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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Mylanodon Rosei, A New Metacheiromyid (Mammalia: Palaeanodonta) From The Late Tiffanian (Late Paleocene) Of Northwestern Wyoming, Ross Secord, Philip D. Gingerich, Jonathan I. Bloch Dec 2002

Mylanodon Rosei, A New Metacheiromyid (Mammalia: Palaeanodonta) From The Late Tiffanian (Late Paleocene) Of Northwestern Wyoming, Ross Secord, Philip D. Gingerich, Jonathan I. Bloch

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Mylanodon rosei is a new genus and species of late Paleocene metacheiromyid palaeanodont from a new late Tiffanian locality, Y2K Quarry, in the Clarks Fork Basin, Wyoming. The type is an adult dentary with P4 and a molariform double-rooted M1. This provides the first evidence that molariform teeth were retained in early Metacheiromyidae. A second specimen is a juvenile dentary with a partial P3 and an unerupted P4. This is the first juvenile dentition known for a Paleocene metacheiromyid. The new specimens enable determination of dental homologies. Reduction of teeth in early metacheiromyids took …


Lake-Catchment Interactions With Climate In The Low Arctic Of Southern West Greenland, N. John Anderson, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Christopher E. Gibson, Bent Hasholt, Melanie J. Leng Dec 2002

Lake-Catchment Interactions With Climate In The Low Arctic Of Southern West Greenland, N. John Anderson, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Christopher E. Gibson, Bent Hasholt, Melanie J. Leng

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Arctic hydrology plays a central role in the earth’s heat balance and ocean circulation (Vörösmarty et al. 2001). Future changes associated with human influence on the climate system are also predicted to cause major changes in the energy and hydrologic mass balance of Arctic catchments. Climate change will likely affect permafrost and snowmelt, which dominate Arctic hydrology and control the chemistry of surface runoff (and hence streams and lakes) as water percolates through the active layer. However, the controls and dynamic impact of snowmelt are poorly understood, because this critical timeframe is often missed by sampling programs. In the Søndre …


Provenance Of Sand In Periglacial Sand Wedges And Sheet Sand, Northeastern Nebraska, Usa, William J. Wayne Dec 2002

Provenance Of Sand In Periglacial Sand Wedges And Sheet Sand, Northeastern Nebraska, Usa, William J. Wayne

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Sand-wedge polygons on upland surfaces beneath thin loess in northeastern Nebraska record existence of permafrost around the margin of the Wisconsinan glacier at its maximum advance. Strong unidirectional wind not only kept the upland surfaces free of snow, allowing frost to penetrate deeply and thermal contraction cracks to develop, but also dessicated the surface material so that frost action and sublimation of pore ice could loosen surface material. The strong NW-SE winds deflated soils from upland surfaces, made ventifacts of the cobbles in the lag that remained and created fields of yardangs oriented NW-SE. Sand derived from the soils and …


Early Deglaciation In The Tropical Andes, G. O. Seltzer, D. T. Rodbell, P. A. Baker, Sherilyn C. Fritz, P. M. Tapia, H. D. Rowe, R. B. Dunbar, Peter U. Clark Oct 2002

Early Deglaciation In The Tropical Andes, G. O. Seltzer, D. T. Rodbell, P. A. Baker, Sherilyn C. Fritz, P. M. Tapia, H. D. Rowe, R. B. Dunbar, Peter U. Clark

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Analysis of sediment records from lakes located beyond the glacial limit in the Andes has provided, for the first time, an independent assessment of effective moisture ( precipitation minus evaporation) and the timing of the last glaciation (1). Conditions were wet at the LGM and remained so until approximately 15,000 cal yr B.P. (2). However, deglaciation was under way from the LGM between 22,000 and 19,500 cal yr B.P., which reinforces the observation that deglaciation in the tropical Andes was primarily forced by an increase in mean annual temperature during a wet postglacial interval (3, 4).


Development And Implementation Of A Comprehensive Lake And Reservoir Strategy For Nebraska As A Model For Agricultural Dominated Ecosystems, John C. Holz, James W. Merchant, Anatoly A. Gitelson, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Kyle D. Hoagland, Istvan Bogardi, Donald C. Rundquist Sep 2002

Development And Implementation Of A Comprehensive Lake And Reservoir Strategy For Nebraska As A Model For Agricultural Dominated Ecosystems, John C. Holz, James W. Merchant, Anatoly A. Gitelson, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Kyle D. Hoagland, Istvan Bogardi, Donald C. Rundquist

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

In agriculturally dominated regions, land use practices have an unusually large impact on water bodies and, therefore, land use may reduce the utility of current ecoregion-based approaches to lake classification by dampening the signals that underlie the ecoregion framework. A team of water quality researchers has been assembled to develop a comprehensive classification scheme for agriculturally dominated ecosystems, using Nebraska as a highly representative model. Three objectives critical to achieving this goal are to establish: (1) a protocol for aggregating water bodies in agricultural ecosystems into classification strata and identifying reference conditions for these classes; (2) the role of remote …


Geomorphic Effectiveness, Sandur Development, And The Pattern Of Landscape Response During Jökulhlaups: Skeiöarársandur, Southeastern Iceland, F. J. Magilligan, B. Gomez, L. A. K. Mertes, L. C. Smith, Norman D. Smith, D. Finnegan, J. B. Garvin Jul 2002

Geomorphic Effectiveness, Sandur Development, And The Pattern Of Landscape Response During Jökulhlaups: Skeiöarársandur, Southeastern Iceland, F. J. Magilligan, B. Gomez, L. A. K. Mertes, L. C. Smith, Norman D. Smith, D. Finnegan, J. B. Garvin

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

By contrast with other historical outburst floods on Skeióarársandur, the 1996 jökulhlaup was unprecedented in its magnitude and duration, attaining a peak discharge of ~53,000 m3/s in <17 h. Using a combination of field sampling and remote sensing techniques (Landsat TM, SAR interferometry, airphotos, and laser altimetry), we document the sandur-wide geomorphic impacts of this event. These impacts varied widely across the Skeióarársandur and cannot be singularly attributed to jökulhlaup magnitude because pre-jökulhlaup glacial dynamics and the extant setting largely conditioned the spatial pattern, type, and magnitude of these impacts. Topographic lowering and asymmetric retreat of the ice front during the late twentieth century has decoupled the ice sheet from the moraine/sandur complex along the central and western sandur. This glacial control, in combination with the convex topography of the proximal sandur, promoted a shift from a primarily diffuse-source braided outwash system to a more point-sourced, channelized discharge of water and sediment. Deposition dominated within the proglacial depression, with approximately 3.8*107 m3 of sediment, and along channel systems that remained connected to subglacial sediment supplies. This shift to a laterally dissimilar, channelized routing system creates a more varied depositional pattern that is not explicitly controlled by the concave longitudinal profile down-sandur. Laterally contiguous units, therefore, may vary greatly in age and sediment character, suggesting that current facies models inadequately characterize sediment transfers when the ice front is decoupled from its …


The Mount Feather Diamicton Of The Sirius Group: An Accumulation Of Indicators Of Neogene Antarctic Glacial And Climatic History, G. A. Wilson, J. A. Barron, A. C. Ashworth, R. A. Askin, J. A. Carter, M. G. Curren, D. H. Dalhuisen, E. I. Friedmann, D. G. Fyodorov-Davidov, D. A. Gilichinsky, M. A. Harper, David M. Harwood, J. F. Hiemstra, T. R. Janecek, K. J. Licht, V. E. Ostroumov, R. D. Powell, E. M. Rivkina, S. A. Rose, A. P. Stroeven, P. Stroeven, J. J. M. Van Der Meer, M. C. Wizevich Jul 2002

The Mount Feather Diamicton Of The Sirius Group: An Accumulation Of Indicators Of Neogene Antarctic Glacial And Climatic History, G. A. Wilson, J. A. Barron, A. C. Ashworth, R. A. Askin, J. A. Carter, M. G. Curren, D. H. Dalhuisen, E. I. Friedmann, D. G. Fyodorov-Davidov, D. A. Gilichinsky, M. A. Harper, David M. Harwood, J. F. Hiemstra, T. R. Janecek, K. J. Licht, V. E. Ostroumov, R. D. Powell, E. M. Rivkina, S. A. Rose, A. P. Stroeven, P. Stroeven, J. J. M. Van Der Meer, M. C. Wizevich

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

A paucity of data from the Antarctic continent has resulted in conflicting interpretations of Neogene Antarctic glacial history. Much of the debate centres on interpretations of the glacigene Sirius Group strata that crop out as discrete deposits along the length of the Transantarctic Mountains and in particular on its age and the origin of the siliceous microfossils it encloses. Pliocene marine diatoms enclosed within Sirius Group strata are inferred to indicate a dynamic East Antarctic ice sheet that was much reduced, compared with today, in the early-middle Pliocene and then expanded again in the late Pliocene. However, the geomorphology of …


Groundwater Flow To A Horizontal Or Slanted Well In An Unconfined Aquifer, Hongbin Zhan, Vitaly A. Zlotnik Jul 2002

Groundwater Flow To A Horizontal Or Slanted Well In An Unconfined Aquifer, Hongbin Zhan, Vitaly A. Zlotnik

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

New semianalytical solutions for evaluation of the drawdown near horizontal and slanted wells with finite length screens in unconfined aquifers are presented. These fully three-dimensional solutions consider instantaneous drainage or delayed yield and aquifer anisotropy. As a basis, solution for the drawdown created by a point source in a uniform anisotropic unconfined aquifer is derived in Laplace domain. Using superposition, the point source solution is extended to the cases of the horizontal and slanted wells. The previous solutions for vertical wells can be described as a special case of the new solutions. Numerical Laplace inversion allows effective evaluation of the …


Early Warming Of Tropical South America At The Last Glacial-Interglacial Transition, G. O. Seltzer, D. T. Rodbell, P. A. Baker, Sherilyn C. Fritz, P. M. Tapia, H. D. Rowe, R. B. Dunbar May 2002

Early Warming Of Tropical South America At The Last Glacial-Interglacial Transition, G. O. Seltzer, D. T. Rodbell, P. A. Baker, Sherilyn C. Fritz, P. M. Tapia, H. D. Rowe, R. B. Dunbar

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Glaciation in the humid tropical Andes is a sensitive indicator of mean annual temperature. Here, we present sedimentological data from lakes beyond the glacial limit in the tropical Andes indicating that deglaciation from the Last Glacial Maximum led substantial warming at high northern latitudes. Deglaciation from glacial maximum positions at Lake Titicaca, Peru/Bolivia (16°S), and Lake Junin, Peru (11°S), occurred 22,000 to 19,500 calendar years before the present, several thousand years before the Bølling-Allerød warming of the Northern Hemisphere and deglaciation of the Sierra Nevada, United States (36.5° to 38°N). The tropical Andes deglaciated while climatic conditions remained regionally wet, …


Late-Quaternary Lowstands Of Lake Titicaca: Evidence From High-Resolution Seismic Data, Karin D'Agostino, Geoffrey Seltzer, Paul A. Baker, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Robert Dunbar Apr 2002

Late-Quaternary Lowstands Of Lake Titicaca: Evidence From High-Resolution Seismic Data, Karin D'Agostino, Geoffrey Seltzer, Paul A. Baker, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Robert Dunbar

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Approximately 600 km of high-resolution seismic reflection data were collected to investigate the late-Quaternary stratigraphic development of Lake Titicaca. The focus of this report is on two seismic sequence boundaries, which are interpreted as erosional surfaces formed at times of low lake level. The younger erosional surface occurs as much as 90 m below the present lake level and up to 8 m below the present sediment–water interface. This erosional surface is interpreted to be coeval with a well-documented early- to mid-Holocene lowstand, dated between ~8,000 and 3,600 cal yr BP. An earlier and previously unknown erosional surface occurs at …


Dynamic Interpretation Of Slug Tests In Highly Permeable Aquifers, Brian R. Zurbuchen, Vitalya. Zlotnik, James J. Butler Jr. Mar 2002

Dynamic Interpretation Of Slug Tests In Highly Permeable Aquifers, Brian R. Zurbuchen, Vitalya. Zlotnik, James J. Butler Jr.

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Considerable progress has been made in developing a theoretical framework for modeling slug test responses in formations with high hydraulic conductivity K. However, several questions of practical significance remain unresolved. Given the rapid and often oscillatory nature of test responses, the traditional hydrostatic relationship between the water level and the transducer-measured head in the water column may not be appropriate. A general dynamic interpretation is proposed that describes the relationship between water level response and transducer-measured head. This theory is utilized to develop a procedure for transforming model-generated water level responses to transducer readings. The magnitude of the difference …


Arctic Ocean Snow Melt Onset Dates Derived From Passive Microwave, A New Data Set, Mark R. Anderson, Sheldon D. Drobot Jan 2002

Arctic Ocean Snow Melt Onset Dates Derived From Passive Microwave, A New Data Set, Mark R. Anderson, Sheldon D. Drobot

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Snow melt onset is defined as the point in time when the appearance of liquid water in the snow pack changes the crystalline structure within the pack. Owing to the associated increase in surface albedo during melt, surface energy absorption increases rapidly after the onset of snow melt. Monitoring interannual variations in snow melt onset is therefore useful for accurately modeling surface conditions, and it is also valuable for validating climate models and detecting climate change. Since microwave emission changes rapidly when liquid water appears in the snow pack, passive microwave remote sensing techniques can monitor melt onset. Passive microwave …


Upper Cretaceous Diatom Biostratigraphy Of The Arctic Archipelago And Northern Continental Margin, Canada, Pedro M. Tapia, David M. Harwood Jan 2002

Upper Cretaceous Diatom Biostratigraphy Of The Arctic Archipelago And Northern Continental Margin, Canada, Pedro M. Tapia, David M. Harwood

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Strata in the Canadian Arctic contain diverse and moderately well-preserved Late Cretaceous siliceous microfossil assemblages. One-hundred-twelve samples were analyzed from a composite stratigraphic section (1094m-thick) of the Smoking Hills, Mason River and Kanguk formations. Four sections were examined: (1) Slidre Fjord on Ellesmere Island; (2) Hoodoo Dome on Ellef Ringnes Island; (3) Cape Nares on Eglinton Island; and (4) Horton River on the Anderson Plains, Northwest Territories. Two hundred- three diatom taxa were identified in forty-nine productive samples. Four Upper Cretaceous diatom zones are proposed for the Canadian Arctic based on the biostratigraphic distribution of diatoms: (i) the Upper Cenomanian …


Concordant Paleolatitudes For Neoproterozoic Ophiolitic Rocks Of The Trinity Complex, Klamath Mountains, California, Edward A. Mankinen, Nancy Lindsley-Griffin, John R. Griffin Jan 2002

Concordant Paleolatitudes For Neoproterozoic Ophiolitic Rocks Of The Trinity Complex, Klamath Mountains, California, Edward A. Mankinen, Nancy Lindsley-Griffin, John R. Griffin

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

New paleomagnetic results from the eastern Klamath Mountains of northern California show that Neoproterozoic rocks of the Trinity ophiolitic complex and overlying Middle Devonian volcanic rocks are latitudinally concordant with cratonal North America. Combining paleomagnetic data with regional geologic and faunal evidence suggests that the Trinity Complex and related terranes of the eastern Klamath plate were linked in some fashion to the North American craton throughout that time, but that distance between them may have varied considerably. A possible model that is consistent with our paleomagnetic results and the geologic evidence is that the Trinity Complex formed and migrated parallel …


New Amphicyonid Carnivorans (Mammalia, Daphoeninae) From The Early Miocene Of Southeastern Wyoming, Robert M. Hunt Jr. Jan 2002

New Amphicyonid Carnivorans (Mammalia, Daphoeninae) From The Early Miocene Of Southeastern Wyoming, Robert M. Hunt Jr.

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Latest Arikareean sediments of the upper Arikaree Group in southeastern Wyoming produced rare fossils of large, early Miocene amphicyonid carnivorans for field parties of the Frick Laboratory, American Museum, from 1932 to 1940. Recent geologic field investigations, including mapping, have discovered additional remains of these carnivorans, clarifying their geographic and stratigraphic distribution, and permitting a more informed description of the earlier collections. These carnivorans come from tuffaceous sandstones of the Upper Harrison beds, the terminal formation-rank unit of the Arikaree Group in southeastern Wyoming. A large species of the amphicyonid Daphoenodon (D. falkenbachi, n. sp.) occurs in northern …


Intercontinental Migration Of Neogene Amphicyonids (Mammalia, Carnivora): Appearance Of The Eurasian Beardog Ysengrinia In North America, Robert M. Hunt Jr. Jan 2002

Intercontinental Migration Of Neogene Amphicyonids (Mammalia, Carnivora): Appearance Of The Eurasian Beardog Ysengrinia In North America, Robert M. Hunt Jr.

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

At the beginning of the Neogene a remarkable faunal turnover occurred within the North American carnivore community. The dominant larger Oligocene carnivores (creodonts, nimravid cats, the amphicyonid Daphoenus) became extinct during the late Oligocene and were replaced in the early Miocene by amphicyonine amphicyonids and hemicyonine ursids that entered North America from Eurasia. During a five million-year interval from ~23 to 18 Ma, large amphicyonines appear in late Arikareean and early Hemingfordian faunas of the North American midcontinent. Although most fossils are from western Nebraska and southeastern Wyoming, occurrences of amphicyonines at several sites in the eastern United States …