Going underground: in search of Carboniferous coal forests     

Howard J. Falcon-Lang  William A. DiMichele  Scott Elrick  & W. John Nelson 《Geology Today》2009,25(5):181-184

The development of coal forests during the Carboniferous is one of the best-known episodes in the history of life. Although often reconstructed as steamy tropical rainforests, these ancient ecosystems were a far cry from anything we might encounter in the Amazon today. Bizarre giant club-mosses, horsetails and tree ferns were the dominant plants, not flowering trees as in modern rainforests. At their height, coal forests stretched all the way from Kansas to Kazakhstan, spanning the entire breadth of tropical Pangaea. Most of what we know of their biodiversity and ecology has been quite literally mined out of the ground through two centuries of hard labour. Without coal mining, our knowledge would be greatly impoverished. Over the past few years, we've been exploring underground coal mines in the United States, where entire forested landscapes have been preserved intact over huge areas. Never before have geologists had the opportunity to walk out through mile upon mile of fossilized forest. In this feature article, we describe some of our recent explorations and attempt to shed new light on these old fossils.  相似文献   

Dust supply from river floodplains: the case of the lower Huang He (Yellow River) recorded in a loess–palaeosol sequence from the Mangshan Plateau     

Maarten A. Prins  Hongbo Zheng  Kay Beets  Simon Troelstra  Patrick Bacon  Ilse Kamerling  Wouter Wester  Martin Konert  Xiangtong Huang  Wang Ke  Jef Vandenberghe 《第四纪科学杂志》2009,24(1):75-84

The Mangshan Plateau is located on the south bank of the Huang He (Yellow River) just west of the city of Zhengzhou, well outside the Loess Plateau in central China. Mixing models of the grain‐size data indicate that the loess deposits are mixtures of three loess components. Comparison of the mixing model with existing models established for a series of loess–palaeosol sequences from the Loess Plateau indicates that the Mangshan loess has been supplied from a proximal dust source, the Huang He floodplain, during major dust outbreaks. The high accumulation rates, the composition of the loess components, and especially the high proportions of a sandy loess component support this. Owing to the exceptionally high accumulation rates, the Mangshan grain size, magnetic susceptibility and carbonate records provide a high‐resolution archive of environmental and climate change. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.  相似文献   

Final report of IGCP Project 410 （1997-2002）——The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia. E-mail： bwebby@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au     

BarryDWebby MaryL.Droser FlorentinParis 《《幕》》2004,27(3):203-208

In 1997, IGCP Project No. 410 was established to appraise known records of Ordovician biotas, in order to evaluate one of the greatest-ever diversifications of life on Earth, between 489 and 443 million years ago. Data collection and analysis of biodiversity were coordinated through seven regional teams, and a global“clade” team.  相似文献   

Thermal stability of a layer with permeable boundaries and variable gravitational field     

A. K. Singh  Mohammad Yusuf 《Astrophysics and Space Science》1990,167(1):69-80

The aim of this paper is to investigate the thermal stability of a fluid layer with permeable boundaries and a variable gravitational field. It is observed that the principle of exchange of stabilities is valid when the layer is heated form below and the complex growth rate of an arbitrary oscillatory mode exists outside of a circle whose radius depends upon the permeability parameter, Prandtl number and wavelength of the mode. In the case of a layer heated from below, gravity increasing upward has a destabilizing effect whereas the permeability parameter has a stabilizing effect.  相似文献   

A 5000 year geomagnetic palaeosecular variation record from western Canada     

Gillian M. Turner 《Geophysical Journal International》1987,91(1):103-121

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First Byurakan Spectral Sky Suvrvey. Blue stellar objects. III. Region δ=+43°     

G. V. Abramyan  V. A. Lipovetskii  A. M. Mikaelyan  D. A. Stepanyan 《Astrophysics》1990,33(3):493-500

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Kinematics of stars in Kovalsky-Kapteyn figures. II     

R. B. Shatsova  G. B. Anisimova 《Astrophysics》1990,33(3):518-527

Rostov State Pedagogical Institute; All-Union Scientific Research Institute Gradient. Translated from Astrofizika, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 379–393, November–December, 1990.  相似文献   

Radiative and free-convection effects on the oscillatory flow past a vertical plate     

M. A. Mansour 《Astrophysics and Space Science》1990,166(2):269-275

The interaction of free convection with thermal radiation of the oscillatory flow past a vertical plate is studied. The Rosseland approximation is used to describe the radiative heat flux in the energy equation.  相似文献   

Physical parameters of near-Earth asteroid 1982 DV     

Faith Vilas  David J. Tholen  Larry A. Lebofsky  Humberto Campins  Glenn J. Veeder  Richard P. Binzel  Alan T. Tokunaga 《Icarus》1985,63(2):201-205

Visual and infrared observations were made of Amor asteroid 1982 DV during its discovery apparition. Broadband visual and near-infrared photometry shows that it is an S-class asteroid. Narrowband spectrophotometry shows an absorption feature due to olivine or pyroxene or both centered at 0.93 μm. Applying a nonrotating thermal model to 10-μm photometry, the geometric albedo is calculated to be approximately 0.27. The geometric albedo for a slowly rotating, rocky surface was calculated for 1 night to be 0.15, consistent with S-class asteroid albedos. Thus, 1982 DV is either one of the most reflective S-class asteroids known, or a significant amount of bare rock is exposed on the asteroid's surface. For the nonrotating model, ellipsoidal dimensions for 1982 DV are 3.5 × 1.4 × 1.4 km.  相似文献   

A transformation of the two-body problem     

Victor R. Bond 《Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy》1985,35(1):1-7

A transformation of the differential equations of motion of the two-body problem in the spherical coordinates to oscillator form is derived. It is shown that the independent variable transformation dt/ds=r² is a transformation which makes the oscillator form possible.  相似文献