Biogeochemical processes controlling methane in gassy coastal sediments—Part 2: groundwater flow control of acoustic turbidity in Eckernförde Bay Sediments     

Daniel B. Albert  Christopher S. Martens  Marc J. Alperin 《Continental Shelf Research》1998,18(14-15)

To understand the origin of the methane distributions in sediments of Eckernförde Bay, three sites were sampled in May 1994 for determination of methane, sulfate and chloride concentrations in the sediment porewaters. In much of the Bay, bubbles of biogenic methane gas within the sediments lead to widespread ‘acoustic turbidity’ seen in acoustic surveys, masking the sedimentary structure below the gassy horizon. Acoustic windows, where the gas does not appear to be present, occur in several locations in the Bay, often surrounded by acoustically turbid sediments. Pockmarks, shallow depressions in the sediment, are also found in Bay sediments and may show acoustic turbidity at even shallower depths below the interface than surrounding sediments. One site of each type was sampled in this study. The site probably representative of much of the bay below 20 m water depth, revealed methane saturated conditions by about 75 cm depth below the interface, confirming inferences from acoustic scattering data that free gas was present in the sediment. Above this, the methane concentration profile was concave-upward, indicative of methane oxidation in the overlying, sulfate-reducing sediments. These porewaters showed a slightly decreasing chlorinity with depth. At an acoustic window site, methane concentrations rose to a maximum at about 125 cm depth, but did not reach saturation. Below this depth they decreased in a concave-down pattern. Chloride concentrations decreased markedly with depth, indicative of vertical freshwater flow from below. The third site was a pockmark exhibiting very shallow acoustic turbidity at about 25 cm depth. Here methane concentrations rose to exceed saturation within 25 cm depth below the interface and the porewaters became almost fresh by 1.5 m depth, indicative of a stronger flow of freshwater from below. These groundwater flows have competing effects on the methane inventory. They help exclude sulfate from the sediment, allowing the earlier/shallower onset of methanogenesis, but they also aid loss of methane through advection. A diagenetic model that couples the biogeochemistry of sulfate and methane is used to explain the presence or absence of methane gas in these sediments in relation to the flow rate of fresh groundwater from below. Model results indicate that acoustic windows within otherwise acoustically turbid sediments of the bay are likely due to relatively higher rates of vertical advection of fresh groundwater. The gassy pockmark, however, with an even higher vertical advection rate, seems to require the input of additional reactive organic carbon to explain its vertical methane distribution.  相似文献   

Plasma drift estimates from the Dynasonde: comparison with EISCAT measurements     

K. J. F. Sedgemore  J. W. Wright  P. J. S. Williams  G. O. L. Jones  M. T. Rietveld 《Annales Geophysicae》1998,16(10):1138-1143

Modern ionosondes make almost simultaneous measurements of the time rate of change of phase path in different directions and at different heights. By combining these Doppler measurements and angles of arrival of many such radar echoes it is possible to derive reliable estimates of plasma drift velocity for a defined scattering volume. Results from both multifrequency and kinesonde-mode soundings at 3-min resolution show that the Dynasonde-derived F-region drift velocity is in good agreement with EISCAT, despite data loss during intervals of blanketing by intense E-region ionisation. It is clear that the Tromsø Dynasonde, employing standard operating modes, gives a reliable indication of overall convection patterns during quiet to moderately active conditions.  相似文献   

New techniques for auroral irregularity studies with COSCAT     

P. Eglitis  I. W. McCrea  T. R. Robinson  T. Nygrén  K. Schlegel  T. Turunen  T. B. Jones 《Annales Geophysicae》1998,16(10):1241-1250

The COSCAT system enables the detection of E-region auroral backscatter with the EISCAT remote receivers at magnetic aspect angles close to 90°. This is achieved by utilising a low-power transmitter stationed in Oulu, Finland. Many important observations of E-region irregularities have been achieved with this simple experiment. Recent studies have attempted to push the COSCAT system to its experimental limits. Firstly, the CW signal has been phase-modulated with 13-bit Barker codes with baud lengths of 40, 70 and 100 s. Interpretation of the received power allows the spatial distribution of the auroral scatterers to be determined. The second advance is in the use of a sophisticated correlator program which allows data to be buffered within the correlator at very high time resolution. This enables the coherent backscatter power to be sampled every 12.5 ms and the full auto-correlation function to be measured every 100 ms. These measurements allow the COSCAT system to be employed for the first time in an investigation of the growth and decay of the auroral irregularities.  相似文献   

Comments on “carbon cycling in a shallow turbid estuary of Southeast Texas: The use of plant pigment biomarkers and water quality parameters” by Bianchi, Baskaran, DeLord and Ravichandran,Estuaries 20:404–415     

Michael H. Flinn  Elizabeth Harris  Robert Cady  Christopher S. Johnson  Erla Björk Örnólfsdóttir  Lisa Campbell  Douglas C. Biggs 《Estuaries and Coasts》1998,21(4):837-838

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Processing contaminated dredged material from the Port of New York-New Jersey     

E. A. Stern  K. Donato  K. W. Jones  N. L. Clesceri 《Estuaries and Coasts》1998,21(4):646-651

Shipping activities in the Port of New York-New Jersey are currently threatened by restrictions on dredging of navigational channels and private berthing areas becaused of concerns about the environmental effects caused by ocean disposal of the dredged material. Current proposals for solutions to the problem include ocean disposal of uncontaminated material, use of confined disposal facilities (both upland facilities and containment islands), subaqueous barrow pits, and processing and treatment for contaminated materials. A project to produce a complete “treatment train” for processing and decontaminating dredged material is described. The work is divided into several phases: treatability studies of commercial and nonproprietary technologies at volumes of 19 liters (bench scale) and up to 19 m³ (pilot scale); specification of a treatment train; and implementation of a large-scale facility that can process 76,000–382,000 m³ of dredged material per year. The goal is to achieve operational status for the facility by the end of 1999.  相似文献   

ISO observations of molecular hydrogen in the DR 21 bipolar outflow     

Michael D. Smith    Jochen Eislöffel  & Christopher J. Davis 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》1998,297(3):687-691

We demonstrate that a wide range of molecular hydrogen excitation can be observed in protostellar outflows at wavelengths in excess of 5 μm. Cold H₂ in DR 21 is detected through the pure rotational transitions in the ground vibrational level (0–0). Hot H₂ is detected in pure rotational transitions within higher vibrational levels (1–1, 1–2, etc.). Although this emission is relatively weak, we have detected two 1–1 lines in the DR 21 outflow with the ISO SWS instrument. We thus investigate molecular excitation over energy levels corresponding to the temperature range 1015–15 722 K, without the uncertainty introduced by differential extinction when employing near-infrared data.
This gas is thermally excited. We uncover a rather low H₂ excitation in the DR 21 West Peak. The line emission cannot be produced from single C-shocks or J-shocks; a range of shock strengths is required. This suggests that bow shocks and/or bow-generated supersonic turbulence is responsible. We are able to distinguish this shock-excited gas from the fluoresced gas detected in the K band, providing support for the dual-excitation model of Fernandes, Brand & Burton.  相似文献   

Stellar evolution models for Z = 0.0001 to 0.03     

Onno R. Pols  Klaus-Peter Schro¨der  Jarrod R. Hurley  Christopher A. Tout  & Peter P. Eggleton 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》1998,298(2):525-536

We have calculated a grid of empirically well tested evolutionary tracks with masses M between 0.5 and 50 M⊙, spaced by approximately 0.1 in log M , and with metallicities Z  = 0.0001, 0.0003, 0.001, 0.004, 0.01, 0.02 and 0.03. We use a robust and fast evolution code with a self-adaptive non-Lagrangian mesh, which employs the mixing-length theory but treats convective mixing as a diffusion process, solving simultaneously for the structure and the chemical composition. The hydrogen and helium abundances are chosen as functions of the metallicity: X  = 0.76 − 3.0 Z Y  = 0.24 + 2.0 Z .   Two sets of models were computed, one without and one with a certain amount of enhanced mixing or 'overshooting'. This amount has been empirically chosen by means of various sensitive tests for overshooting: (1) the luminosity of core helium burning (blue loop) giants of well-known mass, (2) the width of the main sequence as defined by double-lined eclipsing binaries with well-measured masses and radii, and (3) the shape and implied stellar distribution of isochrones of various open clusters. The first two tests have been the subject of previous papers, the third test is discussed in this paper. On the basis of these tests, we recommend the use of the overshooting models for masses above about 1.5M ⊙.   We describe here the characteristics of the models, the procedure for constructing isochrones for arbitrary age and metallicity from the models, and the performance of these isochrones for several intermediate-age and old open clusters. All original models are available in electronic form and we describe the means by which they may be obtained.  相似文献   

A textbook case of bow shock entrainment in a YSO outflow     

Christopher J. Davis  Michael D. Smith  & Gerald H. Moriarty-Schieven 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》1998,299(3):825-833

Near-infrared images in H₂ line emission and submillimetre maps in CO J  = 3–2 emission illustrate the remarkable association between a molecular bow shock and the redshifted molecular outflow lobe in W75N. The flow lobe fits perfectly into the wake of the bow, as one would expect if the lobe represented swept-up gas. Indeed, these observations strongly support the 'bow shock' entrainment scenario for molecular outflows driven by young stars.   The characteristics of the bow shock and CO outflow lobe are compared with those of numerical simulations of jet-driven flows. These models successfully reproduce the bulge and limb-brightening in the CO outflow, although the model H₂ bow exhibits more structure extending back along the flow axis. We also find that the size of the flow, the high mass fraction in the flow at low outflow velocities (low γ values) and the high CO/H₂ luminosity ratio indicate that the system is evolved. We also predict a correlation, in evolved systems, between outflow age and the CO/H₂ luminosity ratio.  相似文献   

The origin of the cosmic soft X-ray background: optical identification of an extremely deep ROSAT survey     

MHardy  Jones  Merrifield  Mason  Newsam  Abraham  Dalton  Carrera  Smith  Rowan-Robinson  Wegner  Ponman  Lehto  Branduardi-Raymont  Luppino  Efstathiou  Allan  & Quenby 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》1998,295(3):641-671

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The origin of pulsar glitches     

Jones 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》1998,296(1):217-224

It is usually assumed that pulsar glitches are caused by the large-scale unpinning of superfluid neutron vortices in the solid crust of a neutron star and that vortex motion relative to the crust is highly dissipative at low velocities, owing to the excitation of long-wavelength Kelvin waves. The force per unit length acting on a vortex as a result of Kelvin wave excitation has been calculated for a polycrystalline structure using the free-vortex Green function. An approximate upper limit for the maximum pinning force has been obtained which, for the form of structure anticipated, is many orders of magnitude too small for consistency with the observed size and frequency of glitches. The corollary is that glitches do not originate in the crust: the necessary pinning may be given by the interaction between neutron and proton vortices in the liquid core of the star.  相似文献