ALBERT

Description: Sea surface salinity (SSS) is the least constrained major variable of the past (paleo) ocean but is fundamental in controlling the density of seawater and thus large-scale ocean circulation. The hydrogen isotopic composition (δD) of non-exchangeable hydrogen of algal lipids, specifically alkenones, has been proposed as a promising new proxy for paleo SSS. The δD of surface seawater is correlated with SSS, and laboratory culture studies have shown the δD of algal growth water to be reflected in the δD of alkenones. However, a large-scale field study testing the validity of this proxy is still lacking. Here we present the δD of open-ocean Atlantic and Pacific surface waters and coincident δD of alkenones sampled by underway filtration. Two transects of approximately 100° latitude in the Atlantic Ocean and more than 50° latitude in the Western Pacific sample much of the range of open ocean salinities and seawater δD, and thus allow probing the relationship between δD of seawater and alkenones. Overall, the open ocean δD alkenone data correlate significantly with SSS, and also agree remarkably well with δD water vs δD alkenone regressions developed from culture studies. Subtle deviations from these regressions are discussed in the context of physiological factors as recorded in the carbon isotopic composition of alkenones. In a best-case scenario, the data presented here suggest that SSS variations as low as 1.2 can be reconstructed from alkenone δD.

Description: Changes in the life cycle of organisms (i.e. phenology) are one of the most widely used early-warning indicators of climate change, yet this remains poorly understood throughout the tropics. We exhaustively reviewed any published and unpublished study on fruiting phenology carried out at the community level in the American tropics and subtropics (latitudinal range: 26°N?26°S) to (1) provide a comprehensive overview of the current status of fruiting phenology research throughout the Neotropics; (2) unravel the climatic factors that have been widely reported as drivers of fruiting phenology; and (3) provide a preliminary assessment of the potential phenological responses of plants under future climatic scenarios. Despite the large number of phenological datasets uncovered (218), our review shows that their geographic distribution is very uneven and insufficient for the large surface of the Neotropics (~ 1 dataset per ~ 78,000 km2). Phenological research is concentrated in few areas with many studies (state of São Paulo, Brazil, and Costa Rica), whereas vast regions elsewhere are entirely unstudied. Sampling effort in fruiting phenology studies was generally low: the majority of datasets targeted fewer than 100 plant species (71%), lasted 2 years or less (72%), and only 10.4% monitored 〉 15 individuals per species. We uncovered only 10 sites with ten or more years of phenological monitoring. The ratio of numbers of species sampled to overall estimates of plant species richness was wholly insufficient for highly diverse vegetation types such as tropical rainforests, seasonal forest and cerrado, and only slightly more robust for less diverse vegetation types, such as deserts, arid shrublands and open grassy savannas. Most plausible drivers of phenology extracted from these datasets were environmental (78.5%), whereas biotic drivers were rare (6%). Among climatic factors, rainfall was explicitly included in 73.4% of cases, followed by air temperature (19.3%). Other environmental cues such as water level (6%), solar radiation or photoperiod (3.2%), and ENSO events (1.4%) were rarely addressed. In addition, drivers were analyzed statistically in only 38% of datasets and techniques were basically correlative, with only 4.8% of studies including any consideration of the inherently autocorrelated character of phenological time series. Fruiting peaks were significantly more often reported during the rainy season both in rainforests and cerrado woodlands, which is at odds with the relatively aseasonal character of the former vegetation type. Given that climatic models predict harsh future conditions for the tropics, we urgently need to determine the magnitude of changes in plant reproductive phenology and distinguish those from cyclical oscillations. Long-term monitoring and herbarium data are therefore key for detecting these trends. Our review shows that the unevenness in geographic distribution of studies, and diversity of sampling methods, vegetation types, and research motivation hinder the emergence of clear general phenological patterns and drivers for the Neotropics. We therefore call for prioritizing research in unexplored areas, and improving the quantitative component and statistical design of reproductive phenology studies to enhance our predictions of climate change impacts on tropical plants and animals.

Description: We provide a database of the coseismic surface ruptures produced by the 26 December 2018 Mw 4.9 earthquake that struck the eastern flank of Mt. Etna (southern Italy), the largest active volcano in Europe. Despite its small size, this shallow earthquake caused an impressive system of coseismic surface ruptures extending about 8.5 km, along the trace of the NNW-trending active Fiandaca Fault. We performed detailed field surveys were performed in the epicentral region to describe the ruptures geometry and kinematics. These exhibit a dominant right-oblique sense of slip with coseismic displacement peaks of 0.35 m. The Fiandaca Fault is part of a complex active faults system affecting the eastern flank of Mt. Etna. Its seismic history indicates a prominent surface-faulting potential, so our study is essential for unravelling the seismotectonics of shallow earthquakes in volcanic settings, and contributes updating empirical scaling laws relating moderate-sized earthquakes and surface faulting. The collected observations have been parsed and organized in a concise database consisting of 874 homogeneous georeferenced records. The main features describing the coseismic ruptures are the following: ID, time of sample collection, location (latitude, longitude, elevation), type of rupture, type of affected substratum, attitude (dip angle, dip direction, strike), surface offset (opening, throw, strike slip, net slip), kinematics, slip vector attitude, width of the deformation zone.

Description: For nearly a century, the Atlantic Coastal Plain (ACP) of the United States has been the focus of studies investigating Pliocene and Pleistocene shorelines, however, the mapping of paleoshorelines was primarily done by using elevation contours on topographic maps. Here we review published geologic maps and compare them to paleoshoreline locations obtained through geomorphometric classification and satellite data. We furthermore present the results of an extensive field campaign that measured the mid-Pliocene (~ 3.3-2.9 Ma) shorelines of the Atlantic Coastal Plain using high-accuracy GPS and digital elevation models. We compare our new dataset to positions and elevations extracted from published maps and find that the extracted site information from earlier studies is prone to significant error, both in the location and, more severely, in the elevation of the paleoshoreline. We also investigate, using geophysical modeling, the origin of post-depositional displacement of the shoreline from Georgia to Virginia. In particular, we correct the elevation of our shoreline for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) and then compare the corrected elevation to predictions of mantle flow-induced dynamic topography (DT). While a subset of these models does reconcile the general trends in the observed elevation of the mid-Pliocene shoreline, local discrepancies persist. These discrepancies suggests that either (i) the DT and GIA models presented here do not capture the full range of uncertainty in the input parameters; and/or (ii) other influences, such as sediment loading and unloading or local fault-driven tectonics, may have contributed to post-depositional deformation of the mid-Pliocene shoreline that are not captured in the above models. In this context, our field measurements represent an important observational dataset with which to compare future generations of geodynamic models. Improvements in models for DT, GIA and other relevant processes, together with an expanded, geographically distributed set of shoreline records, will ultimately be the key to obtaining more accurate estimates of eustatic sea level not only in the mid-Pliocene but also earlier in the Cenozoic.

Description: The exponential growth of studies on the biological response to ocean acidification over the last few decades has generated a large amount of data. To facilitate data comparison, a data compilation hosted at the data publisher PANGAEA was initiated in 2008 and is updated on a regular basis (doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.149999). By January 2015, a total of 581 data sets (over 4 000 000 data points) from 539 papers had been archived. Here we present the developments of this data compilation five years since its first description by Nisumaa et al. (2010). Most of study sites from which data archived are still in the Northern Hemisphere and the number of archived data from studies from the Southern Hemisphere and polar oceans are still relatively low. Data from 60 studies that investigated the response of a mix of organisms or natural communities were all added after 2010, indicating a welcomed shift from the study of individual organisms to communities and ecosystems. The initial imbalance of considerably more data archived on calcification and primary production than on other processes has improved. There is also a clear tendency towards more data archived from multifactorial studies after 2010. For easier and more effective access to ocean acidification data, the ocean acidification community is strongly encouraged to contribute to the data archiving effort, and help develop standard vocabularies describing the variables and define best practices for archiving ocean acidification data.