ALBERT

Description: The Mississippi River maintains commercial and societal networks of the USA along its 〉3700 km length. It has accumulated a fluvial sedimentary succession over 80 million years. Through the last 11,700 years of the Holocene Epoch, the wild river shaped the landscape, models of which have become classic in geological studies of ancient river strata. Studies of the river were led by the need to develop infrastructure and to search for hydrocarbons, through which, these models have become quite sophisticated. However, whilst the models demonstrate how the wild river behaves, a monumental shift in fundamental controls on the entire fluvial system, broadly coinciding with the proposed mid-20th century onset of the Anthropocene Epoch, has generated new geological patterns that are becoming globally ubiquitous, and which the Mississippi River typifies. As such, whilst classic Holocene river models may be compared to human-modified systems such as the Lower Mississippi River (and others worldwide), locally the models may now only directly apply to its fossilized components preserved in the sub-surface. Such river models need adapting to better understand the present dynamics, and future evolution of these landscapes.

Description: With the help of the concepts ‘aura’ and ‘autopoiesis’, the relationship between poetry and natural phenomena can be defined as a ‘translation from nature’. Gennadij Ajgi translates his auratic manner of perceiving into poetry. For him, the poem becomes an epistemic medium transcending the sensory perception of nature for a hidden, spiritual level. Les Murray, conversely, demonstrates an autopoietic understanding of nature: The poet himself becomes the medium of the living being. Christian Lehnert takes up impulses from both orientations. He combines the opposing concepts so that they correspond to the hierarchical levels of his religious and metaphysical vision of the world. The three authors all aim to alter the attitude of humans towards nature through their ‘translation from nature into poetry’ so that humankind will open itself towards nature and raise it from an object which can be instrumentalised to an autonomous subject on equal footing with humanity itself.

Description: The paper discusses the CF-industries ammonia plant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. The plant is framed as an exemplary site from which the Anthropocene can be observed and understood. In doing so, a proposal for a “chemical cultural theory” is set out, to allow us to understand such molecular planetary technologies and interpret their (geo)historical significance. As one of the largest fertilizer plants in the world in terms of its output, and one of the largest chemical plants along the “Petrochemical Corridor,” a cluster of chemical industries situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Donaldsonville typifies the relations between the nitrogen and hydrocarbon industries. Catalysis is here used both as a chemical concept and as a metaphor central to the proposed chemical cultural theory. As key to the Haber-Bosch process and refinery technologies in general, investigating the role of catalysis allows us to connect the history of the Petrochemical Corridor to that of German industrialism. This relation reveals how, from the late 19th century through to the World Wars, an ambivalent industrial co-operation between the US and Germany not only transformed local and planetary environments, it also contributed to the Anthropocene condition.

Description: Lateral stiffness of structural components, such as reinforced concrete (RC) columns, plays an important role in resisting the lateral earthquake loads. The lateral stiffness relates the lateral force to the lateral deformation, having a critical effect on the accuracy of the lateral seismic response predictions. The classical methods (e.g. fiber beam–column model) to estimate the lateral stiffness require calculations from section, element, and structural levels, which is time-consuming. Moreover, the shear deformation and bond-slip effect may also need to be included to more accurately calculate the lateral stiffness, which further increases the modeling difficulties and the computational cost. To reduce the computational time and enhance the accuracy of the predictions, this article proposes a novel data-driven method to predict the laterally seismic response based on the estimated lateral stiffness. The proposed method integrates the machine learning (ML) approach with the hysteretic model, where ML is used to compute the parameters that govern the nonlinear properties of the lateral response of target structural components directly from a training set composed of experimental data (i.e. data-driven procedure) and the hysteretic model is used to directly output the lateral stiffness based on the computed parameters and then to perform the seismic analysis. We apply the proposed method to predict the lateral seismic response of various types of RC columns subjected to cyclic loading and ground motions. We present the detailed model formulation for the application, including the developments of a modified hysteretic model, a hybrid optimization algorithm, and two data-driven seismic response solvers. The results predicted by the proposed method are compared with those obtained by classical methods with the experimental data serving as the ground truth, showing that the proposed method significantly outperforms the classical methods in both generalized prediction capabilities and computational efficiency.

Description: The PEER NGA-Sub ground-motion intensity measure database is used to develop new conditional ground-motion models (CGMMs), a set of scenario-based models, and non-conditional models to estimate the cumulative absolute velocity ([Formula: see text]) of ground motions from subduction zone earthquakes. In the CGMMs, the median estimate of [Formula: see text] is conditioned on the estimated peak ground acceleration ([Formula: see text]), the time-averaged shear-wave velocity in the top 30 m of the soil ([Formula: see text]), the earthquake magnitude ([Formula: see text]), and the spectral acceleration at the period of 1 s ([Formula: see text]). Multiple scenario-based [Formula: see text] models are developed by combining the CGMMs with pseudo-spectral acceleration ([Formula: see text]) ground-motion models (GMMs) for [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] to directly estimate [Formula: see text] given an earthquake scenario and site conditions. Scenario-based [Formula: see text] models are capable of capturing the complex ground-motion effects (e.g. soil non-linearity and regionalization effects) included in their underlying [Formula: see text]/[Formula: see text] GMMs. This approach also ensures the consistency of the [Formula: see text] estimates with a [Formula: see text] design spectrum. In addition, two non-conditional [Formula: see text] GMMs are developed using Bayesian hierarchical regressions. Finally, we present comparisons between the developed models. The comparisons show that if non-conditional GMMs are properly constrained, they are consistent with scenario-based GMMs. The [Formula: see text] GMMs developed in this study advance the performance-based earthquake engineering practice in areas affected by subduction zone earthquakes.

Description: The Mississippi River Basin is a vast near-planar surface, an area upon which sunlight falls and wind flows. Its gently banked geomorphology channels precipitation, sediment, biota, and human activity into a dynamic locus of regional Earth system interactions. This paper describes the major features of this region’s energy exchanges from a thermodynamic Earth systems perspective. This analysis is combined with descriptions of the historical and socio-political contexts that have helped shape energy use. In doing so, the paper contrasts the region’s available energy exchanges and flows with their anthropogenic diversion, providing an account of human impact at a regional scale. It also offers theoretical estimates of the potential availabilities of renewable energy. This is contrasted with a description of the geological formation of stocks of fossil energy in the region. On these bases, a number of maps are presented and an assessment of the region’s energy flows is offered. These exercises point to significant affordances for achieving regional de-fossilisation at the river basin scale.

Description: This report draws upon political ecology and nature–society geography to examine the production network–nature nexus. Indebted to these approaches, a growing number of production network and value chain studies are expanding well beyond the field’s traditional remit of environmental governance. This work centers the institutional arrangements of firms, laboratories, workers, and regulations that organize and combine extensive and intensive strategies to appropriate nature’s value. ‘Nature’ is neither input nor output here; rather, it is metabolized in and through the functional coordination of these spatially distributed activities. I explore these themes in recent studies of resource extraction and frontier-making, chemical geographies of biocides, and the material-cum-geographical claims of ethical supply chains. Expanding and deepening the dialogue between conjunctural analyses of states, labor, and supply chains, on the one hand, and how socionatures condition these arrangements, on the other, is both analytically and politically necessary. I offer this, my final report, as a modest contribution to this endeavor.

Description: Dynamic and unrestrained socio-economic development is upsetting the balance of nature’s mechanisms, causing a climate stalemate, or even climate destabilisation. After the Second World War a new political system – real socialism – was enforced on Poland. It brought about changes of a social, cultural, economic and environmental nature. Its immanent feature was the application of top-down decisions that did not take into account environmental components. There was also little ecological awareness within Polish society at that time. The transformations of the 1990s resulted not only in the liberalisation of the Polish economy, but also in the permeation of new trends oriented towards pro-environmental activities. The aim of the article is to find an answer to the question: How is ecological awareness currently shaped in the context of Anthropocene in Poland during the transition from a socialist economy to a capitalist economic system?

Description: Currently, conventional remediation of liquefaction triggering may have many environmental effects, and this important issue has led researchers to look for more sustainable methods. In this research, one of the new bio-improvement methods (biogas) has been used to generate gas bubbles within a soil, susceptible to liquefaction. Using this method, two bio materials create ammonium ions and carbonate, in which ammonium ion is converted into nitrate due to the presence of bacteria in water, and they are eventually converted to nitrogen gas in an anaerobic condition. The nitrogen bubbles created in water reduce the soil’s degree of saturation, which in effect increases the soil’s resistance to liquefaction occurrence. In this study, two sources of urease enzyme were used to reduce the soil degree of saturation. The effects of various parameters, including the optimum concentration of each substance for optimum time to generate gas bubbles, as well as the effect of the oxygen amount in water were investigated using monotonic triaxial tests. The results illustrated that the addition of the mentioned two substances to the oxab (water with 60 ppm oxygen) or tap water decreased the pore water pressure due to desaturation. Finally, the energy approach was used to test the substance containing the amount of oxab with the highest decrease in pore water generation, here called “optimum selection,” in the cyclic triaxial device, and the results were analyzed to evaluate liquefaction occurrence. The outcome of these results revealed that compared with the strain energy of the non-treated sample, the treated sample had a much higher strain energy; in other words, the treated sample needed a larger amount of loading to trigger liquefaction.