How do drying and rewetting events affect nutrient fluxes and bacteria dynamics in subtropical estuarine sediments?

Drying and rewetting occur frequently in coastal marsh sediments due to oscillations of rising and falling tides, and episodic droughts and floods. Similarly, drying events also occur within freshwater systems due to changing precipitation patterns. However, little is known about how these events affect biogeochemical processes in sediments. In this study we examined the effects of drying on the release of nutrients from sediments to overlying waters, together with associated bacterial dynamics. We incubated dried and rewetted salt marsh sediments collected from the Nueces River mouth at the Nueces Salt Marsh (NSM) and from a freshwater section of the Mission River (MR) in South Texas. During the incubations, we quantified the nutrients released and changes of bacterial abundance and community structure in slurries of wet and dry sediments under anoxic conditions. Our results showed that ammonium concentrations increased steadily for both NSM and MR dry treatment incubations, reaching a maximum of 203 and 51 μM respectively, as compared to only 124 and 2 μM in the wet treatments. Phosphate concentrations steadily increased throughout the incubation in the NSM dry treatment, but not in the wet treatment where concentrations remained below 5 μM. In contrast, we observed an opposite trend in the MR sediment with phosphate concentrations in the dry treatment remaining below those in the wet treatment throughout the incubation. The atomic C/N ratios for NSM and MR sediments ranged from 10 to 14 for both MR and NSM treatments, however they were significantly lower in the supernatants of the NSM dry treatment (12). Although both NSM and MR had higher ammonium releases in the dry treatments than the wet ones, patterns in phosphate release and C/N ratios of dissolved organic matter differed in these two sediments, likely resulting from the differences in salinity and grain size distribution. Bacteria that developed in the slurry of NSM dried sediment included Bacillus, Anaerobacillus, Haloplasma, and Vibrio; these species were perhaps involved in decomposing sedimentary organic matter, including lysates from biota killed by the drying. The MR sediment slurry developed a different microbial community, where Gemmobacter, Rhodobacter, and Mycoplasma were most notable in the dried treatment. Overall, this study demonstrates that drying and rewetting events can increase nutrient fluxes out of marsh sediments and affect bacterial communities, important in estuarine biogeochemical processes. Information on this topic is important in the context of the increasing frequency of extreme droughts and floods and rising sea levels associated with global change.Marine Scienc

Slag ladle insulation

Slag from Pasminco's lead-zinc smelters, which is rich in zinc, is transferred in thirteen tonne capacity ladles from the blast furnace to the slag fuming furnace. The cycle time is about three hours. The Study Group was asked to examine whether heat could be conserved by some insulation strategy, without at any stage overheating the steel of the ladle

A simple model for the short-time evolution of near-surface current and temperature profiles

A simple analytical/numerical model has been developed for computing the evolution, over periods of up to a few hours, of the current and temperature profile in the upper layer of the ocean. The model is based upon conservation laws for heat and momentum, and employs an eddy diffusion parameterisation which is dependent on both the wind speed and the wind stress applied at the sea surface. Other parameters such as the bulk-skin surface temperature difference and CO$_2$ flux are determined by application of the Molecular Oceanic Boundary Layer Model (MOBLAM) of Schluessel and Soloviev. A similar model, for the current profile only, predicts a temporary increase in wave breaking intensity and decrease in wave height under conditions where the wind speed increases suddenly, such as, for example, during gusts and squalls. The model results are compared with measurements from the lagrangian Skin Depth Experimental Profiler (SkinDeEP) surface profiling instrument made during the 1999 MOCE-5 field experiment in the waters around Baja California. SkinDeEP made repeated profiles of temperature within the upper few metres of the water column. Given that no tuning was performed in the model, and that the model does not take account of stratification, the results of the model runs are in rather good agreement with the observations. The model may be suitable as an interface between time-independent models of processes very near the surface, and larger-scale three-dimensional time-dependent ocean circulation models. A straightforward extension of the model should also be suitable for making time-dependent computations of gas concentration in the near-surface layer of the ocean.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. In press at Deep-Sea Research II. Uses a modified form of elsart.cls. Proof correction

Slurry behaviour in separation devices

Four different modelling approaches for slurry behaviour in cyclones are considered: bulk flow models, a simple continuum model, hydrodynamic models and so-called wet granular flow models. The aim is to consider the utility of each approach for design purposes. It is concluded that bulk flow models and the simple continuum model are inadequate for such use, principally because they are unable to account for geometrical effects which affect the flow. However, both the hydrodynamic models and the wet granular flow approach show considerable promise for the task, due to recent increases in computer power and improved models and algorithms. Of these two approaches, the hydrodynamic models are the more mature, but the wet granular flow approach has the advantage of being based explicitly on particle motion

Bosonic Operator Methods for the Quark Model

Quark model matrix elements can be computed using bosonic operators and the holomorphic representation for the harmonic oscillator. The technique is illustrated for normal and exotic baryons for an arbitrary number of colors. The computations are much simpler than those using conventional quark model wavefunctions

Simultaneous measurement of circular dichroism and Faraday rotation at terahertz frequencies using heterodyne detection

A far-infrared system measures the full complex Faraday angle, rotation as well as ellipticity, with an unprecedented accuracy of 10\,$\mu$rad/T. The system operates on several far-infrared laser lines in the spectral range from 0.3 to 6 THz and produces results as a continuous function of temperature from 10 to 310K and applied fields between $\pm$ 8\,T. Materials successfully measured include GaAs 2-DEG heterostructures, various high temperature superconductors including Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+x}$, Pr$_{2 - x}$Ce$_{x}$CuO$_4$, and La$_{2-x}$Sr$_x$CuO$_4$, and single crystals of the topological insulator Bi$_2$Se$_3$.Comment: Submitted to Review of Scientific Instruments (RSI