Late Miocene Mediterranean desiccation: topography and significance of the 'Salinity Crisis' erosion surface on-land in southeast Spain: Reply

We welcome this opportunity to amplify the results of our studies of the Late Miocene Messinian sequence in the Sorbas Basin of southeast Spain. The Salinity Crisis concept has captured geological imagination and found its way into textbooks, but scrutiny reveals its details to be disturbingly elusive. Our approach has been to read the history of this important episode in Neogene history in well-exposed on-land sections at Sorbas, Almería, near the western end of the Mediterranean. The Salinity Crisis concept, as it was first proposed (Hsü et al., 1973, 1977) and has largely survived (Cita, 1991), is of deep-desiccation and reflooding of the Mediterranean near the close of the Miocene. Marine downdraw resulted in marginal erosion; evaporites accumulated in depressions; and final marine reflooding completed the cycle. Our rationale is that if these principal tenets of the concept are correct, then one or more of their effects should be recorded throughout the region, both on the deep Mediterranean floor and in marginal basins that were contemporaneously connected to the Mediterranean, including the Sorbas Basin. This emphasis on the widespread effects of the Salinity Crisis does not exclude the possibility that they were overprinted by local conditions, which probably differed considerably over a region as extensive and diverse as the Mediterranean basins. Indeed, we have interpreted the evaporites of the Sorbas Basin to be local products of basin barring, related to the Salinity Crisis but not coeval with deep Mediterranean evaporites. At the same time, we have taken the view that the regional result of the Salinity Crisis in all marginal basins should be an erosion surface on the scale of the massive sea-level fall implied by the concept. It is our recognition of this erosion surface in the Sorbas Basin that has drawn most criticism from Fortuin et al. (2000). Here we provide further details of critical localities so that our observations can be accurately assessed

Reef response to sea-level and environmental changes during the last deglaciation: Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 310, Tahiti Sea Level

The last deglaciation is characterized by a rapid sea-level rise and coeval abrupt environmental changes. The Barbados coral reef record suggests that this period has been punctuated by two brief intervals of accelerated melting (meltwater pulses, MWP), occurring at 14.08-13.61 ka and 11.4-11.1 ka (calendar years before present), that are superimposed on a smooth and continuous rise of sea level. Although their timing, magnitude, and even existence have been debated, those catastrophic sea-level rises are thought to have induced distinct reef drowning events. The reef response to sea-level and environmental changes during the last deglacial sea-level rise at Tahiti is reconstructed based on a chronological, sedimentological, and paleobiological study of cores drilled through the relict reef features on the modern forereef slopes during the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 310, complemented by results on previous cores drilled through the Papeete reef. Reefs accreted continuously between 16 and 10 ka, mostly through aggradational processes, at growth rates averaging 10 mm yr-1. No cessation of reef growth, even temporary, has been evidenced during this period at Tahiti. Changes in the composition of coralgal assemblages coincide with abrupt variations in reef growth rates and characterize the response of the upward-growing reef pile to nonmonotonous sea-level rise and coeval environmental changes. The sea-level jump during MWP 1A, 16 ± 2 m of magnitude in ~350 yr, induced the retrogradation of shallow-water coral assemblages, gradual deepening, and incipient reef drowning. The Tahiti reef record does not support the occurrence of an abrupt reef drowning event coinciding with a sea-level pulse of ~15 m, and implies an apparent rise of 40 mm yr-1 during the time interval corresponding to MWP 1B at Barbados. © 2012 Geological Society of America

Anti-de Sitter boundary in Poincare coordinates

We study the space-time boundary of a Poincare patch of Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. We map the Poincare AdS boundary to the global coordinate chart and show why this boundary is not equivalent to the global AdS boundary. The Poincare AdS boundary is shown to contain points of the bulk of the entire AdS space. The Euclidean AdS space is also discussed. In this case one can define a semi-global chart that divides the AdS space in the same way as the corresponding Euclidean Poincare chart.Comment: In this revised version we add a discussion of the physical consequences of the choice of a coordinate system for AdS space. We changed figure 1 and added more references. Version to be published in Gen. Relat. Grav

Gauge/string duality and scalar glueball mass ratios

It has been shown by Polchinski and Strassler that the scaling of high energy QCD scattering amplitudes can be obtained from string theory. They considered an AdS slice as an approximation for the dual space of a confining gauge theory. Here we use this approximation to estimate in a very simple way the ratios of scalar glueball masses imposing Dirichlet boundary conditions on the string dilaton field. These ratios are in good agreement with the results in the literature. We also find that they do not depend on the size of the slice.Comment: 5 pages, no figures. References updated. Version published in JHE

Decay Properties of the Connectivity for Mixed Long Range Percolation Models on Zd\Z^d

In this short note we consider mixed short-long range independent bond percolation models on $\Z^{k+d}$. Let $p_{uv}$ be the probability that the edge $(u,v)$ will be open. Allowing a $x,y$-dependent length scale and using a multi-scale analysis due to Aizenman and Newman, we show that the long distance behavior of the connectivity $\tau_{xy}$ is governed by the probability $p_{xy}$. The result holds up to the critical point.Comment: 6 page

Magnetic field strength and orientation effects on co-fe discontinuous multilayers close to percolation

International audienceMagnetization and magnetoresistance in function of the magnitude and orientation of applied magnetic field were studied in Co-Fe discontinuous multilayers close to their structural percolation. The high pulsed magnetic fields up to 33 T were used in the 120–310 K temperature range. Comparison between longitudinal and transverse with respect to the film plane field configurations was made in the low-field and high-field regimes in order to clarify the nature of the measured negative magnetoresistance. Coexistence of two distinct magnetic fractions, superparamagnetic SPM, consisting of small spherical Co-Fe granules and superferromagnetic SFM, by bigger Co-Fe clusters, was established in this system. These fractions were shown to have different relevance for the system magnetization and magnetotransport. While the magnetization is almost completely up to 97% defined by the SFM contribution and practically independent of temperature in this range, the magnetoresistance experiences a crossover from a regime dominated by Langevin correlations suppressed with temperature between neighbor SPM and SFM moments at low fields, to that dominated by spin scattering enhanced with temperature of charge carriers within SFM clusters at high fields. Also, the demagnetizing effects, sensitive to the field orientation, were found to essentially define the low-field behavior and characteristic crossover field

Black-hole quasinormal modes and scalar glueballs in a finite-temperature AdS/QCD model

We use the holographic AdS/QCD soft-wall model to investigate the spectrum of scalar glueballs in a finite temperature plasma. In this model, glueballs are described by a massless scalar field in an AdS_5 black hole with a dilaton soft-wall background. Using AdS/CFT prescriptions, we compute the boundary retarded Green's function. The corresponding thermal spectral function shows quasiparticle peaks at low temperatures. We also compute the quasinormal modes of the scalar field in the soft-wall black hole geometry. The temperature and momentum dependences of these modes are analyzed. The positions and widths of the peaks of the spectral function are related to the frequencies of the quasinormal modes. Our numerical results are found employing the power series method and the computation of Breit-Wigner resonances.Comment: Revision: Results unchanged. More discussions on the model and on the results. References added. 28 pages, 7 figures, 5 table

The role of Amazonian anthropogenic soils in shifting cultivation: Learning from farmers’ rationales

We evaluated farmers’ rationales to understand their decision making in relation to the use of fertile anthropogenic soils, i.e., Amazonian dark earths (ADE), and for dealing with changes in shifting cultivation in Central Amazonia. We analyzed qualitative information from 196 interviews with farmers in 21 riverine villages along the Madeira River. In order to decide about crop management options to attain their livelihood objectives, farmers rely on an integrated and dynamic understanding of their biophysical and social environment. Farmers associate fallow development with higher crop yields and lower weed pressure, but ADE is always associated with high yields and high weeding requirements. Amazonian dark earths are also seen as an opportunity to grow different crops and/or grow crops in more intensified management systems. However, farmers often maintain simultaneously intensive swiddens on ADE and extensive swiddens on nonanthropogenic soils. Farmers acknowledge numerous changes in their socioeconomic environment that affect their shifting cultivation systems, particularly their growing interaction with market economies and the incorporation of modern agricultural practices. Farmers considered that shifting cultivation systems on ADE tend to be more prone to changes leading to intensification, and we identified cases, e.g., swiddens used for watermelon cultivation, in which market demand led to overintensification and resulted in ADE degradation. This shows that increasing intensification can be a potential threat to ADE and can undermine the importance of these soils for agricultural production, for the conservation of agrobiodiversity, and for local livelihoods. Given that farmers have an integrated knowledge of their context and respond to socioeconomic and agro-ecological changes in their environment, we argue that understanding farmers’ knowledge and rationales is crucial to identify sustainable pathways for the future of ADE and of smallholder agriculture in Amazonia. © 2016 by the author(s)