ALBERT

Description: Gas hydrates represent one of the largest pools of readily exchangeable carbon on Earth's surface. Releases of the greenhouse gas methane from hydrates are proposed to be responsible for climate change at numerous events in geological history. Many of these inferred events, however, were based on carbonate carbon isotopes which are susceptible to diagenetic alterations. Here we propose a molecular fossil proxy, i.e., the "Methane Index (MI)", to detect and document the destabilization and dissociation of marine gas hydrates. MI consists of the relative distribution of glycerol dibiphytanyl glycerol tetraethers (GDGTs), the core membrane lipids of archaea. The rational behind MI is that in hydrate-impacted environments, the pool of archaeal tetraether lipids is dominated by GDGT-1, -2 and -3 due to the large contribution of signals from the methanotrophic archaeal community. Our study in the Gulf of Mexico cold-seep sediments demonstrates a correlation between MI and the compound-specific carbon isotope of GDGTs, which is strong evidence supporting the MI-methane consumption relationship. Preliminary applications of MI in a number of hydrate-impacted and/or methane-rich environments show diagnostic MI values, corroborating the idea that MI may serve as a robust indicator for hydrate dissociation that is useful for studies of global carbon cycling and paleoclimate change.

Description: The evolution of permeability and its effective stress behavior is related to inelastic deformation and failure mode. This was systematically investigated in Indiana and Purbeck limestones with porosities of 16% and 14%, respectively. High‐pressure compression tests were conducted at room temperature on water‐saturated samples. At relatively high confinement shear‐enhanced compaction was observed to initiate at a critical stress, accompanied by significant permeability reduction of up to a factor of ~3. Overall, the permeability reduction due to inelastic compaction in our limestones is smaller than that observed in sandstones. At relatively low confinement, dilatant failure was observed, which was accompanied by a decrease and increase of permeability in Indiana and Purbeck limestones, respectively. There seems to be a trend for the correlation between porosity and permeability changes to switch from positive to negative with increasing porosity. The void space of both limestones has significant proportions of macropores and micropores. The effective stress behavior of such a limestone with dual porosity has been documented to be different from the prediction for a microscopically homogeneous assemblage, in that its effective stress coefficients for permeability and pore volume change may attain values significantly 〉1. In contrast, our investigation of damaged samples consistently showed effective stress coefficients for both permeability and pore volume change with values 〈1. This suggests that the behavior in the damaged samples is akin to that of a microscopically homogeneous assemblage, possibly due to pervasive collapse of macropores that would effectively homogenize the initially bimodal pore size distribution.

Description: The dataset contains foraminifera images of over 1,000 forams taken under 16 different lighting directions with an optical microscope. The species and locations of the samples are also specified. It also contains manual segmentation of over 400 samples from the images described above. The segmentation labels are matched by their name. To capture these images, a visual identification system was developed in order to automate the identification of target microorganisms. The visual system incorporates a controllable LED lighting ring used to capture images by illuminating the specimens from several directions, mimicking an important step in the traditional identification process. The dataset was originally used for foraminifera identification and segmentation with machine learning and computer vision techniques. This work is a collaboration between the Dr. Edgar Lobaton (Associate Professor at the North Carolina State University), Dr. Thomas Marchitto (Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder) and Dr. Ritayan Mitra (Assistant Professor at IIT Bombay). Please refer to https://research.ece.ncsu.edu/aros/foram-identification/ for more information about the datasets, related studies and downloading the dataset.

Description: We reconstruct the environmental evolution of the East China Sea in the past 14 kyr based on glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (GDGTs) in a sediment core from the subaqueous Yangtze River Delta. Two primary phases are recognized. Phase I (13.8-8 cal kyr BP) reflects a predominantly continental influence, showing distinctly higher concentrations of branched GDGTs (averaged 143 ng/g dry sediment weight, dsw) than isoprenoid GDGTs (averaged 36 ng/g dsw), high BIT index (branched vs. isoprenoid tetraethers) values (〉0.78) and a fluctuating GDGT-0/crenarchaeol ratio (R0/5, varied from 0.52 to 3.81). Within this interval, temporal increases of terrestrial and marine influence are attributed to Younger Dryas (YD) (ca. 12.9-12.2 cal kyr BP) cold event and melt-water pulse (MWP) -1B (11.5-11.1 cal kyr BP), respectively. The prominent transition from 8 to 7.9 cal kyr BP shows a sharp decrease in BIT index value (〈0.4) and increase in crenarchaeol, which marks the beginning of phase II. Afterwards, the proxies remain relatively constant, which indicates that phase II (7.9 cal kyr BP-present) is a shelf sedimentary environment with high stand of sea level. Overall, the BIT index in our record serves as a good marker for terrestrial influence at the site, and likely reflects the flooding history of the region. The TEX86 (TetraEther Index of tetraethers consisting of 86 carbons) proxy is not applicable in phase I because of an excess terrestrial influence; but it seems to be valid for revealing the annual SST in phase II (21.6±0.9°C, n=49). In contrast, the MBT'/CBT (Methylation of Branched Tetraethers and Cyclization of Branched Tetraethers) proxy appears to faithfully record the annual mean air temperature (MAT) (14.3±0.63°C, n=68) and presents an integrated signal over the middle and lower Yangtze River drainage basin.

Description: The Multi-GNSS observations from an onboard receiver were retrieved using kinematic Precise Point Positioning (PPP) method. The solution using only Global Positioning System (GPS) observations is the GPS-only solution; and the one using GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo observations together, is the GRE PPP solution. R is short for the Russian system GLONASS, and E is short for Europe system Galileo. The GNSS data was collected by a GNSS receiver on R/V Lance. It is used by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) for regular monitoring and research related to ocean and sea ice properties in Fram Strait. During the Fram Strait 2016 cruise from day-of-year (DOY) 238 to DOY 257, a geodetic JAVAD TR_G3TH GNSS receiver was installed on the ship bow, which is about 6 m above the water surface. This receiver collected multi-GNSS data at a sampling of 1-Hz, including GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo.