利用海洋重力场变化分析洋底板块运动

洋底板块运动是地球动力学和全球变化研究的重要内容.本文根据质量迁移与地球外部重力场变化的对应关系,利用不同时期测高资料推算的1995—2019全球海洋重力场变化结果,反演分析全球洋底板块运动特征.研究表明,板块汇聚边界、板块内无震海岭、海山群、断裂带等区域重力异常变化显著,而在板块离散边界无明显变化趋势;西南印度洋中脊、大西洋中脊、中印度洋中脊等地区重力异常垂直梯度变化显著,且在西太平洋俯冲带、部分海岭区域也存在明显变化,其空间分布与地形基本吻合.海洋重力场变化整体上准确反映了全球洋底板块构造运动.相较于重力异常变化反演结果,重力垂直梯度的变化能够更为准确地反映洋底板块运动特征,特别是在洋中脊区域,扩张速率越小,垂直重力梯度变化越显著.此外,详细讨论了测高海洋重力场不确定因素对洋底板块运动分析结果的影响,海面坡度改正是主要因素之一.     

Color of the Corona Continuum of July 11, 1991

Geomagnetism and Aeronomy - The color of the coronal continuum was determined from observations in order to search for manifestations of coronal expansion. A brief review of studies determining the...     

Terrestrial LiDAR monitoring of coastal foredune evolution in managed and unmanaged systems

Coastal dunes provide essential protection for infrastructure in developed regions, acting as the first line of defence against ocean-side flooding. Quantifying dune erosion, growth and recovery from storms is critical from management, resiliency and engineering with nature perspectives. This study utilizes 22 months of high-resolution terrestrial LiDAR (Riegl VZ-2000) observations to investigate the impact of management, anthropogenic modifications and four named storms on dune morphological evolution along ~100 m of an open-coast, recently nourished beach in Nags Head, NC. The influences of specific management strategies – such as fencing and plantings – were evaluated by comparing these to the morphologic response at an unmanaged control site at the USACE Field Research Facility (FRF) in Duck, NC (33 km to the north), which experienced similar environmental forcings. Various beach-dune morphological parameters were extracted (e.g. backshore-dune volume) and compared with aeolian and hydrodynamic forcing metrics between each survey interval. The results show that LiDAR is a useful tool for quantifying complex dune evolution over fine spatial and temporal scales. Under similar forcings, the managed dune grew 1.7 times faster than the unmanaged dune, due to a larger sediment supply and enhanced capture through fencing, plantings and walkovers. These factors at the managed site contributed to the welding of the incipient dune to the primary foredune over a short period of less than a year, which has been observed to take up to decades in natural systems. Storm events caused alongshore variable dune erosion primarily to the incipient dune, yet also caused significant accretion, particularly along the crest at the managed site, resulting in net dune growth. Traditional empirical Bagnold equations correlated with observed trends of backshore-dune growth but overpredicted magnitudes. This is likely because these formulations do not encompass supply-limiting factors and erosional processes. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Seasonal extreme rainfall over Indian monsoon region: a moisture budget analysis to distinguish the role of ENSO and non-ENSO forcing

Theoretical and Applied Climatology - Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) variability of ± 10% of its long-term mean leads to flood and drought, affecting the life and economic...     

Australian ‘gayborhoods’ and ‘lesborhoods’: a new method for estimating the number and prevalence of adult gay men and lesbian women living in each Australian postcode

ABSTRACT

Gay men and lesbian women often demonstrate unique settlement patterns, forming what have been referred to as ‘gayborhoods’. This study sought to provide the first postcode-level estimates of population size and prevalence of gay and lesbian people in Australia. Data on same-gender-partnered households from the Australian Census were combined with information from six different surveys conducted from 2011 to 2017. We estimated that in 2016 there were 132,203 gay men (1.5% of adult males; 95% CI: 1.4–1.6) and 79,931 lesbian women (0.9% of adult females; 95% CI: 0.8–1.0) in Australia. While many postcodes were sparsely populated by gay and lesbian people (40.1% had prevalences of <0.1%), 24.6% were moderately populated (prevalences in the 50-95th percentile) and 2.7% were highly populated (95th percentile). By jurisdiction, the Australian Capital Territory had the highest prevalences of gay men (2.1%; 95% CI: 2.0–2.2) and lesbian women (1.5%; 95% CI: 1.4–1.6). Although the majority of highly populated postcodes were found in major cities (83.7%), some were also found in regional and remote area (16.3%). This method can be applied in other countries to enhance populate estimates. The accompanying dataset can be used to guide service delivery, conduct geographically contextualised research and develop policies relevant to gay men and lesbian women in Australia.     

Evaluation of Interactions Between Oilfield Chemicals and Reservoir Rocks

Natural Resources Research - Sand failure and production occurs when the formation stress exceeds the strength of the formation, which is derived majorly from the natural material that cements the...     

Updated Characterization of Dorowa Phosphate Rock Mined in Zimbabwe

Natural Resources Research - The physical and chemical characteristics of mined phosphate rock will vary temporally as the location and nature of the ore body changes and as the type of equipment...     

Seismic design of floor–wall joints of multi-storey CLT buildings to comply with regularity in elevation

The effects of irregularity in elevation of cross-laminated timber buildings have not been fully analysed in literature to provide useful information for the design. In this work, a number of building configurations, regular or irregular in elevation, characterized by a different arrangement per storey of the floor–wall joints have been analysed by means of non-linear dynamic analyses. Comparative results in terms of ratio between the behaviour q-factor of the investigated irregular configurations and that of reference regular ones, show that less dissipative capacity can be expected if the building is irregular due to a disequilibrium among storeys between the actual and the required strength provided by the floor–wall joints. A correlation method to estimate the behaviour q-factor for perfectly regular cross-laminated timber buildings is here presented and extended to in-elevation irregular ones. A new empirical formulation to assess the reliable corrective factor accounting for the irregularity in elevation of cross-laminated timber buildings, according to Eurocode 8 provisions, is also proposed. A final discussion about the implications of in-elevation irregularity on the building design is reported.     

Structure-specific selection of earthquake ground motions for the reliable design and assessment of structures

A decision support process is presented to accommodate selecting and scaling of earthquake motions as required for the time domain analysis of structures. Code-compatible suites of seismic motions are provided being, at the same time, prequalified through a multi-criterion approach to induce response parameters with reduced variability. The latter is imperative to increase the reliability of the average response values, normally required for the code-prescribed design verification of structures. Structural attributes like the dynamic characteristics as well as criteria related to variability of seismic motions and their compliance with a target spectrum are quantified through a newly introduced index, δ _sv–sc , which aims to prioritize motions suites for response history analysis. To demonstrate the applicability of the procedure presented, the structural model of a multi-story building was subjected to numerous suites of motions that were highly ranked according to both the proposed approach (δ _sv–sc ) and the conventional one (δ _conv ), that is commonly used for earthquake records selection and scaling. The findings from numerous linear response history analyses reveal the superiority of the proposed multi-criterion approach, as it extensively reduces the intra-suite structural response variability and consequently, increases the reliability of the design values. The relation between the target reliability in assessing structural response and the size of the suite of motions selected was also investigated, further demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed selection procedure to achieve higher response reliability levels with smaller samples of ground motion.     

Seismic performance and damage incurred by monolithic concrete self-centering rocking walls under the effect of axial stress ratio

Self-centering rocking walls offer the possibility of minimizing repair costs and downtimes, and also nullify the residual drift after seismic events, thanks to their self-centering properties. In this paper, the effect of axial stress ratio on the behavior of monolithic self-centering rocking walls is investigated by utilizing a developed finite element model. To verify the validity of the finite element model, results and observed damage in the model are compared with those of a full-scale wall test. The axial stress ratio is varied from 0.024 to 0.30 while keeping the other structural parameters constant. For qualitative damage evaluation, the observed damage in the model compared with expected damage states of desired performance levels. In order to evaluate the incurred damage quantitatively, the amount of crushing and damage in the wall is calculated by utilizing several ratios (crushing ratio and damage ratio). Furthermore, seismic response factors (i.e., μ, R and C_d) are calculated for different axial stress ratio values. The obtained results showed that, in order to satisfy the requirements of desired performance levels, the maximum axial stress ratio should be approximately within the range of 0.10–0.15. In addition, the maximum overall damage ratio and crushing ratio are suggested to be less than 5%. For axial stress ratio higher than 0.15, the flag-shaped pattern of hysteresis curves completely disappeared and the variation of displacement ductility is less sensitive to axial stress ratio. Considering the maximum axial stress ratio limited to 0.150, values of 4 and 3.5 are conservatively proposed as a period-independent response modification factor and displacement modification factor of the investigated structural wall, respectively.