Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences
Recent Submissions
-
Burial and Exhumation of Sedimentary Rocks Revealed by the Base Stimson Erosional Unconformity, Gale Crater, Mars
(2022)Sedimentary rocks record the ancient climate of Mars through changes between subaqueous and eolian depositional environments, recognized by their stratal geometries and suites of sedimentary structures. Orbiter- and rover-image-based geologic mapping show a dynamic evolution of the 5-km-thick sedimentary sequence exposed along the flanks of Aeolis ... -
Tridymite in a lacustrine mudstone in Gale Crater, Mars: Evidence for an explosive silicic eruption during the Hesperian
(2022)The unexpected detection of ∼16 wt.% monoclinic tridymite, a high-temperature silica polymorph, within an otherwise lacustrine mudstone in Gale crater, Mars raises significant questions about its formation and the extent of magmatic evolution on that planet. The rock sample, analyzed by the X-ray diffractometer onboard the Curiosity rover, also ... -
Watching the Cryosphere Thaw: Seismic Monitoring of Permafrost Degradation Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing During a Controlled Heating Experiment
(2022)Permafrost degradation is rapidly increasing in response to a warming Arctic climate, altering landscapes and damaging critical infrastructure. Solutions for monitoring permafrost thaw dynamics are essential to understand biogeochemical feedbacks as well as to issue warnings for hazardous geotechnical conditions. We investigate the feasibility of ... -
Geologic Evidence of Lithostatic Pore Fluid Pressures the Base of the Subduction Seismogenic Zone
(2022)Geophysical and rheological work below the subduction seismogenic zone suggest that elevated pore fluid pressures (Pfs) may facilitate slow slip and tremor. However, quantification of Pf and its variation in this environment remain indirect and incomplete. We examine brittle-frictional deformation within metasedimentary rocks from an exhumed subduction ... -
A novel and efficient engine for P-/S-wave-mode vector decomposition for vertical transverse isotropic elastic reverse time migration
(2022)Wave-mode decomposition plays a very important role in elastic reverse time migration (ERTM). Improved imaging quality can be achieved due to reduced wave-mode crosstalk artifacts. The current state-of-the-art methods for anisotropic wavefield separation are based on either splitting model strategy, low-rank approximation, or lower-upper (LU) ... -
Sedimentary and crustal structure of the US Gulf Coast revealed by Rayleigh wave and teleseismic P coda data with implications for continent rifting
(2022)We have developed an S-wave model of the south-central US focusing on the Gulf Coast sedimentary basin and its crust to understand continental rifting and regional tectonics. The model was derived by a joint inversion of Rayleigh wave phase velocities, Z/H ratios and P-coda data. The surface- and body-wave measurements were made, respectively, from ... -
Land Use and Land Cover Shape River Water Quality at a Continental Caribbean Land-Ocean Interface
(2022)Land use and land cover (LULC) can significantly alter river water, which can in turn have important impacts on downstream coastal ecosystems by delivering nutrients that promote marine eutrophication and hypoxia. Well-documented in temperate systems, less is known about the way land cover relates to water quality in low-lying coastal zones in the ... -
Magma and Mineral Composition Response to Increasing Slab-Derived Fluid Flux: Nevado de Longaví Volcano, Southern Chilean Andes
(2022)Nevado de Longaví volcano (NLV), in the Southern-Central Chilean Andes, has erupted during the Holocene magmas with compositions that are in several ways atypical for the region. These characteristics include elevated La/Yb ratios in evolved magmas, in an area of only moderately thick crust, coupled with low concentrations of K, Th, and other ... -
Transport Processes in the Gulf of Mexico Along the River-Estuary-Shelf-Ocean Continuum: a Review of Research from the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative
(2022)Estuarine and coastal geomorphology, biogeochemistry, water quality, and coastal food webs in river-dominated shelves of the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) are modulated by transport processes associated with river inputs, winds, waves, tides, and deep-ocean/continental shelf interactions. For instance, transport processes control the fate of river-borne ... -
The dynamics of warming during the last deglaciation in high-elevation regions of Eastern Equatorial Africa
(2022)Tropical mountain environments, such as the Rwenzori Mountains in equatorial Africa, are thought to be particularly sensitive to climate change. Ongoing warming in the Rwenzori is impacting local environments and communities through glacial retreat, fires, and flooding. Paleoclimate reconstructions from elsewhere in Africa suggest considerable warming ... -
Last Millennium ENSO Diversity and North American Teleconnections: New Insights From Paleoclimate Data Assimilation
(2022)El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability affects year-to-year changes in North American hydroclimate. Extra-tropical teleconnections are not always consistent between El Niño events due to stochastic atmospheric variability and diverse sea surface temperature anomalies, making it difficult to quantify teleconnections using only instrumentally-based ... -
ENSO's Response to Volcanism in a Data Assimilation-Based Paleoclimate Reconstruction Over the Common Era
(2022)The tropical response to explosive volcanism remains underconstrained in the paleoclimate record. While the atmosphere cools due to aerosol forcing following volcanic eruptions, modeling evidence suggests that the tropical Pacific responds with compensatory warming. Given the rarity of large volcanic eruptions and the short instrumental record, these ... -
Tracking Shallow Convective Mixing and Its Influence on Low-Level Clouds With Stable Water Isotopes in Vapor
(2022)Low-cloud feedbacks contribute large uncertainties to climate projections and estimated climate sensitivity. A key physical process modulating low-cloud feedbacks is shallow convective mixing between the boundary layer and the free troposphere. However, there are challenges in acquiring observational constraints of shallow convective mixing with ... -
Towards physics-inspired data-driven weather forecasting: integrating data assimilation with a deep spatial-transformer-based U-NET in a case study with ERA5
(2022)There is growing interest in data-driven weather prediction (DDWP), e.g., using convolutional neural networks such as U-NET that are trained on data from models or reanalysis. Here, we propose three components, inspired by physics, to integrate with commonly used DDWP models in order to improve their forecast accuracy. These components are (1) a deep ... -
From Fluid Flow to Coupled Processes in Fractured Rock: Recent Advances and New Frontiers
(2022)Quantitative predictions of natural and induced phenomena in fractured rock is one of the great challenges in the Earth and Energy Sciences with far-reaching economic and environmental impacts. Fractures occupy a very small volume of a subsurface formation but often dominate fluid flow, solute transport and mechanical deformation behavior. They play ... -
The Apparent Respiratory Quotient of Soils and Tree Stems and the Processes That Control It
(2022)The CO2/O2 fluxes ratio (apparent respiration quotient [ARQ]) measured in soils and plants contains valuable information about the respiratory-substrate stoichiometry and biotic and abiotic non-respiratory processes. We investigated ARQ variability by measurements in soil pore space air, and in headspace air from incubations of bulk-soil and tree ... -
Centennial to millennial variability of greenhouse climate across the mid-Cenomanian event
(2021)Centennial- to millennial-scale climate variations are often attributed to solar forcing or internal climate system variability, but recognition of such variations in the deep-time paleoclimate record is extremely rare. We present an exceptionally well-preserved, millimeter-scale laminated marlstone from a succession of precession-driven limestone-marlstone ... -
Race and ethnic minority, local pollution, and COVID-19 deaths in Texas
(2022)The costs of COVID-19 are extensive, and, like the fallout of most health and environmental crises in the US, there is growing evidence that these costs weigh disproportionately on communities of color. We investigated whether county-level racial composition and fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) are indicators for COVID-19 incidence and death rates ... -
Thick crust, hydrous magmas, and the paradox of voluminous cold magmatism
(2021)Andesites are refined and “cold” magmas compared to their basaltic parents, yet large volumes of andesites are generated at continental arcs. We show that large andesitic plutons are favored when arc crust attains a thickness of ~60 km while mafic plutons are small and favored when arc crust is thin. Using simple thermal models, we show that large, ... -
Slab dehydration in warm subduction zones at depths of episodic slip and tremor
(2020)Non-volcanic tremor (NVT) and episodic slow slip events (SSEs) have been observed below the seismogenic zone of relatively warm subduction zones for the past 20 years. Geophysical and geologic observations show that this portion of the subduction interface is fluid-rich, and many models for these slip behaviors necessitate high pore fluid pressures. ...
RSS 1.0