ALBERT

Description: Highlights • All investigated sites are in quiescent stage. Multi layers of clam shell debris were the ancient sediment surfaces during high methane flux. • Current fluxes contribute to less than 2 wt % of authigenic carbonates and 2 wt % iron sulfide minerals being precipitated in 600-800 cm sediment. • The sequestration of carbon could be 〉 50 mmol C cm-2 yr-1 under current in situ condition. Abstract Methane seepage records information of the local carbon cycle with respect to the generation, consumption and sequestration of carbon. Here presents the investigation of 7 gravity cores retrieved in 2004 during cruise SO-177 in the Haiyang 4 Area at the northern slope of the South China Sea. Porewater solutes, sulfate, methane, total alkalinity, sulfide and calcium demonstrate currently the weak seep activity. Local carbon cycling and sequestration is also revealed, that dominates by anaerobic oxidation of biogenic methane to dissolved bicarbonate inducing calcium carbonate and iron sulfide minerals (mainly pyrite) precipitation. A reactive transport model was employed to quantify the carbon cycle and budget. Model results show that current methane fluxes contribute to less than 2 wt % of authigenic carbonates and 2 wt % iron sulfide minerals being precipitated in 600–800 cm sediment depth. The sequestration of carbon could be 〉 50 mmol C cm−2 yr−1 under in situ condition. The observed increase of carbonate and iron sulfide minerals at ∼100 cm, however, require higher methane fluxes to shift the zone of anaerobic oxidation of methane upwards to around 1 m below the seafloor, which have occurred during sea level low stands in the geological past. The oscillation of seepage flux contributed to the formation of multiple layers of authigenic carbonates and pyrite, which indicates the high capability of carbon sink and is speculated to be induced by the dissociation of the underlying hydrates triggered by sea level drop and or temperature increase.

Description: Offshore explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) in the marine environment is a high-risk activity. Structured risk assessment (RA) can be a helpful tool to provide EOD experts with decision-making support. This paper hypothesizes that existing RA approaches that address unexploded ordnance (UXO) in the sea do not meet the requirements of EOD RA. To test this hypothesis, the paper proposes a novel categorization tool. It uses five review criteria: study type (qualitative vs. quantitative), level of decision-making (strategic vs. applied), risk component (probability vs. consequence), spatial scale (global vs. local), and temporal scale (long-term vs. short-term). The categorization tool is used to identify the requirements of EOD RA and to test whether nine existing RA methods fulfill these requirements. The study finds that none of the investigated RAs meets the requirements and, hence, concludes that a new method should be developed. However, some aspects of the existing studies should be considered when designing a new method. This includes using risk factors (type and mass of explosive material, type and state of the fuze, and water depth) that are relevant for EOD RA. It also involves setting up a directed graph to assess the complex interdependencies between these risk factors.

Description: The scleractinian coral Lophelia pertusa (Caryophylliidae) is the most common frameworkforming cold-water coral with a global distribution. L. pertusa bioherms are hot-spots of biodiversity because their three-dimensional framework provides niches and nursery grounds for a variety of species, including commercially important fish species. In contrast to shallowwater corals from the tropics, very little is known about the ecophysiology of cold-water corals such as L. pertusa and their sensitivity towards climate change. The present study intends to start filling this knowledge gap by examining a variety of L. pertusa’s ecophysiological responses (e.g. food uptake, respiration, growth, fitness, behaviour) under present-day (in the following referred as “ambient”) and experimentally manipulated environmental conditions. Living specimens of L. pertusa from two Norwegian cold-water coral locations (Oslofjord and Sula Reef Complex) were collected during two research cruises with the aid of the manned submersible JAGO and transferred into a newly established closed recirculating system at IFM-GEOMAR. Long-term analyses (〉3 years) of dissolved inorganic nutrients revealed the high tolerance of L. pertusa to rising concentrations of nitrate and phosphate. However, for the main toxic compound - ammonium - it could be demonstrated that the corals’ polyp behaviour alters if concentrations are increased to 〉 17 μmol L-1. Food availability is thought to be one of the most important factors determining cold-water coral distribution and growth. This study provides feeding rates for three live food organisms encompassing different sizes and qualities. It also describes the food uptake mechanism for mesozooplankton based on the first video documentation of the whole feeding process. The effect of rising temperatures (ocean warming) on the oxygen consumption, fitness, and behaviour was investigated through a combination of short-term and long-term aquarium experiments. This study shows that at ambient conditions of 7.5 °C L. pertusa exhibits low respiration rates of ~ 0.3 μmol O2 g-1 h-1 which may increase up to 58 % after a relatively small temperature change (+ 3.5 °C). High Q10 values of 3.7 ± 0.7 in these corals and significantly depressed RNA/DNA ratios in coral polyps maintained for 2 weeks under elevated temperatures (11°C) revealed that L. pertusa is sensitive to small temperature changes even though analyses of their behaviour may suggest some acclimatisation. L. pertusa exhibits relatively low bulk calcification rates that vary over time and applied measurement methods. On average calcification amounts to 8.7 x 10-3 % d-1 which is intermediate in the broad range of reported L. pertusa growth rates. Interestingly, corals fed under nearby ad libitum conditions showed no relationship between food quality/quantity and growth. This indicates a degree of regulation in the feeding mechanism and may suggest that calcification is rather dependent on a basic metabolic rate than on specific food supply. The impact of increasing concentrations of CO2 (ocean acidification) on L. pertusa growth rates and fitness was examined in a short-term (one week) and a long-term (8 months) experiment. This study shows for the first time that - when kept under long-term exposure to elevated CO2 levels - L. pertusa is capable to compensate for adverse effects as experienced during short-term incubations. Net growth is sustained even in waters undersaturated with respect to aragonite (ΩAr 〈 1). These results suggest that cold-water coral reefs, the majority of which will be exposed to undersaturated waters before the end of this century, may not suffer immediate wide-spread extinction as previously projected. However, the fact that even a temperature increase of about 3 °C seems to be of higher relevance in respect to fitness than a doubling of the pCO2 emphasises the problem of synergistic impacts between ocean warming and ocean acidification and the need for further long-term incubation experiments.

Description: Automatic seismic data interpretation is a significant method in the exploration of geophysics. Complexities of the subsurface structures and the subsurface wave propagation media, make the decision-making process difficult in seismic data interpretation. Nevertheless, the extent of related knowledge and using the expert system method in seismic data interpretation can mitigate this problem. An expert system is a knowledge-based system that applies its knowledge in a complex and specific area and acts as an expert end-user consultant. This study investigates the design of an ANFIS expert system for mud diapirs detection with seismic data analysis in Gorgan plain. This method was applied to seismic attributes from a complex geological mud diapir bearing structure from south of the Caspian Sea. The south of the Caspian Sea is one of the richest area as petroleum reserves, and the Gorgan plain has various mud diapirs, which act as indicators of hydrocarbon reservoirs. The expert system design process to identify mud diapirs on seismic sections was modeled in two approaches including manual and automatic seismic data interpretation. In the first approach, the experience of the expert was collected by manual interpretation of training data and used to create a knowledge base and inference of the expert system in the second approach. The validation verified the accuracy of this method with an average accuracy of 90.1% according to using minimum knowledge to develop a knowledge base of the designed ANFIS expert system.

Description: Highlights • Accurate fault model can be built even when sparse drilling wells are available. • The multiresolution fault model provides information of faults with different sizes. • Fault model provides possibility of tectonic and fluid flow analysis simultaneously. • Modelling of faults in different scales, enable more accurate well path design. • The ANN provides optimized parameters for fault detection by ant tracking algorithm. Modelling faults plays a crucial step in the chain of studies through the first phase of the hydrocarbon exploration and its following studies in reservoir engineering, simulation and field development. This study introduces an innovative and automatic integrated approach that combines seismic multi-attributes and well data for faults modelling. The proposed strategy begins with extracting fault-related seismic attributes commonly used for seismic reservoir characterization. Chaos, variance and curvature attributes, typically highlight large-scale faults that shape the structural framework of the study field. In contrast, small-scale faults, influencing subsurface fluid flow in the fractured reservoir, are modeled using the ant-tracking algorithm applied to seismic data. Small-scale and large-scale fault models, then integrated with the conventional fault model to create an integrated discrete fracture network (DFN). This DFN model incorporates information on both large-scale and small-scale faults. The proposed strategy was applied on a geologically complex petroleum field in Iran. The results, validated using Formation Micro Imager (FMI) data, demonstrate accuracy of the integrated DFN model in comparison to conventional approaches on the studied filed, particularly in capturing small-scale faults. Consequently, it can be concluded that the proposed strategy provides a viable alternative for generating accurate DFN model.

Description: When created faithfully from real-world data, Digital 3D representations of objects can be useful for human or computer-assisted analysis. Such models can also serve for generating training data for machine learning approaches in settings where data is difficult to obtain or where too few training data exists, e.g. by providing novel views or images in varying conditions. While the vast amount of visual 3D reconstruction approaches focus on non-physical models, textured object surfaces or shapes, in this contribution we propose a volumetric reconstruction approach that obtains a physical model including the interior of partially translucent objects such as plankton or insects. Our technique photographs the object under different poses in front of a bright white light source and computes absorption and scattering per voxel. It can be interpreted as visual tomography that we solve by inverse raytracing. We additionally suggest a method to convert non-physical NeRF media into a physically-based volumetric grid for initialization and illustrate the usefulness of the approach using two real-world plankton validation sets, the lab-scanned models being finally also relighted and virtually submerged in a scenario with augmented medium and illumination conditions. Please visit the project homepage at www.marine.informatik.uni-kiel.de/go/vito