of external power. The system consists of a hydraulic damper connected to the bracing frame in a selected story unit. In this paper, study of a SASD in two building models of five‐stories under four benchmark earthquake records is reported. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the control system against structure type and varying earthquake inputs. Various control laws are chosen to work with SASD, such as: resetting control, switching control, linear quadratic regulator (LQR) and modified LQR, and the results are compared with no control and passive control cases. Numerical results show that the use of a SASD is effective in reducing seismic responses. Control effectiveness is dependent on the type of structure and earthquake excitation. Passive control is less effective than other control cases as expected. Resetting control, switching control and LQR generally perform similarly in response reduction. While modified LQR is more efficient and robust compared with other control algorithms. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Postglacial vegetation history of Mitkof Island, Alexander Archipelago, southeastern Alaska

An AMS radiocarbon-dated pollen record from a peat deposit on Mitkof Island, southeastern Alaska provides a vegetation history spanning ∼12,900 cal yr BP to the present. Late Wisconsin glaciers covered the entire island; deglaciation occurred > 15,400 cal yr BP. The earliest known vegetation to develop on the island (∼12,900 cal yr BP) was pine woodland (Pinus contorta) with alder (Alnus), sedges (Cyperaceae) and ferns (Polypodiaceae type). By ∼12,240 cal yr BP, Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) began to colonize the island while pine woodland declined. By ∼11,200 cal yr BP, mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) began to spread across the island. Sitka spruce-mountain hemlock forests dominated the lowland landscapes of the island until ∼10,180 cal yr BP, when western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) began to colonize, and soon became the dominant tree species. Rising percentages of pine, sedge, and sphagnum after ∼7100 cal yr BP may reflect an expansion of peat bog habitats as regional climate began to shift to cooler, wetter conditions. A decline in alders at that time suggests that coastal forests had spread into the island's uplands, replacing large areas of alder thickets. Cedars (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis, Thuja plicata) appeared on Mitkof Island during the late Holocene.     

GEOCHRONOMETRY & ISOTOPE GEOLOGY

正20142333Liao Jin(State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology,China University of Geosciences,Wuhan 430074,China);Hu Chaoyong Thermoluminescence Based Thermometer from Stalagmites(Quaternary Sciences,ISSN1001-7410,CN11-2708/P,33(6),2013,p.1122-1129,6illus.,1table,48refs.)     

Enhancing spatial accuracy of mobile phone data using multi-temporal dasymetric interpolation

Novel digital data sources allow us to attain enhanced knowledge about locations and mobilities of people in space and time. Already a fast-growing body of literature demonstrates the applicability and feasibility of mobile phone-based data in social sciences for considering mobile devices as proxies for people. However, the implementation of such data imposes many theoretical and methodological challenges. One major issue is the uneven spatial resolution of mobile phone data due to the spatial configuration of mobile network base stations and its spatial interpolation. To date, different interpolation techniques are applied to transform mobile phone data into other spatial divisions. However, these do not consider the temporality and societal context that shapes the human presence and mobility in space and time. The paper aims, first, to contribute to mobile phone-based research by addressing the need to give more attention to the spatial interpolation of given data, and further by proposing a dasymetric interpolation approach to enhance the spatial accuracy of mobile phone data. Second, it contributes to population modelling research by combining spatial, temporal and volumetric dasymetric mapping and integrating it with mobile phone data. In doing so, the paper presents a generic conceptual framework of a multi-temporal function-based dasymetric (MFD) interpolation method for mobile phone data. Empirical results demonstrate how the proposed interpolation method can improve the spatial accuracy of both night-time and daytime population distributions derived from different mobile phone data sets by taking advantage of ancillary data sources. The proposed interpolation method can be applied for both location- and person-based research, and is a fruitful starting point for improving the spatial interpolation methods for mobile phone data. We share the implementation of our method in GitHub as open access Python code.     

A collective human mobility analysis method based on data usage detail records

Human mobility patterns have been widely investigated due to their application in a wide variety of fields, for example urban planning and epidemiology. Many studies have introduced spatial networks into human mobility analyses at the collective level. However, these studies merely analyzed spatial network structure, and the underlying collective mobility patterns were not further discussed. In this paper, we propose a collective mobility discovery method based on community differences (CMDCD). We constructed spatial networks where nodes represent geographical entities and edge weights denote collective mobility intensity between geographical entities. The differences between communities detected from the networks constructed in different periods were then identified. Since collective spatial movement has a large influence on network structure, we can discover groups with different mobility patterns based on community differences. By applying the method to data usage detail records collected from the cellular networks in a city of China, we analyzed different collective mobility patterns between the Spring Festival vacation and workdays. The experimental results show that our method can solve these two problems of identifying community differences and discovering users with different mobility patterns simultaneously. Moreover, the CMDCD method is an integrated approach to discover groups whose mobility patterns have changed in different periods at the large spatial scale and the small spatial scale. The discovered collective mobility patterns can be used to guide urban planning, traffic forecasting, urban resource allocation, providing new insights into human mobility patterns and spatial interaction analyses.     

Seismic hazard assessment using the theory of records

This article is a review of some basic results for analysis of records. First, the general methods appropriate for seismic hazard are discussed. Then, in view of the frequency-magnitude law of Gutenberg and Richter, some results relevant for hazard assessment related to earthquakes are presented. The discussion is concluded with an example of application and comparison with classical methods.     

中国历史文献档案中的古环境记录

我国的历史文献记录是古气候、古环境信息的重要来源,对古全球变化（PAGES）研究计划的目标时段——近2000年（人文记录和自然记录并存的时段）来说,尤其具有重要的科学价值。介绍了我国古文献中的古气候、古环境记录的概况和各项记录如水、旱、雨、雪等的数量统计,综述了这些记录被用于重建定量的气候序列、绘制历史气候复原图、编制古环境事件年表、获取高分辨率的古气候信息诸方面的主要进展。     

Understanding the bias of call detail records in human mobility research

ABSTRACT

In recent years, call detail records (CDRs) have been widely used in human mobility research. Although CDRs are originally collected for billing purposes, the vast amount of digital footprints generated by calling and texting activities provide useful insights into population movement. However, can we fully trust CDRs given the uneven distribution of people’s phone communication activities in space and time? In this article, we investigate this issue using a mobile phone location dataset collected from over one million subscribers in Shanghai, China. It includes CDRs (~27%) plus other cellphone-related logs (e.g., tower pings, cellular handovers) generated in a workday. We extract all CDRs into a separate dataset in order to compare human mobility patterns derived from CDRs vs. from the complete dataset. From an individual perspective, the effectiveness of CDRs in estimating three frequently used mobility indicators is evaluated. We find that CDRs tend to underestimate the total travel distance and the movement entropy, while they can provide a good estimate to the radius of gyration. In addition, we observe that the level of deviation is related to the ratio of CDRs in an individual’s trajectory. From a collective perspective, we compare the outcomes of these two datasets in terms of the distance decay effect and urban community detection. The major differences are closely related to the habit of mobile phone usage in space and time. We believe that the event-triggered nature of CDRs does introduce a certain degree of bias in human mobility research and we suggest that researchers use caution to interpret results derived from CDR data.     

皮山6.5级地震前地表MODIS热红外异常与气象台站记录对比

利用2015年皮山6.5级地震前半年的MODIS影像,通过劈窗算法对震中周边地表温度进行反演,通过对比地表反演温度和震中周边气象台站气象记录,研究发现震中附近在震前80 d和15 d左右出现明显的热异常,但在震前1个月左右存在短暂的温度低异常现象。另外,根据近22年的气象记录,震中及周边在震前半年气温明显偏高,这种气象异常或可视为地震前兆。