A New FP7 Project Demonstrating CO2 Capture Technologies

AbstractThe OCTAVIUS project (Optimisation of CO2 Capture Technology Allowing Verification and Implementation at Utility Scale) has started on March 1st 2012 for a period of 5 years, as part of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Gathering 15 European and 2 South African partners, OCTAVIUS was conceived as contributing to demonstration of integrated concepts for zero emission power plants covering all the components needed for power generation as well as CO2 post-combustion capture and compression facilities.This paper presents the objectives of the project, its main expected outcomes and the results obtained within the first six months period

A customisable pipeline for continuously harvesting socially-minded Twitter users

On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions in terms of network and content metrics. Others, for instance online activists, are not less important but their characterisation still requires experimenting. We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found within temporally and spatially localised contexts, i.e., small but topical fragments of the network containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a significant footprint on Twitter. To explore this hypothesis, we have designed a continuous user profile discovery pipeline that produces an ever-growing dataset of user profiles by harvesting and analysing contexts from the Twitter stream. The profiles dataset includes key network and content-based users metrics, enabling experimentation with user-defined score functions that characterise specific classes of online users. The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline and its empirical evaluation on a case study consisting of healthcare-related campaigns in the UK, showing how it supports the operational definitions of online activism, by comparing three experimental ranking functions. The code is publicly available.Comment: Procs. ICWE 2019, June 2019, Kore

The climatic importance of uncertainties in regional aerosol-cloud radiative forcings over recent decades

This is the final version of the article. Available from American Meteorological Society via the DOI in this record.Regional patterns of aerosol radiative forcing are important for understanding climate change on decadal time scales. Uncertainty in aerosol forcing is likely to vary regionally and seasonally because of the short aerosol lifetime and heterogeneous emissions. Here the sensitivity of regional aerosol cloud albedo effect (CAE) forcing to 31 aerosol process parameters and emission fluxes is quantified between 1978 and 2008. The effects of parametric uncertainties on calculations of the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation are found to be spatially and temporally dependent. Regional uncertainty contributions of opposite sign cancel in global-mean forcing calculations, masking the regional importance of some parameters. Parameters that contribute little to uncertainty in Earth's global energy balance during recent decades make significant contributions to regional forcing variance. Aerosol forcing sensitivities are quantified within 11 climatically important regions, where surface temperatures are thought to influence large-scale climate effects. Substantial simulated uncertainty in CAE forcing in the eastern Pacific leaves open the possibility that apparent shifts in the mean ENSO state may result from a forced aerosol signal on multidecadal time scales. A likely negative aerosol CAE forcing in the tropical North Atlantic calls into question the relationship between Northern Hemisphere aerosol emission reductions and CAE forcing of sea surface temperatures in the main Atlantic hurricane development region on decadal time scales. Simulated CAE forcing uncertainty is large in the North Pacific, suggesting that the role of the CAE in altering Pacific tropical storm frequency and intensity is also highly uncertain.Data can be made available upon request from the corresponding author. L. A. Regayre is funded by a Doctoral Training Grant from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and a CASE studentship with the Met Office Hadley Centre. B. B. B. Booth was supported by the Joint UK DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101). K. S. Carslaw acknowledges funding from the Royal Society Wolfson Award. We acknowledge funding from NERC under AEROS and GASSP Grants NE/G006172/1 and NE/J024252/1. This work made use of the facilities of N8 HPC provided and funded by the N8 consortium and EPSRC (EP/K000225/1). The Met Office Hadley Centre is coordinated by the University of Leeds and the University of Manchester. The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this article

Warm Water and Cool Nests Are Best. How Global Warming Might Influence Hatchling Green Turtle Swimming Performance

For sea turtles nesting on beaches surrounded by coral reefs, the most important element of hatchling recruitment is escaping predation by fish as they swim across the fringing reef, and as a consequence hatchlings that minimize their exposure to fish predation by minimizing the time spent crossing the fringing reef have a greater chance of surviving the reef crossing. One way to decrease the time required to cross the fringing reef is to maximize swimming speed. We found that both water temperature and nest temperature influence swimming performance of hatchling green turtles, but in opposite directions. Warm water increases swimming ability, with hatchling turtles swimming in warm water having a faster stroke rate, while an increase in nest temperature decreases swimming ability with hatchlings from warm nests producing less thrust per stroke

Are there asymmetries in the effects of training on the conditional male wage distribution?

Recent studies have used quantile regression (QR) techniques to estimate the impact of education on the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. In our paper we investigate the degree to which work-related training – another important form of human capital – affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Using the first six waves of the European Community Household Panel, we utilise both ordinary least squares and QR techniques to estimate associations between work-related training and wages for private sector men in ten European Union countries. Our results show that, for the majority of countries, there is a fairly uniform association between training and hourly wages across the conditional wage distribution. However, there are considerable differences across countries in mean associations between training and wages

In situ XAFS Study of Palladium Electrodeposition at the Liquid/Liquid Interface

We report the use of XAFS (X-ray absorption fine structure) as an in situ method to follow the electrochemically driven deposition of palladium nanoparticles at a liquid/liquid interface. A novel glass/plastic hybrid electrochemical cell was used to enable control of the potential applied to the liquid/liquid interface. In situ measurements indicate that the nucleation of metallic nanoparticles can be triggered through chronoamperometry or cyclic voltammetry. In contrast to spontaneous nucleation at the liquid/liquid interface, whereby fluctuations in Pd oxidation state and concentration are observed, under a fixed interfacial potential the growth process occurs at a steady rate leading to a build-up of palladium at the interface. Raman spectroscopy of the deposit suggests that the organic electrolyte binds directly to the surface of the deposited nanoparticles. It was found that the introduction of citric acid results in the formation of spherical nanoparticles at the interface

Is The Iberian-African plates boundary well defined in the Alboran Basin of the Westernmost Mediterranean?

European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2018, 8-13 April 2018, Vienna, Austria.-- 1 pageThe Alboran Basin (Westernmost Mediterranean) hosts the boundary between the Iberian and African plates. Traditionally, this boundary has been described as a wide deformation zone, in which the convergence is accommodated by several onshore-offshore tectonic structures. Extensional processes that led to the Alboran Basin formation took place from the Early to the Late Miocene, led by slab roll-back and slab tearing. During the Plio-Quaternary, the basin has been deformed due to the Iberia – Africa tectonic plates convergence, producing the contractive reorganization of some structures at the basin. In this study, we estimate the total slip accommodated by the most prominent tectonic structures in the area of Ear-liest Pliocene in age. We use Pre-Stack Depth Migrated sections of the crustal structure, that allow us to analyzed the real geometry of these structures at depth and to measure strain. We use the deformation-related geometry of strata and faults to estimate slip on the main faults. Results show that estimated total slip accommodated by the main fault system may be similar (with error bounds) to the estimated plate convergence value since the Messinian time (∼24 km). Thus, slip on that faults may have accommodated most of the Iberian – African plate convergence during the Plio-Quaternary, revealing that the contractive reorganization of the Alboran basin is focused on a few first-order structures that act as lithospheric boundaries, rather than widespread and diffuse along the entire basinPeer Reviewe

The lithospheric structure of the Gibraltar Arc System from Wide Angle Seismic data

In continental settings, seismic failure is generally restricted to crustal depth. Crustal structure is therefore an important proxy to evaluate seismic hazard of continental fault systems. Here we present a seismic velocity model across the Gibraltar Arc System, from the Eurasian Betics Range (South Iberian margin), across offshore East Alboran and Pytheas (African margin) basins, and ending onshore in North Morocco. Our results reveal the nature and configuration of the crust supporting the coexistence of three different crustal domains: the continental crust of the Betics, the continental crust of the Pytheas Basin (south Alboran Basin) and onshore Morocco, and a distinct domain formed of magmatic arc crust under the East Alboran Basin. The magmatic arc under the East Alboran Basin is characterized by a velocity structure containing a relatively high‐velocity lower crust (~7 km/s) bounded at the top and base by reflections. The lateral extension of this crust is mapped integrating a second perpendicular wide‐angle seismic profile along the Eastern Alboran basin, together with basement samples, multibeam bathymetry, and a grid of deep‐penetrating multichannel seismic profiles. The transition between crustal domains is currently unrelated to extensional and magmatic processes that formed the basin. The abrupt transition zones between the different crustal domains support that they are bounded by crustal‐scale active fault systems that reactivate inherited structures. Seismicity in the area is constrained to upper‐middle crust depths, and most earthquakes nucleate outside of the magmatic arc domain. Key Points New velocity model reveals the lithospheric structure under the Betics (South Iberia), the Alboran Basin and the North African margin The East Alboran Basin is floored by magmatic arc crust, while the southern area of the Alboran Basin is floored by continental crust Seismic activity is constrained to the upper‐middle continental crust. Crustal domains are likely bounded by active fault

Evidence for a developing plate boundary in the western Mediterranean

Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Complementary Action ESF TopoEurope TOPOMED (CGL2008- 03474-E/BTE) and national project EVENT (CGL2006-12861-C02-02). L.G.P. was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport through the FPU fellowship AP2012-1579 and a Short-Term Scientific Mission (COST-STSM-ECOST-STSM-ES1301- 180814-045667) inside the COST Action ES1301. This study benefited from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to L.G.P. (H2020-MSCA-IF-2017 796013), the project “MORPHOMED” (PID2019-107138RB-I00) funded by MCIN/SRA (State Research Agency/10.13039/501100011033), FEDER/Junta de Andalucía-Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades/Projects (B-RNM-305-UGR18, A-RNM-508-UGR20 and P18-RT-3632), and acknowledges the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S) and C.R.R. project PID2019-109559RB-I00 of the Spanish “Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación”.We thank the reviewers (JoaoDuarte and anonymous) for their insightful comments. This work has been carried out within Grup de Recerca Consolidat de la Generalitat de Catalunya “Barcelona Center for Subsurface Imaging” (2017 SGR 1662).Additional information Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31895-z.The current diffuse-strain model of the collision between Africa and Eurasia in the western Mediterranean predicts a broad region with deformation distributed among numerous faults and moderate-magnitude seismicity. However, the model is untested because most deformation occurs underwater, at poorly characterized faults of undetermined slip. Here we assess the diffuse-strain model analysing two active offshore fault systems associated with the most prominent seafloor relief in the region. We use pre-stack depth migrated seismic images to estimate, for the first time, the total Plio-Holocene slip of the right-lateral Yusuf and reverse Alboran Ridge structurally linked fault system. We show that kinematic restoration of deformational structures predicts a slip of 16 ± 4.7 km for the Alboran Ridge Fault and a minimum of 12 km for the Yusuf Fault. Thus, this fault system forms a well-defined narrow plate boundary that has absorbed most of the 24 ± 5 km Plio-Holocene Africa-Eurasia convergence and represents an underappreciated hazard.MCIN Projects A-RNM-508-UGR20, B-RNM-305-UGR18, P18-RT-3632H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-IF-2017 796013, PID2019-107138RB-I00Society for Research on AdolescenceGeneralitat de Catalunya 2017 SGR 1662Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte AP2012-1579, COST-STSM-ECOST-STSM-ES1301-180814-045667, ES1301 MECDMinisterio de Economía y CompetitividadMinisterio de Ciencia e InnovaciónSevero Ochoa Centre of Excellence CEX2019-000928-S, PID2019-109559RB-I0