Air-based measurements of permeability in pebbly sands     

Conrad CM  Ritzi RW  Dominic DF 《Ground water》2008,46(1):103-112

We considered small-scale measurement of permeability in pebbly sands having coarser grains supported in a finer grained matrix (fine packing). Our central question was whether air-based measurements are representative if made with a permeameter tip seal pressed in the sand matrix. We created pebbly sands and variably sorted sands, with systematic variation in aspects of their fine packing. We made permeability measurements by inserting the tip seal of an air permeameter in the matrix of these samples and compared them to the permeability of the composite sample determined by both water-based methods and theory. The air-permeameter measurements made in this way represent the permeability of the composite mixtures of coarser and finer grains and allow for the discernment of permeability between samples with different matrix compositions, ranging from fine to coarse sand. Furthermore, the collective results show that permeability differences in the pebbly sands and variably sorted sands with fine packing, however measured, are primarily due to differences in matrix permeability and not due to differences in the size or the percentage of the coarser grains.  相似文献   

A simplified model for lateral response of large diameter caisson foundations—Linear elastic formulation     

Varun  Dominic Assimaki  George Gazetas 《Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering》2009

The transient response of large embedded foundation elements of length-to-diameter aspect ratio D/B=2–6 is characterized by a complex stress distribution at the pier–soil interface that cannot be adequately represented by means of existing models for shallow foundations or flexible piles. On the other hand, while three-dimensional (3D) numerical solutions are feasible, they are infrequently employed in practice due to their associated cost and effort. Prompted by the scarcity of simplified models for design in current practice, we here develop an analytical model that accounts for the multitude of soil resistance mechanisms mobilized at their base and circumference, while retaining the advantages of simplified methodologies for the design of non-critical facilities. The characteristics of soil resistance mechanisms and corresponding complex spring functions are developed on the basis of finite element simulations, by equating the stiffness matrix terms and/or overall numerically computed response to the analytical expressions derived by means of the proposed Winkler model. Sensitivity analyses are performed for the optimization of the truncated numerical domain size, the optimal finite element size and the far-field dynamic boundary conditions to avoid spurious wave reflections. Numerical simulations of the transient system response to vertically propagating shear waves are next successfully compared to the analytically predicted response. Finally, the applicability of the method is assessed for soil profiles with depth-varying properties. The formulation of frequency-dependent complex spring functions including material damping is also described, while extension of the methodology to account for nonlinear soil behavior and soil–foundation interface separation is described in the conclusion and is being currently investigated.  相似文献   

Land restoration in food security programmes: synergies with climate change mitigation     

Dominic Woolf  Dawit Solomon  Johannes Lehmann 《Climate Policy》2018,18(10):1260-1270

Food-insecure households in many countries depend on international aid to alleviate acute shocks and chronic shortages. Some food security programmes (including Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program–PSNP – which provides a case study for this article) have integrated aid in exchange for labour on public works to reduce long-term dependence by investing in the productive capacity and resilience of communities. Using this approach, Ethiopia has embarked upon an ambitious national programme of land restoration and sustainable land management. Although the intent was to reduce poverty, here we show that an unintended co-benefit is the climate-change mitigation from reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increased landscape carbon stocks. The article first shows that the total reduction in net GHG emissions from PSNP’s land management at the national scale is estimated at 3.4 million?Mg?CO₂e?y^?1 – approximately 1.5% of the emissions reductions in Ethiopia’s Nationally Determined Contribution for the Paris Agreement. The article then explores some of the opportunities and constraints to scaling up of this impact.

Key policy insights

• Food security programmes (FSPs) can contribute to climate change mitigation by creating a vehicle for investment in land and ecosystem restoration.

• Maximizing mitigation, while enhancing but not compromising food security, requires that climate projections, and mitigation and adaptation responses should be mainstreamed into planning and implementation of FSPs at all levels.

• Cross-cutting oversight is required to integrate land restoration, climate policy, food security and disaster risk management into a coherent policy framework.

• Institutional barriers to optimal implementation should be addressed, such as incentive mechanisms that reward effort rather than results, and lack of centralized monitoring and evaluation of impacts on the physical environment.

• Project implementation can often be improved by adopting best management practices, such as using productive living livestock barriers where possible, and increasing the integration of agroforestry and non-timber forest products into landscape regeneration.

  相似文献   

Malta's external security     

Dominic Fenech 《GeoJournal》1997,41(2):153-163

For a small country whose main relevance to the outside world has always been its strategic location and whose known history has been moulded by that fact, security has been remarkably low on the list of priorities on Maltas national agenda since independence. In recent years, security has become an issue of keen political debate, although security per se may not be the real reason why the subject has been brought out into the limelight by both government and opposition. More than just an issue in its own right, security began featuring rather more as a function of the main direction of Maltas foreign policy, which during the past decade has been focused on relations with the European Union.  相似文献   

An investigation of the multi-scale temporal variability of beach profiles at Duck using wavelet packet transforms     

Dominic Reeve  Ying Li  Murray Lark  Dave Simmonds 《Coastal Engineering》2007

In an earlier paper a particular discrete wavelet transform (DWT) was used to study the complex variation of beach profile changes. However, use of the DWT requires that the sequence of spatial and temporal resolution is fixed as a dyadic sequence, which means that the variability over longer intervals is not characterised well. Here we introduce the discrete wavelet packet transform (DWPT) that uses an adaptive scaling to partition the data variance, according to an entropy cost function. The advantages of this approach are demonstrated by its application to the study of temporal variability of a 22 year record of beach profile data from the Field Research Facility (FRF) at Duck, North Carolina, USA. Time series of beach elevations at three locations across a particular profile are investigated in detail. We conclude that the DWPT provides a superior analysis of non-stationary time series to that of the DWT, with improved resolution of the scale intervals of the variability. The beach elevation around the shoreline is shown to respond at both sub-annual and interannual scales, but variability at an annual scale is weak. Moving seaward into deeper water, the variance is partitioned into fewer and longer scales. It is confirmed that elevation changes around the inner bar at Duck exhibit a strong interannual variation consistent with Plant et al. (Plant, N.G., Holman, R.A. and Freilich, M.H., 1999. A simple model for interannual sandbar behaviour. Journal of Geophysical Research 104(C7), 15755–15776). Around 23% of the variance around the inner bar is explained at the temporal scale of 64–128 months, which is consistent with the bar behaviour of 6 years found by Ruessink et al. (Ruessink, B. G., Wijnberg, K. M., Holman, R. A., Kuriyama, Y. and Van Enckevort, I. M. J., 2003. Intersite comparison of interannual nearshore bar behaviour. Journal of Geophysical Research, 108 (C8): 1–12). A significant new finding is, however, that about 26% of the variance is attributable to temporal scales of 16–21.3 months. Reconstruction of the wavelet packet components for individual temporal scales is shown to provide a means for identifying the impact and scale of non-stationary events, such as storms, on the beach response. This provides further information that can be used to interpret the morphological changes in terms of the forcing processes and also serves to inform morphodynamic modelling.  相似文献   

Cypermethrin induces glutathione S-transferase activity in the shore crab,Carcinus maenas   总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2  

Gowlan BT  Moffat CF  Stagg RM  Houlihan DF  Davies IM 《Marine environmental research》2002,54(2):169-177

Cypermethrin is a synthetic pyrethroid that is particularly toxic to crustacea. It is therefore applied as a chemotherapeutant in the salmonid aquaculture industry for the treatment of sea lice infestations. After use, cypermethrin is released directly into the marine environment, to be diluted by fresh seawater. The shore crab, Carcinus maenas is found in the vicinity of fish farms, and may come into contact with released cypermethrin. The detoxification enzyme, glutathione S-transferase (GST) has been implicated in cypermethrin metabolism in terrestrial arthropods, but this has not yet been demonstrated in crustacea. In this paper we investigate the response of GST activity in Carcinus to cypermethrin exposure, and also the time course of the induction process. GST activity is significantly increased in Carcinus exposed to nominal concentrations of 50 and 500 ng/l of water-borne cypermethrin. Carcinus demonstrate a significant elevation in GST activity following intra-cephalothoracic injection with 10 ng of cypermethrin. GST activity returns to basal levels after 36 h. The potential application of GST activity in Carcinus as a biomarker of cypermethrin exposure is discussed.  相似文献   

High‐resolution topography and anthropogenic feature extraction: testing geomorphometric parameters in floodplains          下载免费PDF全文

Giulia Sofia  Giancarlo Dalla Fontana  Paolo Tarolli 《水文研究》2014,28(4):2046-2061

In floodplains, anthropogenic features such as levees or road scarps, control and influence flows. An up‐to‐date and accurate digital data about these features are deeply needed for irrigation and flood mitigation purposes. Nowadays, LiDAR Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) covering large areas are available for public authorities, and there is a widespread interest in the application of such models for the automatic or semiautomatic recognition of features. The automatic recognition of levees and road scarps from these models can offer a quick and accurate method to improve topographic databases for large‐scale applications. In mountainous contexts, geomorphometric indicators derived from DTMs have been proven to be reliable for feasible applications, and the use of statistical operators as thresholds showed a high reliability to identify features. The goal of this research is to test if similar approaches can be feasible also in floodplains. Three different parameters are tested at different scales on LiDAR DTM. The boxplot is applied to identify an objective threshold for feature extraction, and a filtering procedure is proposed to improve the quality of the extractions. This analysis, in line with other works for different environments, underlined (1) how statistical parameters can offer an objective threshold to identify features with varying shapes, size and height; (2) that the effectiveness of topographic parameters to identify anthropogenic features is related to the dimension of the investigated areas. The analysis also showed that the shape of the investigated area has not much influence on the quality of the results. While the effectiveness of residual topography had already been proven, the proposed study underlined how the use of entropy can anyway provide good extractions, with an overall quality comparable to the one offered by residual topography, and with the only limitation that the extracted features are slightly wider than the investigated one. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.  相似文献   

Ancient graphite in the Eoarchean quartz-pyroxene rocks from Akilia in southern West Greenland I: Petrographic and spectroscopic characterization     

Dominic Papineau  Bradley T. De Gregorio  Marc D. Fries  Stephen J. Mojzsis  Rhonda M. Stroud 《Geochimica et cosmochimica acta》2010,74(20):5862-5883

Because all known Eoarchean (>3.65 Ga) volcano-sedimentary terranes are locked in granitoid gneiss complexes that have experienced high degrees of metamorphism and deformation, the origin and mode of preservation of carbonaceous material in the oldest metasedimentary rocks remain a subject of vigorous debate. To determine the biogenicity of carbon in graphite in such rocks, carbonaceous material must be demonstrably indigenous and its composition should be consistent with thermally altered biogenic carbon as well as inconsistent with abiogenic carbon. Here we report the petrological and spectroscopic characteristics of carbonaceous material, typically associated with individual apatite grains, but also with various other minerals including calcite, in a >3.83 Ga granulite-facies ferruginous quartz-pyroxene unit (Qp rock) from the island of Akilia in southern West Greenland. In thin sections of the fine-grained parts of Akilia Qp rock sample G91-26, mapped apatites were found to be associated with graphite in about 20% of the occurrences. Raman spectra of this carbonaceous material had strong G-band and small D-band absorptions indicative of crystalline graphite. Three apatite-associated graphites were found to contain curled graphite structures, identified by an anomalously intense second-order D-band (or 2D-band) Raman mode. These structures are similar to graphite whiskers or cones documented to form at high temperatures. Raman spectra of apatite-associated graphite were consistent with formation at temperatures calculated to be between 635 and 830 °C, which are consistent with granulite-facies metamorphic conditions. Three graphite targets extracted by focused ion beam (FIB) methods contained thin graphite coatings on apatite grains rather than inclusions sensu stricto as inferred from transmitted light microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. TEM analyses of graphite in these FIB sections showed a (0 0 0 2) interplanar spacing between 3.41 and 3.64 Å for apatite-associated graphite, which is larger than the spacing of pure graphite (3.35 Å) and may be caused by the presence of non-carbon heteroatoms in interlayer sites. Samples analyzed by synchrotron-based scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) also confirmed the presence of crystalline graphite, but abundances of N and O heteroatoms were below detection limit for this method. Graphite in the Akilia Qp rock was also found to occur in complex polyphase mineral assemblages of hornblende ± calcite ± sulfides ± magnetite that point to high-temperature precipitation from carbon-bearing fluids. These complex mineral assemblages may represent another generation of graphitization that could have occurred during the amphibolite-facies metamorphic event at 2.7 Ga. Several observations point to graphitization from high-temperature fluid-deposition for some of the Akilia graphite and our results do not exclude a biogenic source of carbon in graphite associated with apatite, but ambiguities remain for the origin of this carbon.  相似文献   

Diagenesis of the Khuff Formation (Permian–Triassic), northern United Arab Emirates     

Simone Fontana  Fadi H. Nader  Sadoon Morad  Andrea Ceriani  Ihsan S. Al-Aasm 《Arabian Journal of Geosciences》2010,3(4):351-368

This diagenetic study (including fieldwork, petrographic, fluid inclusion, and stable isotope investigations) deals with the outcrop of Upper Permian–Lower Triassic carbonate rocks, which are equivalent to the Khuff Formation. The studied succession, which outcrops in the Ras Al Khaimah region, northern United Arab Emirates, comprises three formations, including the Bih, the Hagil, and the Ghail formations. The study focuses on unraveling the conditions and fluid compositions encountered during diagenesis of the succession. Emphasize is also made on linking diagenesis to major stratigraphic surfaces and to highlight reservoir property evolution and heterogeneity of the studied rocks. The evolution of fluids and related diagenetic products can be summarized as follows: (1) formation of near-surface to shallow burial, fine-crystalline dolomite (dolomite matrix) through pervasive dolomitization of carbonate sediments by modified marine pore waters; (2) formation of coarse-crystalline dolomite cement by highly evolved marine pore waters (13–23 wt.% NaCl eq.) at elevated temperatures (120–208°C), and (3) calcite cementation by highly saline fluid (20–23 wt.% NaCl eq.) at high temperature (170–212°C). A final calcite cement generation has been formed by the percolation of meteoric fluids during uplift. Fracture- and vug-filling diagenetic minerals are mainly restricted to the mid-Bih breccia marker level, suggesting preferential focused fluid flow through specific stratigraphic surfaces as well as along tectonic-related structures. Reservoir properties have been evolved as result of the interplay of the original sedimentary texture and the diagenetic evolution. Porosity is higher in the Bih Formation, which is dominated by dolomitized packstones and grainstones, than in the Hagil and Ghail formations, consisting mainly of dolomitized mudstones and wackestones. Image analyses were used to quantify the visual porosity in thin sections. The highest porosity values were measured in the Bih Formation, which is characterized by significant amounts of vug- and fracture-filling cements. This feature is attributed to the increase of porosity owing to substantial dissolution of abundant intergranular and vug-filling cements. In contrast, the Hagil and Ghail formations, which consist of finer-grained rock than the Bih Formation, were less cemented, and thus, the porosity enhancement by cement dissolution was insignificant.  相似文献   

Limnology of Two Antarctic Epishelf Lakes and their Potential to Record Periods of Ice Shelf Loss   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

James A. Smith  Dominic A. Hodgson  Michael J. Bentley  Elie Verleyen  Melanie J. Leng  Steven J. Roberts 《Journal of Paleolimnology》2006,35(2):373-394

George VI Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula and its northern margin marks the southern most latitudinal limit of recent ice shelf retreat. As part of a project to reconstruct the long-term (Holocene) history of George VI Ice Shelf we studied two epishelf lakes impounded by the ice shelf at Ablation Point, on the east coast of Alexander Island. These lakes, Moutonnée and Ablation, are stratified water bodies with a lower marine layer and an upper freshwater layer. To determine if their sediment records could be used to detect past changes in the presence or absence of the ice shelf it was necessary to describe their present-day limnology and sedimentology. We measured water column chemistry and sampled the water column and sediments of the lakes along vertical and horizontal transects. We analysed these samples for diatoms, stable isotopes (δ¹⁸O, δ²H, δ¹³C_DIC, δ¹³C_org), geochemistry (TOC, TN, C/N ratios) and physical sedimentology (grain-size). This was supplemented by chemical and biological reference data from the catchments. Results showed that the water columns of both lakes are nutrient limited and deficient in phytoplankton. Benthic productivity is low and decreases with depth. Comparison of water column chemistry with an earlier survey shows a net increase in the thickness of the freshwater layer in Moutonnée Lake between 1973 and 2001, which could indicate that George VI Ice Shelf has thinned during this period. However, a similar trend was not observed in Ablation Lake (5 km to the north) and an alternative explanation is that the changes are a seasonal phenomena. Data from the surface sediment transects identified a number of proxies that respond to the present day stratification of the water column including diatom species composition, stable isotopes and geochemistry, particularly in Moutonnée Lake. Collectively these data have been used to develop a conceptual model for determining past ice shelf configuration in epishelf lakes. Specifically, periods of past ice shelf loss, and the removal of the ice dam, would see the present stratified epishelf lake replaced by a marine embayment. It is suggested that this change would leave a clear signature in the lake sediment record, notably the deposition of an exclusively marine biological assemblage, increased ice rafted debris and δ¹³C_org values that are indicative of marine derived organic matter. These authors contributed equally to this work  相似文献