302 research outputs found
Fungal decomposition of terrestrial organic matter accelerated Early Jurassic climate warming
This is the final version of the article. Available from Nature via the DOI in this record.Soils â constituting the largest terrestrial carbon pool - are vulnerable to climatic warming. Currently existing uncertainties regarding carbon fluxes within terrestrial systems can be addressed by studies of past carbon cycle dynamics and related climate change recorded in sedimentary successions. Here we show an example from the Early Jurassic (early Toarcian, c. 183 mya) marginal-marine strata from Poland, tracking the hinterland response to climatic changes through a super-greenhouse event. In contrast to anoxia-related enhanced carbon storage in coeval open marine environments, Total Organic Carbon (TOC) concentrations in the Polish successions are substantially reduced during this event. Increasing temperature favoured fungal-mediated decomposition of plant litter â specifically of normally resistant woody tissues. The associated injection of oxidized organic matter into the atmosphere corresponds to abrupt changes in standing vegetation and may have contributed significantly to the amplified greenhouse climate on Earth. The characteristic Toarcian signature of multiple warm pulses coinciding with rapidly decreasing carbon isotope ratios may in part be the result of a radical reduction of the terrestrial carbon pool as a response to climate change.This paper is a part of the project financed from resources of the Polish National Science Centre, granted on the
basis of decision no. DEC-2012/06/M/ST10/00478. C.V.U. was supported by the Leopoldina - German National
Academy of Sciences (grant no LPDS 2014-08), and G.P. by the scientific funds of the Polish Geological Institute,
project 61.3608.1501.00.0. This is a contribution to the IGCP project 632 âContinental Crises of the Jurassicâ. We
thank PrzemysĆaw Karcz for performing RockEval pyrolithic analyses and Stephen Hesselbo and anonymous
reviewer for valuable remarks
Thermal excitation of heavy nuclei with 5-15 GeV/c antiproton, proton and pion beams
Excitation-energy distributions have been derived from measurements of
5.0-14.6 GeV/c antiproton, proton and pion reactions with Au target
nuclei, using the ISiS 4 detector array. The maximum probability for
producing high excitation-energy events is found for the antiproton beam
relative to other hadrons, He and beams from LEAR. For protons
and pions, the excitation-energy distributions are nearly independent of hadron
type and beam momentum above about 8 GeV/c. The excitation energy enhancement
for beams and the saturation effect are qualitatively consistent with
intranuclear cascade code predictions. For all systems studied, maximum cluster
sizes are observed for residues with E*/A 6 MeV.Comment: 14 pages including 5 figures and 1 table. Accepted in Physics Letter
B. also available at http://nuchem.iucf.indiana.edu
The liquid to vapor phase transition in excited nuclei
For many years it has been speculated that excited nuclei would undergo a
liquid to vapor phase transition. For even longer, it has been known that
clusterization in a vapor carries direct information on the liquid- vapor
equilibrium according to Fisher's droplet model. Now the thermal component of
the 8 GeV/c pion + 197Au multifragmentation data of the ISiS Collaboration is
shown to follow the scaling predicted by Fisher's model, thus providing the
strongest evidence yet of the liquid to vapor phase transition.Comment: four pages, four figures, first two in color (corrected typo in Ref.
[26], corrected error in Fig. 4
Signals for a Transition from Surface to Bulk Emission in Thermal Multifragmentation
Excitation-energy-gated two-fragment correlation functions have been studied
between 2 to 9A MeV of excitation energy for equilibrium-like sources formed in
and p + Au reactions at beam momenta of 8,9.2 and 10.2 GeV/c.
Comparison of the data to an N-body Coulomb-trajectory code shows a decrease of
one order of magnitude in the fragment emission time in the excitation energy
interval 2-5A MeV, followed by a nearly constant breakup time at higher
excitation energy. The observed decrease in emission time is shown to be
strongly correlated with the increase of the fragment emission probability, and
the onset of thermally-induced radial expansion. This result is interpreted as
evidence consistent with a transition from surface-dominated to bulk emission
expected for spinodal decomposition.Comment: 11 pages including 3 postscript figures (1 color
Tracking the phase-transition energy in disassembly of hot nuclei
In efforts to determine phase transitions in the disintegration of highly
excited heavy nuclei, a popular practice is to parametrise the yields of
isotopes as a function of temperature in the form
, where 's are the measured yields
and and are fitted to the yields. Here would be
interpreted as the phase transition temperature. For finite systems such as
those obtained in nuclear collisions, this parametrisation is only approximate
and hence allows for extraction of in more than one way. In this work we
look in detail at how values of differ, depending on methods of
extraction. It should be mentioned that for finite systems, this approximate
parametrisation works not only at the critical point, but also for first order
phase transitions (at least in some models). Thus the approximate fit is no
guarantee that one is seeing a critical phenomenon. A different but more
conventional search for the nuclear phase transition would look for a maximum
in the specific heat as a function of temperature . In this case is
interpreted as the phase transition temperature. Ideally and would
coincide. We invesigate this possibility, both in theory and from the ISiS
data, performing both canonical () and microcanonical ()
calculations. Although more than one value of can be extracted from the
approximate parmetrisation, the work here points to the best value from among
the choices. Several interesting results, seen in theoretical calculations, are
borne out in experiment.Comment: Revtex, 10 pages including 8 figures and 2 table
Thermally-induced expansion in the 8 GeV/c + Au reaction
Fragment kinetic energy spectra for reactions induced by 8.0 GeV/c
beams incident on a Au target have been analyzed in
order to deduce the possible existence and influence of thermal expansion. The
average fragment kinetic energies are observed to increase systematically with
fragment charge but are nearly independent of excitation energy. Comparison of
the data with statistical multifragmentation models indicates the onset of
extra collective thermal expansion near an excitation energy of E*/A
5 MeV. However, this effect is weak relative to the radial
expansion observed in heavy-ion-induced reactions, consistent with the
interpretation that the latter expansion may be driven primarily by dynamical
effects such as compression/decompression.Comment: 12 pages including 4 postscript figure
- âŠ