Mercury monitoring: Mercury stability in bird feathers

The influence of ultraviolet light, heating, freezing and weathering on the mercury concentration in the primary feathers from Guillemot and Black Guillemot has been examined. Even within 8 months of exposure variation in mercury concentration due to either loss of mercury or weight loss of the feathers has been found to be less than 10% relative.     

Can the uncertainty of full carbon accounting of forest ecosystems be made acceptable to policymakers?

In accordance with the concept that only full accounting of major greenhouse gases corresponds to the goals of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, this paper considers uncertainties of regional (national) terrestrial biota Full Carbon Accounting (FCA), both those already achieved and those expected. We analyze uncertainties of major components of the FCA of forest ecosystems of a large boreal region in Siberia (~300 × 10⁶ ha). Some estimates for forests of other regions and Russia as a whole are used for comparison. The systems integration of available information sources and different types of models within the landscape-ecosystem approach are shown to have enabled an estimation of the major carbon fluxes (Net Primary Production, NPP, and heterotrophic respiration, HR) for the region for a single year at the level of 7–12% (confidential interval, CI, 0.9), Net Ecosystem Production (NEP) of 35–40%, and Net Biome Production (NBP) of 60–80%. The most uncertain aspect is the assessment of change in the soil carbon pool, which limits practical application of a pool-based approach. Regionalization of global process-based models, introduction of climatic data in empirical models, use of an appropriate time period for accounting and reporting, harmonization and multiple constraints of estimates obtained by different independent methods decrease the above uncertainties of NEP and NBP by about half. The results of this study support the idea that FCA of forest ecosystems is relevant in the post-Kyoto international negotiation process.     

Anmeldelser

Meyer, Marlene: Settlement Patterns and Land-use in Northern Ghana—A Study of the Changes during the period 1963–1991 based on Historical Surveys and recent SPOT-images. Geografisk Tidsskrift 92:101–104. Copenhagen 1992.

A study by Hunter (1966) describes how large areas along the Red Volta River bank, have been abandoned due to river blindness. The mapping of current land-use status and settlements patterns, using multispectral SPOT-satellite images, shows how the border of settlements continue to retreat, whereas new land is being reclaimed for bush fields in the abandoned areas.     

Deep massive sulphide exploration using 2D and 3D geoelectrical and induced polarization data in Skellefte mining district,northern Sweden

Geoelectrical and induced polarization data from measurements along three profiles and from one 3D survey are acquired and processed in the central Skellefte District, northern Sweden. The data were collected during two field campaigns in 2009 and 2010 in order to delineate the structures related to volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits and to model lithological contacts down to a maximum depth of 1.5 km. The 2009 data were inverted previously, and their joint interpretation with potential field data indicated several anomalous zones. The 2010 data not only provide additional information from greater depths compared with the 2009 data but also cover a larger surface area. Several high‐chargeability low‐resistivity zones, interpreted as possible massive sulphide mineralization and associated hydrothermal alteration, are revealed. The 3D survey data provide a detailed high‐resolution image of the top ～450 m of the upper crust around the Maurliden East, North, and Central deposits. Several anomalies are interpreted as new potential prospects in the Maurliden area, which are mainly concentrated in the central conductive zone. In addition, the contact relationship between the major geological units, e.g., the contact between the Skellefte Group and the Jörn Intrusive Complex, is better understood with the help of 2010 deep‐resistivity/chargeability data. The bottommost part of the Vargfors basin is imaged using the 2010 geoelectrical and induced polarization data down to ～1‐km depth.     

Layer-Based Modelling of the Earth’s Gravitational Potential up to 10-km Scale in Spherical Harmonics in Spherical and Ellipsoidal Approximation

Global forward modelling of the Earth’s gravitational potential, a classical problem in geophysics and geodesy, is relevant for a range of applications such as gravity interpretation, isostatic hypothesis testing or combined gravity field modelling with high and ultra-high resolution. This study presents spectral forward modelling with volumetric mass layers to degree 2190 for the first time based on two different levels of approximation. In spherical approximation, the mass layers are referred to a sphere, yielding the spherical topographic potential. In ellipsoidal approximation where an ellipsoid of revolution provides the reference, the ellipsoidal topographic potential (ETP) is obtained. For both types of approximation, we derive a mass layer concept and study it with layered data from the Earth2014 topography model at 5-arc-min resolution. We show that the layer concept can be applied with either actual layer density or density contrasts w.r.t. a reference density, without discernible differences in the computed gravity functionals. To avoid aliasing and truncation errors, we carefully account for increased sampling requirements due to the exponentiation of the boundary functions and consider all numerically relevant terms of the involved binominal series expansions. The main outcome of our work is a set of new spectral models of the Earth’s topographic potential relying on mass layer modelling in spherical and in ellipsoidal approximation. We compare both levels of approximations geometrically, spectrally and numerically and quantify the benefits over the frequently used rock-equivalent topography (RET) method. We show that by using the ETP it is possible to avoid any displacement of masses and quantify also the benefit of mapping-free modelling. The layer-based forward modelling is corroborated by GOCE satellite gradiometry, by in-situ gravity observations from recently released Antarctic gravity anomaly grids and degree correlations with spectral models of the Earth’s observed geopotential. As the main conclusion of this work, the mass layer approach allows more accurate modelling of the topographic potential because it avoids 10–20-mGal approximation errors associated with RET techniques. The spherical approximation is suited for a range of geophysical applications, while the ellipsoidal approximation is preferable for applications requiring high accuracy or high resolution.