Nature Geoscience

Publications in this journal

• Article: Graphite formation by Carbonate reduction during subduction

  Galvez, Beyssac, Martinez, Benzerara, Malvoisin, Malavieille
  Nature Geoscience 06/2013;
• Article: Bottom-up disaster resilience

  Emily YY Chan
  Nature Geoscience 04/2013; 5(5):327-328.
• Article: Flash vaporization during earthquakes evidenced by gold deposits

  D.K. Weatherley, R.W. Henley
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  ABSTRACT: Much of the world’s known gold has been derived from arrays of quartz veins. The veins formed during periods of mountain building that occurred as long as 3 billion years ago and were deposited by very large volumes of water that flowed along deep, seismically active faults. The veins formed under fluctuating pressures during earthquakes, but the magnitude of the pressure fluctuations and their influence on mineral deposition is not known. Here we use a simple thermo-mechanical piston model to calculate the drop in fluid pressure experienced by a fluid-filled fault cavity during an earthquake. The geometry of the model is constrained using measurements of typical fault jogs, such as those preserved in the Revenge gold deposit in Western Australia, and other gold deposits around the world. We find that cavity expansion generates extreme reductions in pressure that cause the fluid that is trapped in the jog to expand to a very low-density vapour. Such flash vaporization of the fluid results in the rapid co-deposition of silica with a range of trace elements to form gold-enriched quartz veins. Flash vaporization continues as more fluid flows towards the newly expanded cavity, until the pressure in the cavity eventually recovers to ambient conditions. Multiple earthquakes progressively build economic-grade gold deposits.
  Nature Geoscience 03/2013;
• Article: Recent climate and ice sheet change in West Antarctica compared to the past 2000 years

  Eric J. Steig, Qinghua Ding, James W.C. White, Marcel Küttel, Summer B Rupper, Vaughn B, Thomas A Neumann, Peter Neff, Ailie J.E. Gallant, P.A. Mayewski, [......], Spruce W Schoenemann, Bradley Markle, David Paul Schneider, T.J. Fudge, Andrew J Shauer, Rebecca P Teel, Bruce H Vaughn, Landon Burgener, Jessica WIlliams, Elena Korotkikh
  Nature Geoscience 02/2013; in press.
• Article: Water in lunar anorthosites and evidence for a wet early Moon

  Hejiu Hui, Anne H. Peslier, Youxue Zhang, Clive R. Neal
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  ABSTRACT: The Moon was thought to be anhydrous since the Apollo era1, but this view has been challenged by detections of water on the lunar surface2–4 and in volcanic rocks5–9 and regolith10. Part of this water is thought to have been brought through solar wind implantation2–4,7,10 and meteorite impacts2,3,7,11, long after the primary lunar crust formed from the cooling magma ocean12,13. Here we show that this primary crust of the Moon contains significant amounts ofwater.We analysed plagioclase grains in lunar anorthosites thought to sample the primary crust, obtained in the Apollo missions, using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, and detected approximately 6 ppm water. We also detected up to 2.7 ppm water in plagioclase grains in troctolites also from the lunar highland upper crust. From these measurements, we estimate that the initial water content of the lunar magma ocean was approximately 320 ppm; water accumulating in the final residuum of the lunar magma ocean could have reached 1.4 wt%, an amount sufficient to explain water contents measured in lunar volcanic rocks. The presence of water in the primary crust implies a more prolonged crystallization of the lunar magma ocean than a dry moon scenario and suggests that water may have played a key role in the genesis of lunar basalts.
  Nature Geoscience 02/2013; 6:177-180.
• Article: Anchukaitis KJ, Breitenmose P, Briffa KR, Buchwal A, Büntgen U, Cook ER, D’Arrigo R, Esper J, Evans MN, Frank D, Grudd H, Gunnarson B, Hughes MK, Kirdyanov AV, Körner Ch, Krusic P, Luckman B, Melvin TM, Salzer MW, Shashkin V, Timmreck C, Vaganov E, Wilson R., 2012: Tree rings and volcanic cooling. Nature Geoscience 5: 836-837. doi:10.1038/ngeo1645

  Anchukaitis KJ, Breitenmose P, Briffa KR, Buchwal A, Büntgen U, Cook ER, D’Arrigo R, Esper J, Evans MN, Frank D, [......], Kirdyanov AV, Körner Ch, Krusic P, Luckman B, Melvin TM, Salzer MW, Shashkin V, Timmreck C, Vaganov E, Wilson R
  Nature Geoscience 02/2013;
• Article: Loss of carbon uptake during the turn of the century drought in western North America

  C.R. Schwalm, C.A. WIlliams, K. Schaefer, D.D. Baldocchi, A. Black, A.H. Goldstein, B.E. Law, W.C. Oechel, K.T. Paw U, R. Scott
  Nature Geoscience 02/2013; 5:551-556.
• Article: The contribution of glacial erosion to shaping the hidden East Antarctic landscape.

  Thomson, S.N, Reiners, P.W, Hemming, S.R. & Gehrels, G.E
  Nature Geoscience 02/2013; 6.
• Article: Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia

  PAGES 2k Network
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  ABSTRACT: Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between AD 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.
  Nature Geoscience 01/2013;
• Article: Nitrogen cycling driven by organic matter export in the South Pacific oxygen minimum zone

  Tim Kalvelage, Gaute Lavik, Phyllis Lam, Sergio Contreras, Lionel Arteaga, Carolin R. Löscher, Andreas Oschlies, Aurélien Paulmier, Lothar Stramma, Marcel M. M. Kuypers
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  ABSTRACT: Oxygen minimum zones are expanding globally, and at present account for around 20–40% of oceanic nitrogen loss. Heterotrophic denitrification and anammox—anaerobic ammonium oxidation with nitrite—are responsible for most nitrogen loss in these low-oxygen waters. Anammox is particularly significant in the eastern tropical South Pacific, one of the largest oxygen minimum zones globally. However, the factors that regulate anammox-driven nitrogen loss have remained unclear. Here, we present a comprehensive nitrogen budget for the eastern tropical South Pacific oxygen minimum zone, using measurements of nutrient concentrations, experimentally determined rates of nitrogen transformation and a numerical model of export production. Anammox was the dominant mode of nitrogen loss at the time of sampling. Rates of anammox, and related nitrogen transformations, were greatest in the productive shelf waters, and tailed off with distance from the coast. Within the shelf region, anammox activity peaked in both upper and bottom waters. Overall, rates of nitrogen transformation, including anammox, were strongly correlated with the export of organic matter. We suggest that the sinking of organic matter, and thus the release of ammonium into the water column, together with benthic ammonium release, fuel nitrogen loss from oxygen minimum zones.
  Nature Geoscience 01/2013; 6(3):228-234.
• Article: Non-solar forcing of Holocene storm dynamics in coastal sedimentary archives

  Philippe Sorrel, Maxime Debret, Isabelle Billeaud, Samuel L. Jaccard, Jerry McManus, Bernadette Tessier
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  ABSTRACT: Considerable climatic variability on decadal to millennial timescales has been documented for the past 11,500 years of interglacial climate1–3. This variability has been particularly pronounced at a frequency of about 1,500 years, with repeated cold intervals in the North Atlantic1,3 . However, there is growing evidence that these oscillations originate from a cluster of different spectral signatures4, ranging from a 2,500-year cycle throughout the period to a 1,000-year cycle during the earliest millennia. Here we present a reappraisal of high-energy estuarine and coastal sedimentary records from the southern coast of the English Channel, and report evidence for five distinct periods during the Holocene when storminess was enhanced during the past 6,500 years. We find that high storm activity occurred periodically with a frequency of about 1,500 years, closely related to cold and windy periods diagnosed earlier1–3. We show that millennial-scale storm extremes in northern Europe are phase-locked with the period of internal ocean variability in the North Atlantic of about 1,500 years4. However, no consistent correlation emerges between spectral maxima in records of storminess and solar irradiation. We conclude that solar activity changes are unlikely to be a primary forcing mechanism of millennial-scale variability in storminess.
  Nature Geoscience 12/2012; 5:892.