Assessing plume impacts caused by polymetallic nodule mining vehicles

Deep-sea mining may be just a few years away and yet society is struggling to assess the positive aspects, such as increasing the supply of metals for battery production to fuel the green revolution, versus the potentially large environmental impacts. Mining of polymetallic (manganese) nodules from the deep ocean is likely to be the first mineral resource targeted and will involve direct impacts to hundreds of km2 of seabed per mine per year. However, the mining activity will also cause the generation of large sediment plumes that will spread away from the mine site and have both immediate and long-term effects over much wider areas. We discuss what the impacts of plumes generated near the seabed by mining vehicles may be and how they might be measured in such challenging environments. Several different mining vehicles are under development around the world and depending on their design some may create larger plumes than others. We discuss how these vehicles could be compared so that better engineering designs could be selected and to encourage innovation in dealing with plume generation and spread. These considerations will aid the International Seabed Authority (ISA) that has the task of regulating mining activities in much of the deep sea in its commitment to promote the Best Available Technology (BAT) and Best Environmental Practice (BEP)

Measurement of the isolated diphoton cross section in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

15 pages plus author list (27 pages total), 9 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Phys. Rev. DThe ATLAS experiment has measured the production cross-section of events with two isolated photons in the final state, in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. The full data set acquired in 2010 is used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 37 pb-1. The background, consisting of hadronic jets and isolated electrons, is estimated with fully data-driven techniques and subtracted. The differential cross-sections, as functions of the di-photon mass, total transverse momentum and azimuthal separation, are presented and compared to the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD

Search for Diphoton Events with Large Missing Transverse Energy in 7 TeV Proton-Proton Collisions with the ATLAS Detector

A search for diphoton events with large missing transverse energy is presented. The data were collected with the ATLAS detector in proton-proton collisions at √s=7  [square root of s=7] TeV at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 3.1  pb-1 [pb superscript -1]. No excess of such events is observed above the standard model background prediction. In the context of a specific model with one universal extra dimension with compactification radius R and gravity-induced decays, values of 1/R<729  GeV are excluded at 95% C. L., providing the most sensitive limit on this model to date.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.