Communicating the relevance of paleo research in the current societal environment

It is not an easy task for paleoscientists to communicate the relevance of their research to policy makers and funders. However, an increase in catastrophic environmental calamities related to climate change (e.g. landslide, droughts, flooding) demands a response both in terms of policy-making and future governmental decisions. Often, climate change in the recent past was linked to major shifts in human behavior, which masks the relative contribution of humans and nature. For example, the 4.2 ka BP aridification event was so severe that it may have triggered the collapse of several large civilizations (the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia; Gibbons 1993). Compilations of long-term records of past variability can help reduce the uncertainties on past, present and future climate changes, and thus support informed societal decisions. Therefore, policymakers should (and some may argue, must) consider the long-term perspective provided by paleoscience research

Double Beta Decay: Historical Review of 75 Years of Research

Main achievements during 75 years of research on double beta decay have been reviewed. The existing experimental data have been presented and the capabilities of the next-generation detectors have been demonstrated.Comment: 25 pages, typos adde

Neutron-induced fission cross sections of short-lived actinides with the surrogate reaction method

Neutron-induced fission cross sections for 242,243Cm and 241Am have been obtained with the surrogate reaction method. Recent results for the neutron-induced cross section of 243Cm are questioned by the present data. For the first time, the 242Cm cross section has been determined up to the onset of second-chance fission. The good agreement at the lowest excitation energies between the present results and the existing neutron-induced data indicates that the distributions in spin and parity of states populated with both techniques are similar

PaCTS 1.0: a crowdsourced reporting standard for paleoclimate data

The progress of science is tied to the standardization of measurements, instruments, and data. This is especially true in the Big Data age, where analyzing large data volumes critically hinges on the data being standardized. Accordingly, the lack of community-sanctioned data standards in paleoclimatology has largely precluded the benefits of Big Data advances in the field. Building upon recent efforts to standardize the format and terminology of paleoclimate data, this article describes the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standard (PaCTS), a crowdsourced reporting standard for such data. PaCTS captures which information should be included when reporting paleoclimate data, with the goal of maximizing the reuse value of paleoclimate datasets, particularly for synthesis work and comparison to climate model simulations. Initiated by the LinkedEarth project, the process to elicit a reporting standard involved an international workshop in 2016, various forms of digital community engagement over the next few years, and grassroots working groups. Participants in this process identified important properties across paleoclimate archives, in addition to the reporting of uncertainties and chronologies; they also identified archive-specific properties and distinguished reporting standards for new vs. legacy datasets. This work shows that at least 135 respondents overwhelmingly support a drastic increase in the amount of metadata accompanying paleoclimate datasets. Since such goals are at odds with present practices, we discuss a transparent path towards implementing or revising these recommendations in the near future, using both bottom-up and top-down approaches

A Fiji multi-coral delta O-18 composite approach to obtaining a more accurate reconstruction of the last two-centuries of the ocean-climate variability in the South Pacific Convergence Zone region

The limited availability of oceanographic data in the tropical Pacific Ocean prior to the satellite era makes coral-based climate reconstructions a key tool for extending the instrumental record back in time, thereby providing a much needed test for climate models and projections. We have generated a unique regional network consisting of five Porites coral O-18 time series from different locations in the Fijian archipelago. Our results indicate that using a minimum of three Porites coral O-18 records from Fiji is statistically sufficient to obtain a reliable signal for climate reconstruction, and that application of an approach used in tree ring studies is a suitable tool to determine this number. The coral O-18 composite indicates that while sea surface temperature (SST) variability is the primary driver of seasonal O-18 variability in these Fiji corals, annual average coral O-18 is more closely correlated to sea surface salinity (SSS) as previously reported. Our results highlight the importance of water mass advection in controlling Fiji coral O-18 and salinity variability at interannual and decadal time scales despite being located in the heavy rainfall region of the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ). The Fiji O-18 composite presents a secular freshening and warming trend since the 1850s coupled with changes in both interannual (IA) and decadal/interdecadal (D/I) variance. The changes in IA and D/I variance suggest a re-organization of climatic variability in the SPCZ region beginning in the late 1800s to period of a more dominant interannual variability, which could correspond to a southeast expansion of the SPCZ

Determination of the233Pa(n, gamma) capture cross section up to neutron energies of 1 MeV using the transfer reaction 232 ThHe, p234Pa

The γ-ray emission probability distribution of 234Pa* has been measured between 5.2 and 6.2 MeV excitation energy using the transfer reaction 232Th(3He, p)234Pa* at an incident 3He energy of 24 MeV. The experimental set-up is made of four liquid scintillator C6D6 detectors and four Si telescopes arranged to detect γ rays and charged particles in coincidence. In order to determine the total number of γ-ray cascades in a given nucleus, the raw experimental detected gamma-ray events have to be corrected by the weighting function technique. This weighting requires complete knowledge of the efficiency and response functions for the C6D6 detector set-up and surroundings. These have been determined experimentally using gamma-ray sources, inelastic scattering reactions and transfer reactions on light nuclei. Simulations which reproduce successfully the detector response and efficiency are presented. From these measurements, the (n, γ) capture cross section of 233Pa, in the neutron energy range 0 to 1 MeV, has been deduced via the product of the measured γ emission probability of 234Pa* with the calculated compound nucleus formation cross section of the reaction 233Pa + n. A comparison between existing data bases or recent predictions and the present results is also made

Climatic Constraints on Growth Rate and Geochemistry (Sr/Ca and U/Ca) of the Coral Siderastrea stellata in the Southwest Equatorial Atlantic (Rocas Atoll, Brazil)

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