Published in Scientific Reports
Vrancea, Eastern Romania, presents a significant intermediate-depth seismicity, between 60 and 170 km depth, i.e. pressures from 2 to 6.5 GPa. A debate has been lasting for decades regarding the nature of the seismic volume, which could correspond to the remnant of a subducted slab of Tethyan lithosphere or a delamination of the Carpathians lithosp...
Inorganic polysulfur compounds (polysulfides, Sx2-; polysulfur radical ions, Sx·-; thiosulfate, S2O32-; polythionate, SxO62-; elemental sulfur, e.g. S8) participate in numerous geochemical processes related to the sulfur cycle. These include authigenic pyrite formation in sediments undergoing early stages of diagenesis, reactions associated with ma...
Published in Scientific reports
The Bangong-Nujiang Suture Zone (BNSZ) of Tibet (Xizang) has been interpreted to represent a relic of the Bangong-Nujiang Ocean. However, the existence of this ocean during Triassic time remains a point of contention. A sedimentary succession spanning the Upper Permian through Triassic described from the central BNSZ suggests that the Lhasa and Sou...
Published in Scientific Reports
We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atom...
Published in Nature Communications
Global climate changes triggered by massive output of greenhouse gases led to mass extinctions in Earth’s past. Here, the authors show that widespread release of methane at the time of the end-Triassic mass extinction was caused by interaction of a Large Igneous Province with sedimentary host-rocks.
Published in Scientific Reports
Magnetite is the main constituent of iron oxide–apatite (IOA) deposits, which are a globally important source of Fe and other elements such as P and REE, critical for modern technologies. Geochemical studies of magnetite from IOA deposits have provided key insights into the ore-forming processes and source of mineralizing fluids. However, to date, ...
Published in Scientific Reports
Carbon dioxide is the most abundant, non-condensable gas in volcanic systems, released into the atmosphere through either diffuse or advective fluid flow. The emission of substantial amounts of CO2 at Earth’s surface is not only controlled by volcanic plumes during periods of eruptive activity or fumaroles, but also by soil degassing along permeabl...
Published in Scientific Reports
The discrepancy between Na-rich compositions of modern carbonatitic lavas (Oldoinyo Lengai volcano) and alkali-poor ancient carbonatites remains a topical problem in petrology. Although both are supposedly considered to originate via fractional crystallization of a “common parent” alkali-bearing Ca-carbonatitic magma, there is a significant composi...
An adjoint-based formulation leads to a particularly efficient approach for inverting geodetic measurements for the source of the deformation. Specifically, the quantities necessary to iteratively improve the fit to the observations can be computed with just three forward calculations, one to obtain the current residuals, another to solve the adjoi...
This paper demonstrates a new method to classify mineral phases in 3D images of particulate materials obtained by x-ray computed micro-tomography (CT), here named mounted single particle characterization for 3D mineralogical analysis (MSPaCMAn). The method allows minimizing the impact of imaging artefacts that make the classification of voxels inac...
