Four thousand years of environmental change and human activity in the Cochabamba Basin, Bolivia

The Cochabamba Basin (Bolivia) is on the ancient road network connecting Andean and lowland areas. Little is known about the longevity of this trade route or how people responded to past environmental changes. The eastern end of the Cochabamba valley system constricts at the Vacas Lake District, constraining the road network and providing an ideal location in which to examine past human-environmental interactions. Multi-proxy analysis of sediment from Lake Challacaba has allowed a c. 4000 year environmental history to be reconstructed. Fluctuations in drought tolerant pollen taxa and calcium carbonate indicate two periods of reduced moisture availability (c. 4000-3370 and c. 2190-1020 cal yr BP) compared to adjacent wetter episodes (c. 3370-2190 and c. 1020 cal yr BP-present). The moisture fluctuations broadly correlate to El Niño/Southern Oscillation variations reported elsewhere. High charcoal abundance from c. 4000 to 2000 yr ago indicates continuous use of the ancient road network. A decline in charcoal and an increase in dung fungus (Sporormiella) c. 1340-1210 cal yr BP, suggests that cultural changes were a major factor in shaping the modern landscape. Despite undisputable impacts of human populations on the Polylepis woodlands today, we see no evidence of woodland clearance in the Challacaba record.     

江苏省洪涝灾情及风险的时空分析

采用灰色关联分析,计算全省各市2011—2017年洪涝灾情指数;运用熵权法估算洪涝风险指标权重,评估各市2005—2018年综合洪涝风险.主要结果表明:选取的灾情指标能有效地反映区域洪涝灾情,扬州是全省历史灾情较为严重的城市,全省大部分城市在2012年和2015年的灾情指数较高,2016年苏南和苏中的灾情较严重;各市在...     

Impacts of geoscience research on the physical environment of the Vestfold Hills,Antarctica

Antarctic polar deserts can be of considerable scientific interest, but can also exhibit great environmental sensitivity. A variety of factors, including Australia's legal obligations under the Madrid Protocol, public expectations, certain research opportunities and ethical considerations, demand a very high standard of environmental protection. A survey outside the Davis Station limits in the Vestfold Hills, East Antarctica, identified 66 sites at which past human activities had left long term impacts on the physical environment. Nearly half of all observed impacts were the result of geoscientific research that had left old pit and trench sites, vehicular tracks, partly excavated palaeontological material, rock sampling and drilling sites, localised slope instability caused by disturbance, and discarded equipment and markers. Comparisons between rehabilitated sites and others where little, if any, rehabilitation appears to have been attempted suggest natural processes alone are generally insufficient to heal the damage, but that effective rehabilitation is often possible if undertaken immediately after the initial disturbance.     

Impacts,volcanism and mass extinction: random coincidence or cause and effect?

Large impacts are credited with the most devastating mass extinctions in Earth's history and the Cretaceous?–?Tertiary (K/T) boundary impact is the strongest and sole direct support for this view. A review of the five largest Phanerozoic mass extinctions provides no support that impacts with craters up to 180 km in diameter caused significant species extinctions. This includes the 170 km-diameter Chicxulub impact crater regarded as 0.3 million years older than the K/T mass extinction. A second, larger impact event may have been the ultimate cause of this mass extinction, as suggested by a global iridium anomaly at the K/T boundary, but no crater has been found to date. The current crater database suggests that multiple impacts, for example comet showers, were the norm, rather than the exception, during the Late Eocene, K/T transition, latest Triassic and the Devonian?–?Carboniferous transition, but did not cause significant species extinctions. Whether multiple impacts substantially contributed to greenhouse warming and associated environmental stresses is yet to be demonstrated. From the current database, it must be concluded that no known Phanerozoic impacts, including the Chicxulub impact (but excluding the K/T impact) caused mass extinctions or even significant species extinctions. The K/T mass extinction may have been caused by the coincidence of a very large impact (>?250 km) upon a highly stressed biotic environment as a result of volcanism. The consistent association of large magmatic provinces (large igneous provinces and continental flood-basalt provinces) with all but one (end-Ordovician) of the five major Phanerozoic mass extinctions suggests that volcanism played a major role. Faunal and geochemical evidence from the end-Permian, end-Devonian, end-Cretaceous and Triassic/Jurassic transition suggests that the biotic stress was due to a lethal combination of tectonically induced hydrothermal and volcanic processes, leading to eutrophication in the oceans, global warming, sea-level transgression and ocean anoxia. It must be concluded that major magmatic events and their long-term environmental consequences are major contributors, though not the sole causes of mass extinctions. Sudden mass extinctions, such as at the K/T boundary, may require the coincidence of major volcanism and a very large Impact.     

Goat Paddock,Western Australia: an impact crater near the simple – complex transition

Goat Paddock in northern Western Australia is a ～5 km-diameter impact crater of Eocene age excavated in gently dipping Proterozoic sandstones. Roughly radial gorges formed by post-impact erosion provide cross-sectional views of the wall and rim zone. The predominant structural theme is one of synclinal rim folding with broad zones in which bedrock strata were deformed by impact to steep, vertical and overturned attitudes. Impact breccia is found craterward of deformed bedrock, on top of it, and downdropped into fault troughs roughly concentric to the crater. The bedrock?–?breccia contact is sharp in some places and gradational in others. In at least one section, the entire mass of upturned bedrock and breccia was displaced radially over essentially undisturbed bedrock, as indicated by slickensides on the horizontal contact. Talus deposits are similar to breccia, but show rough size sorting and clast orientation that dips steeply craterward, indicating that the talus formed as slides down the oversteepened crater wall immediately after crater formation. Shatter cones in some clasts indicate that allogenic material is incorporated in these deposits. Suevite, characterised by ropy flow textures, and by microclasts of quartz with planar deformation features, planar fractures, and of vesiculated silica glass, was found overlying deformed bedrock at a point where the surface of the bedrock forms a nearly horizontal bench midway up the crater wall. The crater was at least partially filled by later sediments, represented by bedded conglomerate close to the crater wall grading inward to sand, silt and mudstone recovered by drillholes on the crater floor. Some of the talus and conglomerate occupy re-entrants in the crater walls, suggesting an original scalloped outline to the crater. Two drillholes, one central and one halfway to the wall, both reached brecciated sandstone after penetrating 210 m of lake sediments. Goat Paddock has a flat floor with no indication of a central uplift and a depth/diameter ratio of ～0.073. This crater form, coupled with the modification of the crater walls by slumping and the scalloped outline of the crater rim suggests that Goat Paddock bridges the two traditional classes of impact crater: simple and complex.     

Lunar impact breccias: petrology,crater setting,and bombardment history of the Moon

Two general classes of lunar impact breccias have been recognised: fragmental breccias and melt breccias. Fragmental breccias are composed of clastic-rock debris in a finely comminuted grain-supported matrix of mineral and lithic fragments. Impact melt breccias have crystalline to glassy matrices that formed by cooling of a silicate melt. Most lunar impact breccias in our collection probably sample ejecta from large complex craters or multi-ring basins, although linking individual breccias to specific impact events has proven surprisingly difficult. A long-standing problem in lunar science has been distinguishing clast-poor impact melt breccias from igneous rocks produced by melting of the lunar interior. Concentrations and relative abundances of highly siderophile elements derived from the meteoritic impactor provide a useful discriminant, especially when combined with petrologic and geochemical evidence for mechanical mixing. Most lunar impact melt breccias have crystallisation ages of 4.0?–?3.8 Ga, corresponding to an episode of intensive crustal metamorphism recorded by whole-rock U?–?Pb isotopic compositions of lunar anorthosites. This may reflect a short-lived spike in the cratering rate, although other explanations are possible. The question of whether or not a cataclysmic bombardment struck the Earth and Moon at ca 3.9 Ga remains open and the subject of continuing investigations.     

Gulpuliyul structure: a possible impact structure of Mesoproterozoic age in western Arnhem Land,Northern Territory

The Gulpuliyul structure is the eroded remains of a possible impact structure of Mesoproterozoic age, in western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, on the Arnhem Shelf of the northwestern McArthur Basin. Enigmatic, highly deformed and brecciated strata, within the roughly circular or pentagonal feature about 8.5 km across, contrast with mildly deformed rocks of the surrounding Arnhem Shelf. Shock-metamorphic features have yet to be observed. Other features of the Gulpuliyul Structure are: (i) sharp and faulted outer boundaries; (ii) strata within the structure are younger than adjacent country rocks; i.e., the rocks have been emplaced downwards into the structure; (iii) outcrops display an overall concentric or tangential pattern, the stratigraphy is essentially coherent, and there is an overall younging from the centre outwards; and (iv) strata are commonly overturned by southward-directed thrusting and recumbent folding. It is suggested that the projectile impacted at a shallow angle from the north, to produce a southward-deepening crater about 8.5 km across. The depth of the transient crater was probably between ～500?–?700 m (minimum) and ～800 m (maximum). The central uplift probably rebounded only about 300?–?400 m. The present erosion level is thought to lie near the top of the low central uplift, at about or just below the floor of the final crater. The age of the possible impact is Mesoproterozoic (ca 1600?–?1325 Ma); it is most likely to have occurred very early in the Mesoproterozoic (1600?–?1500 Ma).     

Coupled asteroid impacts and banded iron-formations,Fortescue and Hamersley Groups,Pilbara, Western Australia

Asteroid impact spherule layers and tsunami deposits underlying banded iron-formations in the Fortescue and Hamersley Groups have been further investigated to test their potential stratigraphic relationships. This work has included new observations related to the ca 2.63 Ga Jeerinah Impact Layer (JIL) and impact spherules associated with the 4th Shale-Macroband of the Dales Gorge Iron Member (DGS4) of the Brockman Iron Formation. A unit of impact spherules (microkrystite) correlated with the ca 2.63 Ga JIL is observed within a >100 m-thick fragmental-intraclast breccia pile in drill cores near Roy Hill. The sequence represents significant thickening of the impact/tsunami unit relative to the JIL type section at Hesta, as well as relative to the 20–30 m-thick ca 2.63 Ga Carawine Dolomite spherule-bearing mega-breccia. The ca 2.48 Ga-old Dales Gorge Member of the Brockman Iron Formation is underlain by an ?0.5 m-thick rip-up clast breccia located at the top of the ca 2.50 Ga Mt McRae Shale, and is interpreted as a tsunami deposit. We suggest that the presence of impact ejecta and tsunami units stratigraphically beneath a number of banded iron-formations, and units of ferruginous shale in the Pilbara and South Africa may result from a genetic relationship. For example, it could be that under Archean atmospheric conditions, mafic volcanism triggered by large asteroid impacts enriched the oceans in soluble FeO. If so, seasonal microbial and/or photolytic oxidation to ferric oxide could have caused precipitation of Fe₂O₃ and silica. In view of the possible occurrence of depositional gaps and paraconformities between impact ejecta units and overlying ferruginous sediments, these relationships require further testing by isotopic age studies.     

Assessing human impact on alluvial fan development: a multidisciplinary case-study from Lower Khuzestan (SW Iran)

This paper presents a multidisciplinary approach for studying the evolution of an alluvial fan system in Lower Khuzestan (SW Iran). The study draws on previously collected data from geological and archaeological field campaigns and new data derived from the interpretation of satellite imagery and historical textual sources. Three alluvial fans were identified, successively deposited by the Jarrahi river in progressively downstream/westward direction. Judging from archaeological and historical evidence, the successive phases appear to coincide with a relocation of settlement and irrigation activities. The distributary system of the present-day fan developed over a period of less than four centuries. It is suggested that management of levee breaks by man played a key role in such rapid fan development and in maintaining extremely low gradients. Judging from the extensive patterns of ancient irrigation canals, human activity also played an important role in the formation of the earlier fans.     

SWBM模型在锡林河流域气候变化影响评价中的应用

以内蒙古地区的锡林河流域为研究对象,采用考虑融雪的水量平衡模型(SWBM模型),在对锡林河流域水文模拟的基础上,评估了流域水资源对气候变化的响应。结果表明:SWBM模型锡林河流域月径流过程具有较好的模拟效果,率定期和检验期的模型效率系数均超过60%,相对误差也均小于8%,在未来全球气候变化背景下,流域水资源以减少趋势为主,2030年之后,减少幅度将可能超过10%。