Filtering by Subject: Chemistry
Published: 2022-09-16
Subjects: Chemistry, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Based on the paper by Pan et al., on the early Earth >4.2 Ga with limited exposed land areas, coupled with an ice covered ocean, lightning could have been rare. This presents a conundrum because lightning is considered to be an important energy source needed for the synthesis of prebiotic compounds required for the origin of life. Lightning occurrence during eruptions on wide spread volcanic [...]
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
As ozonation becomes a widespread treatment for removal of trace organic chemicals in wastewater treatment plant effluents, there are increasing concerns regarding the formation of ozonation transformation products (OPs), and their possible impacts on the aquatic environment and eventually human health. In this study, a novel method was developed that utilizes the heavy oxygen isotope (18O) for [...]
Published: 2022-05-17
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
In this discussion, we highlight that the terms sorption and adsorption are often confused and misused in many articles. Even if one thought their formal definition is well known, this does not appear to be the case. We recommend encouragement to adopt the word adsorption only when fully supported by appropriate data and using the sorption terminology when it is more speculative, typically in [...]
Published: 2021-12-10
Subjects: Analytical Chemistry, Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Pearl River drains the second largest watershed in China, funnelling large amounts of freshwater and organic matter into the northern part of the South China Sea through an estuary characterized by pronounced biogeochemical gradients. In this study we analyzed organic extracts of surface sediments collected along land-sea transect that captures a transition from freshwater environment at the [...]
Published: 2021-03-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Salton Sea—a hypersaline, terminal lake in southern California—is in crisis. A combination of mismanagement and competition among federal, state and local agencies has hindered efforts to address declining lake levels and unstable water chemistry. This delay has heightened the public health threat to regional communities as retreating shorelines expose dry lakebed— a source of potentially [...]
Published: 2021-02-24
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Patawarta Diapir, located in the Central Flinders Ranges, South Australia, has been interpreted as a single allochthonous salt sheet containing Tonian-aged igneous and layered evaporite sedimentary intrasalt inclusions derived from the Callanna Group. Using detailed field mapping, petrographic analysis, and lithostratigraphic correlation within Patawarta Diapir, five primarily silty limestone [...]
Published: 2020-11-28
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rationale: Clumped isotope geochemistry examines the pairing or clumping of rare, heavy isotopes in molecules and provides information about the thermodynamic and kinetic controls on their formation. Since clumped isotope measurements of carbonate minerals were first published 15 years ago, interlaboratory offsets in calibrations have been observed, and laboratory and community practices for [...]
Published: 2020-07-17
Subjects: Analytical Chemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Multivariate Analysis, Optics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Sedimentology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a non-destructive high-resolution sensor, which is currently under significant development to analyze geological areas with remote devices or natural samples in a laboratory. In both cases, the hyperspectral image provides several sedimentary structures that need to be separated to temporally and spatially describe the sample. Sediment sequences are composed of [...]
Published: 2020-07-08
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The counter carbonate pump(CCP) is responsible for carbon dioxide sequestration and cycling forms of carbon in the ocean. It is primarily driven by calcifying plankton, such as foraminifera, coccolithophores, and pteropods. These organisms are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification, which can have disastrous effects on their skeletons and productivity, upsetting the marine carbon cycle in [...]
Published: 2020-03-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Atmospheric chemistry models—used as components in models that simulate air pollution and climate change—are computationally expensive. Previous studies have shown that machine-learned atmospheric chemical solvers can be orders of magnitude faster than traditional integration methods but tend to suffer from numerical instability. Here, we present a modeling framework that reduces error [...]
Published: 2020-01-30
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Chemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The absence of organic compounds from Precambrian iron formations (IF) challenges the hypothesis of the biogenic origin of IF. Here we address the fate of adsorbed organic compounds during transformation from ferrihydrite to hematite. We determined the binding energy between hematite and common molecular terminations found in extracellular polymeric substances and biofilms: carboxylic, hydroxyl [...]
Published: 2019-12-04
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Materials Chemistry, Mineral Physics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A large class of solid solution models are built on the premise that exchange of chemical species takes place on a finite number of unique sites, and that the thermodynamic properties of the solution are a function of the proportions of species occupying each of the sites. The site-occupancy spaces spanned by such models are geometrically equivalent to convex polytopes, n-dimensional [...]
Published: 2019-10-31
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Chemistry, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Chemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In this work we study the adsorption, or uptake, of water onto deposited inorganic sodium chloride and organic malonic acid and sucrose nanoparticles at low relative humidities from 0 to 16%. We employ the surface sensitive ambient pressure x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy technique, which has a detection sensitivity from parts per thousand. Our results show that water is adsorbed on sodium [...]
Published: 2019-10-25
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
There have been numerous environmental geochemistry studies using chemical, geological, ecological and toxicological methods but each of these fields requires more subject specialist rigour than has generally been applied so far. Field-specific terminology has been misused and the resulting interpretations rendered inaccurate. In this paper, we propose a series of suggestions, based on our [...]
Published: 2019-06-18
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Studies assessing the environmental impacts of oil spills focus primarily on the non-water-soluble components, leaving the fate of the water-soluble fraction (WSF) largely unexplored. We employed untargeted chemical analysis along with biological information to probe the transformation of crude oil WSF in seawater, in the absence of light, in a laboratory experiment. Over a 14-day incubation, [...]