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Megathrust earthquakes impose changes of differential stress and pore pressure in the lithosphere-asthenosphere system that are transiently relaxed during the postseismic period primarily due to afterslip, viscoelastic and poroelastic processes.
Especially during the early postseismic phase, however, the relative contribution of these processes to the observed surface deformation is unclear.
To investigate this, we use geodetic data collected in the first 48 days following the 2010 Maule earthquake and a poro-viscoelastic forward model combined with an afterslip inversion.
This model approach fits the geodetic data 14% better than a pure elastic model. Particularly near the region of maximum coseismic slip, the predicted surface poroelastic uplift pattern explains well the observations.
If poroelasticity is neglected, the spatial afterslip distribution is locally altered by up to +/- 40%.
Moreover, we find that shallow crustal aftershocks mostly occur in regions of increased postseismic pore-pressure changes, indicating that both processes might be mechanically coupled.
On their way from inland to the ocean, flowing water bodies, their constituents and their biotic communities are ex-posed to complex transport and transformation processes. However, detailed process knowledge as revealed by La-grangian measurements adjusted to travel time is rare in large rivers, in particular at hydrological extremes. To fill this gap, we investigated autotrophic processes, heterotrophic carbon utilization, and micropollutant concentrations applying a Lagrangian sampling design in a 600 km section of the River Elbe (Germany) at historically low discharge. Under base flow conditions, we expect the maximum intensity of instream processes and of point source impacts. Phy-toplankton biomass and photosynthesis increased from upstream to downstream sites but maximum chlorophyll con-centration was lower than at mean discharge. Concentrations of dissolved macronutrients decreased to almost complete phosphate depletion and low nitrate values. The longitudinal increase of bacterial abundance and production was less pronounced than in wetter years and bacterial community composition changed downstream. Molecular analyses revealed a longitudinal increase of many DOM components due to microbial production, whereas saturated lipid-like DOM, unsaturated aromatics and polyphenols, and some CHOS surfactants declined. In decomposition exper-iments, DOM components with high O/C ratios and high masses decreased whereas those with low O/C ratios, low masses, and high nitrogen content increased at all sites. Radiocarbon age analyses showed that DOC was relatively old (890-1870 years B.P.), whereas the mineralized fraction was much younger suggesting predominant oxidation of algal lysis products and exudates particularly at downstream sites. Micropollutants determining toxicity for algae (terbuthylazine, terbutryn, isoproturon and lenacil), hexachlorocyclohexanes and DDTs showed higher concentrations from the middle towards the downstream part but calculated toxicity was not negatively correlated to phytoplankton. Overall, autotrophic and heterotrophic process rates and micropollutant concentrations increased from up-to down-stream reaches, but their magnitudes were not distinctly different to conditions at medium discharges.
LegacyPollen 1.0
(2022)
Here we describe the LegacyPollen 1.0, a dataset of 2831 fossil pollen records with metadata, a harmonized taxonomy, and standardized chronologies.
A total of 1032 records originate from North America, 1075 from Europe, 488 from Asia, 150 from Latin America, 54 from Africa, and 32 from the Indo-Pacific.
The pollen data cover the late Quaternary (mostly the Holocene). The original 10 110 pollen taxa names (including variations in the notations) were harmonized to 1002 terrestrial taxa (including Cyperaceae), with woody taxa and major herbaceous taxa harmonized to genus level and other herbaceous taxa to family level.
The dataset is valuable for synthesis studies of, for example, taxa areal changes, vegetation dynamics, human impacts (e.g., deforestation), and climate change at global or continental scales.
The harmonized pollen and metadata as well as the harmonization table are available from PANGAEA (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.929773; Herzschuh et al., 2021). R code for the harmonization is provided at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5910972; Herzschuh et al., 2022) so that datasets at a customized harmonization level can be easily established.
Boreal forests cover over half of the global permafrost area and protect underlying permafrost. Boreal forest development, therefore, has an impact on permafrost evolution, especially under a warming climate.
Forest disturbances and changing climate conditions cause vegetation shifts and potentially destabilize the carbon stored within the vegetation and permafrost. Disturbed permafrost-forest ecosystems can develop into a dry or swampy bush- or grasslands, shift toward broadleaf- or evergreen needleleaf-dominated forests, or recover to the pre-disturbance state.
An increase in the number and intensity of fires, as well as intensified logging activities, could lead to a partial or complete ecosystem and permafrost degradation. We study the impact of forest disturbances (logging, surface, and canopy fires) on the thermal and hydrological permafrost conditions and ecosystem resilience.
We use a dynamic multilayer canopy-permafrost model to simulate different scenarios at a study site in eastern Siberia. We implement expected mortality, defoliation, and ground surface changes and analyze the interplay between forest recovery and permafrost. We find that forest loss induces soil drying of up to 44%, leading to lower active layer thicknesses and abrupt or steady decline of a larch forest, depending on disturbance intensity.
Only after surface fires, the most common disturbances, inducing low mortality rates, forests can recover and overpass pre-disturbance leaf area index values. We find that the trajectory of larch forests after surface fires is dependent on the precipitation conditions in the years after the disturbance. Dryer years can drastically change the direction of the larch forest development within the studied period.
Measuring the variability of incoming neutrons locally would be usefull for the cosmic-ray neutron sensing (CRNS) method. As the measurement of high energy neutrons is not so easy, alternative particles can be considered for such purpose. Among them, muons are particles created from the same cascade of primary cosmic-ray fluxes that generate neutrons at the ground. In addition, they can be easily detected by small and relatively inexpensive detectors. For these reasons they could provide a suitable local alternative to incoming corrections based on remote neutron monitor data. The reported measurements demonstrated that muon detection system can detect incoming cosmic-ray variations locally. Furthermore the precision of this measurement technique is considered adequate for many CRNS applications.
A large landslide (frozen debris avalanche) occurred at Assapaat on the south coast of the Nuussuaq Peninsula in Central West Greenland on June 13, 2021, at 04:04 local time. We present a compilation of available data from field observations, photos, remote sensing, and seismic monitoring to describe the event. Analysis of these data in combination with an analysis of pre- and post-failure digital elevation models results in the first description of this type of landslide. The frozen debris avalanche initiated as a 6.9 * 10(6) m(3) failure of permafrozen talus slope and underlying colluvium and till at 600-880 m elevation. It entrained a large volume of permafrozen colluvium along its 2.4 km path in two subsequent entrainment phases accumulating a total volume between 18.3 * 10(6) and 25.9 * 10(6) m(3). About 3.9 * 10(6) m(3) is estimated to have entered the Vaigat strait; however, no tsunami was reported, or is evident in the field. This is probably because the second stage of entrainment along with a flattening of slope angle reduced the mobility of the frozen debris avalanche. We hypothesise that the initial talus slope failure is dynamically conditioned by warming of the ice matrix that binds the permafrozen talus slope. When the slope ice temperature rises to a critical level, its shear resistance is reduced, resulting in an unstable talus slope prone to failure. Likewise, we attribute the large-scale entrainment to increasing slope temperature and take the frozen debris avalanche as a strong sign that the permafrost in this region is increasingly at a critical state. Global warming is enhanced in the Arctic and frequent landslide events in the past decade in Western Greenland let us hypothesise that continued warming will lead to an increase in the frequency and magnitude of these types of landslides. Essential data for critical arctic slopes such as precipitation, snowmelt, and ground and surface temperature are still missing to further test this hypothesis. It is thus strongly required that research funds are made available to better predict the change of landslide threat in the Arctic.
A novel idea for an optimal time delay state space reconstruction from uni- and multivariate time series is presented. The entire embedding process is considered as a game, in which each move corresponds to an embedding cycle and is subject to an evaluation through an objective function. This way the embedding procedure can be modeled as a tree, in which each leaf holds a specific value of the objective function. By using a Monte Carlo ansatz, the proposed algorithm populates the tree with many leafs by computing different possible embedding paths and the final embedding is chosen as that particular path, which ends at the leaf with the lowest achieved value of the objective function. The method aims to prevent getting stuck in a local minimum of the objective function and can be used in a modular way, enabling practitioners to choose a statistic for possible delays in each embedding cycle as well as a suitable objective function themselves. The proposed method guarantees the optimization of the chosen objective function over the parameter space of the delay embedding as long as the tree is sampled sufficiently. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the classical time delay embedding methods using a variety of application examples. We compare recurrence plot-based statistics inferred from reconstructions of a Lorenz-96 system and highlight an improved forecast accuracy for map-like model data as well as for palaeoclimate isotope time series. Finally, we utilize state space reconstruction for the detection of causality and its strength between observables of a gas turbine type thermoacoustic combustor.
Large-Scale interseismic strain mapping of the NE Tibetan Plateau from Sentinel-1 Interferometry
(2022)
The launches of the Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar satellites in 2014 and 2016 started a new era of high-resolution velocity and strain rate mapping for the continents. However, multiple challenges exist in tying independently processed velocity data sets to a common reference frame and producing high-resolution strain rate fields. We analyze Sentinel-1 data acquired between 2014 and 2019 over the northeast Tibetan Plateau, and develop new methods to derive east and vertical velocities with similar to 100 m resolution and similar to 1 mm/yr accuracy across an area of 440,000 km(2). By implementing a new method of combining horizontal gradients of filtered east and interpolated north velocities, we derive the first similar to 1 km resolution strain rate field for this tectonically active region. The strain rate fields show concentrated shear strain along the Haiyuan and East Kunlun Faults, and local contractional strain on fault junctions, within the Qilianshan thrusts, and around the Longyangxia Reservoir. The Laohushan-Jingtai creeping section of the Haiyuan Fault is highlighted in our data set by extremely rapid strain rates. Strain across unknown portions of the Haiyuan Fault system, including shear on the eastern extension of the Dabanshan Fault and contraction at the western flank of the Quwushan, highlight unmapped tectonic structures. In addition to the uplift across most of the lowlands, the vertical velocities also contain climatic, hydrological or anthropogenic-related deformation signals. We demonstrate the enhanced view of large-scale active tectonic processes provided by high-resolution velocities and strain rates derived from Sentinel-1 data and highlight associated wide-ranging research applications.
The James Ross archipelago houses numerous lakes and ponds. In this region, a vast diatom and cyanobacterial variety has been reported; however, the prokaryotic diversity in microbial mats from these lakes remains poorly explored.
Here, a high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene in microbial mats from Lake Bart-Roja in James Ross Island and lakes Pan Negro and North Pan Negro located in Vega Island was performed. Combined with mineralogical and environmental characteristics, we analyzed the diversity and structure of the microbial communities. Sequences assigned to Archaea were extremely low, while Bacteria domain prevailed with the abundance of Proteobacteria (mostly Betaproteobacteriales) followed by Bacteroidetes, Verrucomicrobia, Firmicutes, and Cyanobacteria.
Local environmental conditions, such as conductivity and Eh, provided differential microbial assemblages that might have implications in the oligotrophic status of the lakes. Consequently, a clear segregation at the family level was observed.
In this sense, the assigned diversity was related to taxa recognized as denitrifiers and sulfur oxidizers. Particularly, in Lake Pan Negro sulfur-reducing and methanogenic representatives were also found and positively correlate with alkalinity and water depth.
Moreover, Deinococcus-Thermus was observed in Lake Bart-Roja, while Melainabacteria (Cyanobacteria)-poorly reported in Antarctic mats-was detected in Lake Pan Negro. Epsilonbacteraeota was exclusively found in this lake, suggesting new potential phylotypes. This study contributes to the understanding of the diversity, composition, and structure of Antarctic benthic microbial ecosystems and provides highly valuable information, which can be used as a proxy to evaluate environmental changes affecting Antarctic microbiota.
In seismic risk assessment, the sources of uncertainty associated with building exposure modelling have not received as much attention as other components related to hazard and vulnerability. Conventional practices such as assuming absolute portfolio compositions (i.e., proportions per building class) from expert-based assumptions over aggregated data crudely disregard the contribution of uncertainty of the exposure upon earthquake loss models. In this work, we introduce the concept that the degree of knowledge of a building stock can be described within a Bayesian probabilistic approach that integrates both expert-based prior distributions and data collection on individual buildings. We investigate the impact of the epistemic uncertainty in the portfolio composition on scenario-based earthquake loss models through an exposure-oriented logic tree arrangement based on synthetic building portfolios. For illustrative purposes, we consider the residential building stock of Valparaiso (Chile) subjected to seismic ground-shaking from one subduction earthquake. We have found that building class reconnaissance, either from prior assumptions by desktop studies with aggregated data (top-down approach), or from building-by-building data collection (bottom-up approach), plays a fundamental role in the statistical modelling of exposure. To model the vulnerability of such a heterogeneous building stock, we require that their associated set of structural fragility functions handle multiple spectral periods. Thereby, we also discuss the relevance and specific uncertainty upon generating either uncorrelated or spatially cross-correlated ground motion fields within this framework. We successively show how various epistemic uncertainties embedded within these probabilistic exposure models are differently propagated throughout the computed direct financial losses. This work calls for further efforts to redesign desktop exposure studies, while also highlighting the importance of exposure data collection with standardized and iterative approaches.