Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Statistics and Probability
High mountain Asia holds the largest glacier mass on Earth outside the polar regions. In combination with monsoonal rainfall, glacial meltwater provides the downstream Indo-Gangetic river basins with indispensable water resources. These rivers supply 1.2 billion people with water and their water resources are essential for many sectors including the world's largest connected irrigated cropland [...]
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Scaling relationships provide simple rules for understanding complex ecological patterns. We evaluated scaling relationships between whole-lake (benthic + pelagic) primary production and the surface areas and volumes of 73 lakes. Whole-lake primary production scales isometrically with surface area, after accounting for latitudinal gradients of temperature and insolation. Whole-lake primary [...]
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Global-scale characterizations of Earth's lakes and ponds assume their surface areas are power-law distributed across the full size range. However, empirical power-laws only hold across finite ranges of scales. In this paper, we synthesize evidence for upper and lower limits to power-law behavior in lake size-distributions. We find support for the power-law assumption in general. We also find [...]
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Maximum depth varies among lakes from $<$1 to 1741 meters, but attempts to explain this variation have achieved little predictive power. In this paper, we describe the probability distribution of maximum depths based on recent developments in the theory of fractal Brownian motions. The theoretical distribution is right-tailed and adequately captures variations in maximum depth in a dataset of [...]
Published: 2022-02-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Modern to Holocene tropical Pacific stalagmites are commonly difficult to date with the U-series, the most commonly used dating method for speleothems. When U-series does not provide robust age models, due to multiple sources of 230Th or little U, radiocarbon is, potentially, the best alternative. The 14C content of two stalagmites (Pu17 and Nu16) collected from Pouatea and Nurau caves in the [...]
Published: 2022-02-18
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Sedimentology
Freshwater suspended particulate matter (SPM) plays an important role in many biogeochemical cycles and serves multiple ecosystem functions. Most SPM is present as complex floc-like aggregate structures composed of various minerals and organic matter from the molecular to the organism level. Flocs provide habitat for microbes and feed for larger organisms. They constitute microbial bioreactors, [...]
Published: 2022-02-17
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Over the last decades, treatment of domestic wastewater promoted by environmental regulations have reduced human health risks and improved water quality. However, ecological risks caused by effluents of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) discharged into rivers still persist. Moreover, the evolution of these ecological risks in the future is intimately related to effects of changing climate, [...]
Published: 2022-02-15
Subjects: Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Instructional Media Design, Planetary Sciences
A standard internet image search on a scientific topic is common practice, and offers a plethora of images. However, the suggested images provide neither a guarantee in the accuracy of the science content being portrayed, nor in their clarity or artistic elegance. Being curated by both scientists and artists, the online s-Ink collection (https://s-Ink.org) is, in contrast, an exchange platform [...]
Published: 2022-02-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets are driving interest in opportunities for biomass-based negative emissions and bioenergy, including from marine sources such as seaweed. Yet the biophysical and economic limits to farming seaweed at scales relevant to the global carbon budget have not been assessed in detail. We use coupled seaweed growth and technoeconomic models to estimate the costs of [...]
Published: 2022-02-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding, prioritizing, and mitigating methane (CH4) emissions requires quantifying methane budgets from facility scales to regional scales with the ability to differentiate between source sectors. We deployed a tiered observing system for multiple basins in the United States (San Joaquin Valley, Uintah, Denver-Julesberg, Permian, Marcellus). We quantify strong point source emissions (>10 kg [...]
Published: 2022-01-28
Subjects: Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Risk Analysis
Most land surface system models and observational assessments ignore detailed soil characteristics while describing the drought attributes such as growth, duration, recovery, and the termination rate of the event. With the national-scale digital soil maps available for India, we assessed the climate-catchment-soil nexus using daily observed streamflow records from 98 sites in tropical [...]
Published: 2022-01-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Improved high-resolution paleo records of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and reconstructions of Earth’s surface temperature are available. We analyze one authoritative Pleistocene data set to explore how the climate sensitivity parameter S varies under different system states, using linear regression of mean annual surface temperature changes against CO2 forcing changes. On the [...]
Published: 2022-01-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
There is growing concern in Higher Education around job security, work-life balance and inequalities, and early career academics must make difficult trade-offs and life choices. Ample literature confirms that women navigating academia face additional challenges. Few studies have sought to connect contractual circumstances, employment priorities and their impacts on the life choices of individual [...]
Published: 2022-01-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The past three decades have witnessed the dramatic expansion of global biomass- and fossil fuel-fired power plants, but the tremendously diverse power infrastructure shapes different spatial and temporal CO2 emission characteristics. Here, by combining Global Power plant Emissions Database (GPED v1.1) constructed in this study and the previously developed China coal-fired power Plant Emissions [...]
Published: 2021-12-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
It is critical to obtain accurate flood extent predictions in a timely manner in order to reduce flood-related casualties and economic losses. Running a real-time flood inundation mapping model is a critical step in supporting quick flood response decisions. Most inundation systems, on the other hand, are either overly demanding in terms of data and computing power or have limited interaction and [...]