Plant migration and plant communities at the time of the “green Sahara”     

Julie Watrin  Anne-Marie Lézine  Christelle Hély 《Comptes Rendus Geoscience》2009,341(8-9):656-670

Around 8500 cal years BP, at the time of the maximum of the African Humid Period, lakes and wetlands expanded in the present-day Sahara while large paleodrainages were formed or re-actived, in response to an orbitally-induced increase in monsoon rainfall. It has been suggested that the direct consequence of this increase in rainfall was the northward displacement of the Sahara/Sahel boundary, thought to have reached 23°N in central and eastern Africa. Here, we show a more complex situation characterized by an increase in biodiversity as the desert accommodated more humid-adapted species from tropical forests and wooded grasslands: tropical plant species now found some 400 to 500 km to the south probably entered the desert as gallery-forest formations along rivers and lakes where they benefited from permanent fresh water. At the same time, Saharan trees and shrubs persisted, giving rise to a vegetation that has no analogue today. In this article, we present distribution maps of selected plant species to show both the amplitude of the vegetation change compared to the present and the composition of the past plant communities. We also estimate the migration rate of tropical plant taxa to their northernmost position in the Sahara. This study is based on the use of several data sets: a data set of the modern plant distribution in northern Africa and a data set of modern and fossil pollen sites (from the African Pollen Database, http://fpd.mediasfrance.org/ and http://medias.obs-mip.fr/apd/).  相似文献   

Earthquakes produce carbon dioxide in crustal faults     

Vincent Famin  Satoru Nakashima  Anne-Marie Boullier  Koichiro Fujimoto  Tetsuro Hirono 《Earth and Planetary Science Letters》2008,265(3-4):487-497

Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microanalysis of pseudotachylytes (i.e. friction-induced melts produced by seismic slip) from the Nojima fault (Japan) reveals that earthquakes almost instantaneously expel 99 wt.% of the wall rock CO₂ content. Carbon is exsolved because it is supersaturated in the friction melts. By extrapolation to a crustal-scale fault rupture, large events such as the M7.2 Kobe earthquake (1995) may yield a total production of 1.8 to 3.4 × 10³ tons CO₂ within a few seconds. This extraordinary release of CO₂ can cause a flash fluid pressure increase in the fault plane, and therefore enhance earthquake slip or trigger aftershocks; it may also explain the anomalous discharge of carbon monitored in nearby fault springs after large earthquakes. Because carbon saturation in silicate melts is pressure-dependent, FTIR can be used as a new tool to constrain the maximum depth of pseudotachylyte formation in exhumed faults.  相似文献   

Impact of partial steps and momentum advection schemes in a global ocean circulation model at eddy-permitting resolution     

Bernard Barnier  Gurvan Madec  Thierry Penduff  Jean-Marc Molines  Anne-Marie Treguier  Julien Le Sommer  Aike Beckmann  Arne Biastoch  Claus Böning  Joachim Dengg  Corine Derval  Edmée Durand  Sergei Gulev  Elizabeth Remy  Claude Talandier  Sébastien Theetten  Mathew Maltrud  Julie McClean  Beverly De Cuevas 《Ocean Dynamics》2009,59(3):537-537

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High-resolution pollen record from core KW31, Gulf of Guinea, documents the history of the lowland forests of West Equatorial Africa since 40,000 yr ago     

Anne-Marie Lezine  Jean-Pierre Cazet 《Quaternary Research》2005,64(3):432-443

Pollen data from core KW31 recovered off the mouth of the Niger River (3°31′1N–05°341E; 1181 m water depth) provide an exceptional record of vegetation changes in the West African lowlands between 40,000 and 3500 cal yr B.P. The highly diverse microflora testify for the permanency of rain and secondary forests in the Niger river catchment, at least as gallery formations along rivers, during the last glacial period when dry conditions occurred in relation to enhanced trade-wind circulation. The direct consequence of the post-glacial warming and the correlative increase in monsoon fluxes over West Africa was the increase in forest diversity and the expansion of rain and secondary forests on the nearby continent. Comparison between KW31 pollen record and continental pollen data from 5°S to 25°N allows the evaluation of migration rates of tropical forest populations throughout North West Africa at the beginning of the Holocene and the vegetation response to the shift toward aridity recorded widely at the end of the African Humid Period around 4000 cal yr B.P.  相似文献   

Monitoring vertical deformation due to water pumping in the city of Paris (France) with differential interferometry     

Bénédicte Fruneau  Benoît Deffontaines  Jean-Paul Rudant  Anne-Marie Le Parmentier 《Comptes Rendus Geoscience》2005,337(13):1173-1183

The Saint-Lazare area in Paris (France) has undergone important water pumping for the construction of the underground Haussmann–Saint-Lazare station for the EOLE subway line. This paper presents the monitoring of the small surface displacements related to this pumping activity, by classical SAR interferometry. Piezometric measurements provided on 87 piezometers by SNCF and IGC as well as precise levelling data acquired on 626 points by SNCF are also examined. Their comparison with interferometric results shows their good agreement and complementarity, as well as the potential ‘operationality’ of SAR interferometric approach in such a study. To cite this article: B. Fruneau et al., C. R. Geoscience 337 (2005).  相似文献   

Reviews on books,internet and scientific media     

Anne-Marie de Grosbois  Philip E. LaMoreaux  Fakhry A. de Assaad  Jörg Matschullat 《Environmental Geology》2007,53(2):467-468

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[Without Title]     

Travis Hudson  Anne-Marie de Grosbois 《Environmental Geology》2006,49(7):1081-1087

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Late Holocene paleoenvironment in northern New Caledonia, southwestern Pacific, from a multiproxy analysis of lake sediments     

Denis Wirrmann  Anne-Marie Sémah 《Quaternary Research》2006,66(2):213-232

Lithostratigraphic and palynological analysis of two cores recovered from the ‘Grand Lac’ (New Caledonia), combined with 35 ¹⁴C AMS dates, yields a paleoenvironmental record spanning the last 2000 yr. The lithology is represented mainly by clayey or laminated layers. A catastrophic event, which is marked by very coarse deposits, occurred probably between ca 1070-960 cal yr B.P. and possibly is associated with an unusually severe La Niña event. Before and after this event, a similar combination of the two main sediment types is recorded. The repeated alternation of laminated and clayey layers is interpreted as the response to local hydrologic forcing, which may reflect a shift from relatively wet to relatively drier conditions, respectively. Variable amount of micro-charcoal is detected all along the profile. Without additional evidence, notwithstanding the initial local human settlement documented since ca 2900 ¹⁴C yr B.P., micro-charcoal occurrence and variability cannot be linked directly to an anthropogenic origin. No distinct palynological zonations in relation to the lithology are observed, and the vegetation changes may only represent minor transitions across environmental limits.  相似文献   

Sudden stratospheric warmings and tropospheric blockings in a multi-century simulation of the IPSL-CM5A coupled climate model     

Jessica Vial  Tim J. Osborn  François Lott 《Climate Dynamics》2013,40(9-10):2401-2414

The relation between sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) and blocking events is analyzed in a multi-centennial pre-industrial simulation of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace coupled model (IPSL-CM5A), prepared for the fifth phase of the coupled model intercomparison project. The IPSL model captures a fairly realistic distribution of both SSWs and tropospheric blocking events, albeit with a tendency to overestimate the frequency of blocking in the western Pacific and underestimate it in the Euro-Atlantic sector. The 1000-year long simulation reveals statistically significant differences in blocking frequency and duration over the 40-day periods preceding and following the onset of SSWs. More specifically, there is an enhanced blocking frequency over Eurasia before SSWs, followed by an westward displacement of blocking anomalies over the Atlantic region as SSWs evolve and then decline. The frequency of blocking is reduced over the western Pacific sector during the life-cycle of SSWs, while the model simulates no significant relationship with eastern Pacific blocks. Finally, these changes in blocking frequency tend to be associated with a shift in the distribution of blocking lifetime toward longer-lasting blocking events before the onset of SSWs and shorter-lived blocks after the warmings. This study systematically verifies that the results are consistent with the two pictures that (1) blockings produce planetary scale anomalies that can force vertically propagating Rossby waves and then SSWs when the waves break and (2) SSWs affect blockings in return, for instance via the effect they have on the North Atlantic Oscillation.  相似文献   

Impact of the LMDZ atmospheric grid configuration on the climate and sensitivity of the IPSL-CM5A coupled model   总被引：3，自引：3，他引：0  

Frédéric Hourdin  Marie-Alice Foujols  Francis Codron  Virginie Guemas  Jean-Louis Dufresne  Sandrine Bony  Sébastien Denvil  Lionel Guez  François Lott  Josefine Ghattas  Pascale Braconnot  Olivier Marti  Yann Meurdesoif  Laurent Bopp 《Climate Dynamics》2013,40(9-10):2167-2192

The IPSL-CM5A climate model was used to perform a large number of control, historical and climate change simulations in the frame of CMIP5. The refined horizontal and vertical grid of the atmospheric component, LMDZ, constitutes a major difference compared to the previous IPSL-CM4 version used for CMIP3. From imposed-SST (Sea Surface Temperature) and coupled numerical experiments, we systematically analyze the impact of the horizontal and vertical grid resolution on the simulated climate. The refinement of the horizontal grid results in a systematic reduction of major biases in the mean tropospheric structures and SST. The mid-latitude jets, located too close to the equator with the coarsest grids, move poleward. This robust feature, is accompanied by a drying at mid-latitudes and a reduction of cold biases in mid-latitudes relative to the equator. The model was also extended to the stratosphere by increasing the number of layers on the vertical from 19 to 39 (15 in the stratosphere) and adding relevant parameterizations. The 39-layer version captures the dominant modes of the stratospheric variability and exhibits stratospheric sudden warmings. Changing either the vertical or horizontal resolution modifies the global energy balance in imposed-SST simulations by typically several W/m² which translates in the coupled atmosphere-ocean simulations into a different global-mean SST. The sensitivity is of about 1.2 K per 1 W/m² when varying the horizontal grid. A re-tuning of model parameters was thus required to restore this energy balance in the imposed-SST simulations and reduce the biases in the simulated mean surface temperature and, to some extent, latitudinal SST variations in the coupled experiments for the modern climate. The tuning hardly compensates, however, for robust biases of the coupled model. Despite the wide range of grid configurations explored and their significant impact on the present-day climate, the climate sensitivity remains essentially unchanged.  相似文献