The size of the bioavailable (i.e., “fixed”) nitrogen inventory in the ocean influences global marine productivity and the biological carbon pump. Despite its importance, the pre-industrial rates for the major source and sink terms of the oceanic fixed nitrogen budget, N₂ fixation and denitrification, respectively, are not well known. These...
Air was sampled from the porous firn layer at the NEEM site in Northern Greenland. We use an ensemble of ten reference tracers of known atmospheric history to characterise the transport properties of the site. By analysing uncertainties in both data and the reference gas atmospheric histories, we can objectively...
Biomass burning impacts vegetation dynamics, biogeochemical cycling, atmospheric chemistry, and climate, with sometimes deleterious socio-economic impacts. Under future climate projections it is often expected that the risk of wildfires will increase. Our ability to predict the magnitude and geographic pattern of future fire impacts rests on our ability to model...
Fibre optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) is widely applied in Earth sciences. Many applications require a spatial resolution higher than that provided by the DTS instrument. Measurements at these higher resolutions can be achieved with a fibre optic cable helically wrapped on a cylinder. The effect of the probe construction,...
Previous research has suggested that the use of more authentic learning activities can produce more robust and durable knowledge gains. This is consistent with calls within civil engineering education, specifically hydrology, that suggest that curricula should more often include professional perspective and data analysis skills to better develop the "T-shaped"...
The seasonal climate drivers of the carbon cycle in tropical forests remain poorly known, although these forests account for more carbon assimilation and storage than any other terrestrial ecosystem. Based on a unique combination of seasonal pan-tropical data sets from 89 experimental sites (68 include aboveground wood productivity measurements and...
We present the WD2014 chronology for the upper part (0–2850 m; 31.2 ka BP) of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide (WD) ice core. The chronology is based on counting of annual layers observed in the chemical, dust and electrical conductivity records. These layers are caused by seasonal changes...
Sea-level and ice-sheet databases have driven numerous advances in understanding the Earth system. We describe the challenges and offer best strategies that can be adopted to build self-consistent and standardised databases of geological and geochemical information used to archive palaeo-sea-levels and palaeo-ice-sheets. There are three phases in the development of...
Advances in trace gas analysis allow localised, non-atmospheric features to be resolved in ice cores, superimposed on the coherent atmospheric signal. These high-frequency signals could not have survived the low-pass filter effect that gas diffusion in the firn exerts on the atmospheric history and therefore do not result from changes...
A new weevil species (urn:lsid:zoobank.org: act:2D5E9E4A-A250-4D0A-AF69-CF4753436686), Pseudopilolabus othnius Poinar, Brown and Legalov, sp. nov. (Coleoptera: Attelabidae), is described from Dominican amber. The new species is close to the extant P. viridanus (Gyllenhal, 1839) and P. splendens (Gyllenhal, 1839) but differs by having a bronzed body, narrower and more convex elytral...