Computers in Geology - 25 Years of Progress

This volume vividly demonstrates the importance and increasing breadth of quantitative methods in the earth sciences. With contributions from an international cast of leading practitioners, chapters cover a wide range of state-of-the-art methods and applications, including computer modeling and mapping techniques. Many chapters also contain reviews and extensive bibliographies which serve to make this an invaluable introduction to the entire field. In addition to its detailed presentations, the book includes chapters on the history of geomathematics and on R.G.V. Eigen, the "father" of mathematical geology. Written to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the International Association for Mathematical Geology, the book will be sought after by both practitioners and researchers in all branches of geology.

Radiocarbon ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 43 (2B) ◽  
pp. 731-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
D Lal ◽  
A J T Jull

Nuclear interactions of cosmic rays produce a number of stable and radioactive isotopes on the earth (Lai and Peters 1967). Two of these, 14C and 10Be, find applications as tracers in a wide variety of earth science problems by virtue of their special combination of attributes: 1) their source functions, 2) their half-lives, and 3) their chemical properties. The radioisotope, 14C (half-life = 5730 yr) produced in the earth's atmosphere was the first to be discovered (Anderson et al. 1947; Libby 1952). The next longer-lived isotope, also produced in the earth's atmosphere, 10Be (half-life = 1.5 myr) was discovered independently by two groups within a decade (Arnold 1956; Goel et al. 1957; Lal 1991a). Both the isotopes are produced efficiently in the earth's atmosphere, and also in solids on the earth's surface. Independently and jointly they serve as useful tracers for characterizing the evolutionary history of a wide range of materials and artifacts. Here, we specifically focus on the production of 14C in terrestrial solids, designated as in-situ-produced 14C (to differentiate it from atmospheric 14C, initially produced in the atmosphere). We also illustrate the application to several earth science problems. This is a relatively new area of investigations, using 14C as a tracer, which was made possible by the development of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). The availability of the in-situ 14C variety has enormously enhanced the overall scope of 14C as a tracer (singly or together with in-situ-produced 10Be), which eminently qualifies it as a unique tracer for studying earth sciences.


Author(s):  
Václav Nēmec

Friends and associates of Daniel F. Merriam have prepared this volume in Dan's honor to commemorate his 65th birthday and mark the 25th anniversary of the International Association for Mathematical Geology. This compendium is in the tradition of the Festschriften issued by European universities and scholarly organizations to honor an individual who has bequeathed an exceptional legacy to his students, associates, and his discipline. Certainly Dan has made such an impact on geology, and particularly mathematical geology. It is a great privilege for rne to write the introduction to this Festschrift. The editors are to be congratulated for their idea to collect and to publish so many representative scientific articles written by famous authors of several generations. Dan Merriam is the most famous mathematical geologist, in the world. This statement will probably provoke some criticism against an over-glorification of Dan. Some readers will have their own candidates (including themselves) for such a top position. I would like to bring a testimony that the statement is correct and far from an ad hoc judgment only for this solemn occasion. It may be of interest to describe how I became acquainted with Dan. In my opinion this will show how thin and delicate was the original tissue of invisible ties which helped to build up the first contacts among Western and Eastern colleagues in the completely new discipline of mathematical geology. The role of Dan Merriam in opening and increasing these contacts has been very active indeed. In the Fall 1964 I was on a family visit in the United States. This was— after the coup of Prague in 1948—my first travel to the free Western world. With some experience in computerized evaluation of ore deposits, I was curious to see the application of computers in geology and to meet colleagues who had experience with introducing statistical methods into regular estimation of ore reserves. I had very useful contacts in Colorado and in Arizona. In Tucson I visited the real birthplace of the APCOM symposia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 499 (4) ◽  
pp. 5334-5362
Author(s):  
Catriona A Sinclair ◽  
Mark C Wyatt ◽  
Alessandro Morbidelli ◽  
David Nesvorný

ABSTRACT Recent advances in our understanding of the dynamical history of the Solar system have altered the inferred bombardment history of the Earth during accretion of the Late Veneer, after the Moon-forming impact. We investigate how the bombardment by planetesimals left-over from the terrestrial planet region after terrestrial planet formation, as well as asteroids and comets, affects the evolution of Earth’s early atmosphere. We develop a new statistical code of stochastic bombardment for atmosphere evolution, combining prescriptions for atmosphere loss and volatile delivery derived from hydrodynamic simulations and theory with results from dynamical modelling of realistic populations of impactors. We find that for an initially Earth-like atmosphere, impacts cause moderate atmospheric erosion with stochastic delivery of large asteroids, giving substantial growth (× 10) in a few ${{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of cases. The exact change in atmosphere mass is inherently stochastic and dependent on the dynamics of the left-over planetesimals. We also consider the dependence on unknowns including the impactor volatile content, finding that the atmosphere is typically completely stripped by especially dry left-over planetesimals ($\lt 0.02 ~ {{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ volatiles). Remarkably, for a wide range of initial atmosphere masses and compositions, the atmosphere converges towards similar final masses and compositions, i.e. initially low-mass atmospheres grow, whereas massive atmospheres deplete. While the final properties are sensitive to the assumed impactor properties, the resulting atmosphere mass is close to that of current Earth. The exception to this is that a large initial atmosphere cannot be eroded to the current mass unless the atmosphere was initially primordial in composition.


2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Merriam ◽  
Richard Howarth

Statistical and mathematical techniques have been used in the earth sciences for about one-hundred years, but only after the introduction of the electronic computer in the mid-Twentieth Century did a revolution in the science take place. The story of the quantification of geology is best told through the works of those who fostered the dramatic change. Here is chronicled the contributions of six pioneers in numerical geology in short exposés by authors close to, and knowledgeable of, the people and their work. The pioneers include F. Chayes (American), J. C. Griffiths (American/Welsh), W. C. Krumbein (American/German), G. Matheron (French), R. A. Reyment (Australian/Swede), and A. B. Vistelius (Russian). These magnificent six also played a major role in forming the International Association for Mathematical Geology in 1968 at the International Geological Congress in Prague, Czechoslovakia.


1976 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leroy E. Alexander

In this paper an attempt is made to review in rather broad perspective the origins and history of quantitative methods in diffraction analysis, at the same time leaving an in-depth examination of the present state of the art to other better qualified contributors to this conference. Space limitations preclude mention of many significant contributions, for which I am very sorry. It will be possible to review only a number of pivotal historical events, while also taking note of certain other researches that seem representative of historical and present-day trends.The birth of quantitatively meaningful analysis in the mid-1930s depended upon a realisation of, and allowance for, the alteration of the diffracted intensities resulting from absorption of x-rays by the specimen. Furthermore, advances in the art achieved during the past forty years have been closely related to improvements in the treatment of the absorption factor.


Glottotheory ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamil Stachowski

AbstractThe term Piotrowski-Altmann law refers to a wide range of linguistic phenomena which proceed in the “slow-fast-slow” fashion, i.e. drawing a sigmoid on a graph. They include the replacement of an old morphological form with a new one, lexical borrowing between languages, the growth of a child’s vocabulary, and many others. The paper briefly discusses the history of the law, its current variants and their applications, and lastly science theoretical problems connected with it. It concludes that our law is in fact a group of psycho- and sociological models, whose application to linguistics requires further deliberation.


Author(s):  
Andrew P Jephcoat ◽  
M. Ali Bouhifd ◽  
Don Porcelli

The present state of the Earth evolved from energetic events that were determined early in the history of the Solar System. A key process in reconciling this state and the observable mantle composition with models of the original formation relies on understanding the planetary processing that has taken place over the past 4.5 Ga. Planetary size plays a key role and ultimately determines the pressure and temperature conditions at which the materials of the early solar nebular segregated. We summarize recent developments with the laser-heated diamond anvil cell that have made possible extension of the conventional pressure limit for partitioning experiments as well as the study of volatile trace elements. In particular, we discuss liquid–liquid, metal–silicate (M–Sil) partitioning results for several elements in a synthetic chondritic mixture, spanning a wide range of atomic number—helium to iodine. We examine the role of the core as a possible host of both siderophile and trace elements and the implications that early segregation processes at deep magma ocean conditions have for current mantle signatures, both compositional and isotopic. The results provide some of the first experimental evidence that the core is the obvious replacement for the long-sought, deep mantle reservoir. If so, they also indicate the need to understand the detailed nature and scale of core–mantle exchange processes, from atomic to macroscopic, throughout the age of the Earth to the present day.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (11) ◽  
pp. 2604-2619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elodie Laine ◽  
Yasaman Karami ◽  
Alessandra Carbone

Abstract The systematic and accurate description of protein mutational landscapes is a question of utmost importance in biology, bioengineering, and medicine. Recent progress has been achieved by leveraging on the increasing wealth of genomic data and by modeling intersite dependencies within biological sequences. However, state-of-the-art methods remain time consuming. Here, we present Global Epistatic Model for predicting Mutational Effects (GEMME) (www.lcqb.upmc.fr/GEMME), an original and fast method that predicts mutational outcomes by explicitly modeling the evolutionary history of natural sequences. This allows accounting for all positions in a sequence when estimating the effect of a given mutation. GEMME uses only a few biologically meaningful and interpretable parameters. Assessed against 50 high- and low-throughput mutational experiments, it overall performs similarly or better than existing methods. It accurately predicts the mutational landscapes of a wide range of protein families, including viral ones and, more generally, of much conserved families. Given an input alignment, it generates the full mutational landscape of a protein in a matter of minutes. It is freely available as a package and a webserver at www.lcqb.upmc.fr/GEMME/.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Elden

Abstract. This article discusses the way that the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) made a number of significant contributions to geography. In outlining his contributions as a geologist, palaeontologist, biologist, historian, political theorist and geopolitician, it challenges the straightforward way he is read in geography. Particular focus is on his Protogaea, the Annales Imperii and the Consilium Aegyptiacum, respectively a pre-history of the earth, a chronology of German nobility in the Middle Ages, and a military-strategic proposal to King Louis XIV. Making use of contemporary debates about ways of reading Leibniz, and drawing on a wide range of his writings, the article indicates just how much remains to be discovered about his work.


2019 ◽  
pp. 104-121
Author(s):  
A. B. Makalkin ◽  
I. N. Ziglina ◽  
M. E. Artyushkova

The development of the Earth’s and planets formation theory over 70 years is considered with a special focus on the history of development of this theory at the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IPE RAS) where this direction of research was founded by Otto Schmidt. The state of the art of the theory is outlined. In particular, the planetesimals formation problem currently belonging to the key unsolved issues in the theory of planet formation is discussed. Recent results of the studies aimed at solving this problem at IPE RAS are presented.


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