Gas hydrate disturbance fabrics of southern Hydrate Ridge sediments (ODP Leg 204): Relationship with texture and physical properties

Soupy and mousse-like fabrics are disturbance sedimentary features that result from the dissociation of gas hydrate, a process that releases water. During the core retrieval process, soupy and mousse-like fabrics are produced in the gas hydrate-bearing sediments due to changes in pressure and temperature conditions. Therefore, the identification of soupy and mousse-like fabrics can be used as a proxy for the presence of gas hydrate in addition to other evidence, such as pore water freshening or anomalously cool temperature. We present here grain-size results, mineralogical composition and magnetic susceptibility data of soupy and mousse-like samples from the southern Hydrate Ridge (Cascadia accretionary complex) acquired during Leg 204 of the Ocean Drilling Program. In order to study the relationship between sedimentary texture and the presence of gas hydrates, we have compared these results with the main textural and compositional data available from the same area. Most of the disturbed analyzed samples from the summit and the western flank of southern Hydrate Ridge show a mean grain size coarser than the average mean grain size of the hemipelagic samples from the same area. The depositional features of the sediments are not recognised due to disturbance. However, their granulometric statistical parameters and distribution curves, and magnetic susceptibility logs indicate that they correspond to a turbidite facies. These results suggest that gas hydrates in the southern Hydrate Ridge could form preferentially in coarser grain-size layers that could act as conduits feeding gas from below the BSR. Two samples from the uppermost metres near the seafloor at the summit of the southern Hydrate Ridge show a finer mean grain-size value than the average of hemipelagic samples. They were located where the highest amount of gas hydrates was detected, suggesting that in this area the availability of methane gas was high enough to generate gas hydrates, even within low-permeability layers. The mineralogical composition of the soupy and mousse-like sediments does not show any specific characteristic with respect to the other samples from the southern Hydrate Ridge.     

The Creation of a National Agricultural Land Use Dataset: Combining Pycnophylactic Interpolation with Dasymetric Mapping Techniques

Agricultural Census data is summarised over spatially coarse reporting units for reasons of farm confidentiality. This is problematic for research at a local level. This article describes an approach combining dasymetric and volume preserving techniques to create a national land use dataset at 1 km² resolution. The results for an English county are compared with contemporaneous aggregated habitat data. The results show that the accurate estimates of local agricultural land use (Arable and Grass) patterns can be estimated when individual 1 km squares are combined into blocks of > 9 squares, thereby providing local estimates of agricultural land use. This in turn allows more detailed modelling of land uses related to specific livestock and cropping activities. The dataset created by this work has been subject to extensive external validation through its incorporation into a number of other national models: nitrate leaching (e.g. MAGPIE, NEAP‐N), waste, and pathogen modelling related to agricultural activity.     

用MODIS遥感资料分析四川盆地气溶胶光学厚度时空分布特征

利用MODIS卫星遥感光学厚度产品，分析了四川盆地光学厚度分布和季节变化特征。由于受沙尘天气的影响，春季四川盆地具有最大的平均光学厚度。盆地内几个大值区中，西部成都一带的中心常年维持，季节变化小；南部中心位于宜宾到重庆沿长江流域一带；东部南充到重庆间的大值中心，季节变化大，在夏季消失。光学厚度分布和季节变化的数据结果为研究区域气候变化提供了依据。     

Boosting for Mineral Prospectivity Modeling: A New GIS Toolbox

With an increasing demand for raw materials, predictive models that support successful mineral exploration targeting are of great importance. We evaluated different machine learning techniques with an emphasis on boosting algorithms and implemented them in an ArcGIS toolbox. Performance was tested on an exploration dataset from the Iberian Pyrite Belt (IPB) with respect to accuracy, performance, stability, and robustness. Boosting algorithms are ensemble methods used in supervised learning for regression and classification. They combine weak classifiers, i.e., classifiers that perform slightly better than random guessing to obtain robust classifiers. Each time a weak learner is added; the learning set is reweighted to give more importance to misclassified samples. Our test area, the IPB, is one of the oldest mining districts in the world and hosts giant volcanic-hosted massive sulfide (VMS) deposits. The spatial density of ore deposits, as well as the size and tonnage, makes the area unique, and due to the high data availability and number of known deposits, well-suited for testing machine learning algorithms. We combined several geophysical datasets, as well as layers derived from geological maps as predictors of the presence or absence of VMS deposits. Boosting algorithms such as BrownBoost and Adaboost were tested and compared to Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forests (RF) and Support Vector machines (SVM) in several experiments. We found performance results relatively similar, especially to BrownBoost, which slightly outperformed LR and SVM with respective accuracies of 0.96 compared to 0.89 and 0.93. Data augmentation by perturbing deposit location led to a 7% improvement in results. Variations in the split ratio of training and test data led to a reduction in the accuracy of the prediction result with relative stability occurring at a critical point at around 26 training samples out of 130 total samples. When lower numbers of training data were introduced accuracy dropped significantly. In comparison with other machine learning methods, Adaboost is user-friendly due to relatively short training and prediction times, the low likelihood of overfitting and the reduced number of hyperparameters for optimization. Boosting algorithms gave high predictive accuracies, making them a potential data-driven alternative for regional scale and/or brownfields mineral exploration.

     

A new method to determine the gravity field of small bodies from line-of-sight acceleration data

We present a new method to derive line-of-sight acceleration observables from spacecraft radio tracking data. The observables can be used to estimate the mass and gravity of a natural satellite as a spacecraft flyby. The corresponding observation model adapts to one-way and two/three-way tracking modes. As a test case for method validation and application, we estimated the mass and degree two gravity field for the Martian moon Phobos using simulated tracking data when the spacecraft Mars Express flew by Phobos on 2013 December 29. We have a few real tracking data during flyby and they will be used to confirm raw data simulation. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the method of line-of-sight acceleration reduction from raw tracking data and the feasibility to estimate mass and gravity of a natural satellite using this type of observable. This novel method is potentially applicable to planet and asteroid gravity field studies combined with Doppler tracking data.     

Why chromatic imaging matters

During the last two decades, the first generation of beam combiners at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer has proved the importance of optical interferometry for high-angular resolution astrophysical studies in the near- and mid-infrared. With the advent of 4-beam combiners at the VLTI, the u ? v coverage per pointing increases significantly, providing an opportunity to use reconstructed images as powerful scientific tools. Therefore, interferometric imaging is already a key feature of the new generation of VLTI instruments, as well as for other interferometric facilities like CHARA and JWST. It is thus imperative to account for the current image reconstruction capabilities and their expected evolutions in the coming years. Here, we present a general overview of the current situation of optical interferometric image reconstruction with a focus on new wavelength-dependent information, highlighting its main advantages and limitations. As an Appendix we include several cookbooks describing the usage and installation of several state-of-the art image reconstruction packages. To illustrate the current capabilities of the software available to the community, we recovered chromatic images, from simulated MATISSE data, using the MCMC software SQUEEZE. With these images, we aim at showing the importance of selecting good regularization functions and their impact on the reconstruction.     

Risk identification and perception in the fisheries sector: Comparisons between the Faroes,Greece, Iceland and UK

This paper presents the findings of risk identification and risk perception research conducted in relation to the fisheries systems of four distinct and diverse European countries: Faroes, Iceland, Greece and the UK. Risk research traditionally attempts to quantify the potential threat or consequences from a range of risk events or hazards. This research, however, adopted a social sciences perspective and so assumed that a risk event or hazard can mean different things to different people and that these perceptions are also context and culturally dependent. Risk perceptions were examined and risk registers developed in each country for a range of stakeholder groups. A ‘mental modelling’ approach was adopted in a series of qualitative interviews. Findings were examined in terms of a wide range of psychological, social and cultural risk theories. Differences in risk perceptions were noted between stakeholder groups and countries and contextual influences were examined such as the widely differing fisheries management systems used in each country. This research provides one of the first attempts to systematically evaluate risks and perceptions across a range of fisheries-systems. The findings support social science theories which argue that risk is a subjective, as opposed to objective, concept and that this subjectivity will therefore affect our attempts to assess and manage those hazards we think we can potentially influence or control.     

Geology and hazard implications of the Maraunot notch in the Pinatubo Caldera,Philippines

The 1991 Pinatubo eruption left 5–6 km³ of debris on the volcano slopes, much of which has been mobilized into large lahars in the following rainy seasons. Also during the eruption, collapse, localized in part along preexisting faults, left a caldera 2.5 km in diameter that almost immediately began to accumulate a 1.6 × 10⁸ m³ lake. By 2001, the water had risen to the fault-controlled Maraunot Notch, the lowest, northwestern portion of the caldera rim comprising the physiographic sill of the Caldera Lake. That year, a narrow artificial canal dug into an old volcanic breccia underlying the outlet channel failed to induce a deliberate lake breakout, but discharge from heavy rains in July 2002 rapidly deepened the notch by 23 m, releasing an estimated 6.5 × 10⁷ m³ of lake water that bulked up into lahars with a volume well in excess of 1.6 × 10⁸ m³. Lakes in other volcanoes have experienced multiple breakouts, providing practical motivation for this study. Fieldwork and high-resolution digital elevation models reveal andesites and ancient lacustrine deposits, strongly fractured and deformed along a segment of the Maraunot Fault, a prominent, steeply dipping, left-lateral fault zone that trends N35°–40°W within and parallel to the notch. Seismicity in 1991 demonstrated that the Maraunot Fault is still active. The fault zone appears to have previously been the erosional locus for a large channel, filled with avalanche or landslide deposits of an earlier eruption that were exhumed by the 2002 breakout floods. The deformed lacustrine sediments, with an uncalibrated ¹⁴C age of 14,760 ± 40 year BP from a single charcoal sample, attest to the existence of an earlier lake, possibly within the Tayawan Caldera, rim remnants of which survive as arcuate escarpments. That lake may well have experienced one or more ancient breakouts as well. The 2002 event greatly reduced the possibility of another such event by scouring away the erodible breccia, leaving less erodible fractured andesites and lacustrine rocks, and by enlarging the outlet channel and its discharge capacity. Several lines of evidence indicate, however, that future lahar-generating lake breakouts at the notch may keep populations of Botolan municipality downstream at risk: (1) a volume of 9.5 × 10⁷ m³ of lake water remains perched 0.8 km above sea level; (2) seismicity in 1991 demonstrated that the Maraunot Fault is still active and movements of sufficient magnitude could enlarge the outlet and the discharge through it; (3) more likely, however, with or without earthquake activity, landslides from the steep to overhanging channel walls could block the channel again, and a major rainstorm could then cause a rise in lake level and sudden breakouts; (4) intrusion of a new dome into the bottom of the lake, possibly accompanied by phreatic explosions, could expel large volumes of lahar-generating water.     

Storm deposits and storm-generated coarse carbonate breccias on a pelagic outer shelf (South-East Basin, France)

Uppermost Jurassic limestones of the South‐East Basin (France) are organized into four facies associations that were deposited in four distinct zones: (1) peritidal lagoonal limestones; (2) bioclastic and reefal limestones; (3) pelagic lime mudstones; (4) lime mudstones/calcarenites/coarse breccias. Calcarenite deposits of zone 4 exhibit sedimentary structures that are diagnostic of deposition under wave‐induced combined flow. In subzone 4a, both vertical and lateral transitions from lime mudstone/calcarenite to breccia indicate in situ brecciation under wave‐cyclic loading. Breccias were produced by heterogeneous liquefaction of material previously deposited on the sea floor. Deposits in subzone 4a record relatively long periods (>400 kyr) of sedimentation below wave base, alternating with periods of deposition under wave‐induced currents and periods of in situ deformation. In this zone, storm waves were attenuated by wave–sediment interaction, and wave energy was absorbed by the deformation of soft sediment. With reference to present‐day wave attenuation, water depths in this zone ranged between 50 and 80 m. Landwards of the attenuation zone, in zone 3, storm waves were reduced to fair‐weather wave heights. Storm wave base was not horizontal and became shallower landwards. As a consequence, water depth and wave energy were not linearly related. On a small area of the seaward edge of subzone 4a, cobbles were removed by traction currents and redeposited in subzone 4b. There, they formed a 100‐m‐thick wedge, which prograded over 3 km and was built up by the stacking of 5‐ to 20‐m‐thick cross‐stratified sets of coarse breccia. This wedge records the transport and redeposition of cobbles by a high‐velocity unidirectional component of a combined flow. The increase in flow velocity in a restricted area is proposed to result from flow concentration in a channel‐like structure of the downwelling in the gulf formed by the basin. In more distal subzone 4c, the hydrodynamic effect of wave‐induced currents was quasi‐permanent, and brecciation by wave–sediment interaction occurred only episodically. This indicates that, seawards of the attenuation zone, hydrodynamic storm wave base was deeper than mechanical storm wave base. Uppermost Jurassic carbonates were deposited and soft‐sediment deformed on a hurricane‐dominated ramp of very gentle slope and characterized by a zone of storm wave degeneration, located seawards of a zone of sedimentation below wave base.