49 research outputs found

    What Are The Best Guidelines. For Dredging And Placement Of Dredged Materials?

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    During the~ next 25 years, more than 280 millicm cubic yards of sediment will be dredged from the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries (Table 1). Altogether more than 800 million dollars will be spent to deepen ports and maintain shipping channels. About one-third of the maintenance dredgin~; will be done in ports and harbors where the sediment is contaminated by industrial wastes and sewage discharge. Because of long-continued disposal of dredged material, the region is losing its physical capacity to assimilate more material. Where then can these enormous loads be placed at acceptable costs? And what are the best guidelines for selecting placement sites to accomodate polluted material? What guidelines are needed for predicting the short and long-term impacts of dredging and disposal? These are! important management questions facing bay scientists, engineers, and managers who aim to protect priority resources and at the same time to accomodate shipping that requires deeper channels and efficient navigation.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/vimsbooks/1173/thumbnail.jp

    How Do Sediments Enter The Bay, Move Through The System, Remove And Store Chemicals, Or Release Them?

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    Escape of more than two million tons of sediment., 4,000 tons of man-made chemicals (e.g. Cd, Cu, Pb and Zn) and more than 300 types of synthetic organic compounds annually into the Bay, shoals shipping channels, reduces water quality and threatens biota. Where then do these enormous loads go? Are they mainly flushed into the sea or stored on the Bay floor? And what happens to chemicals attached to the sediments as they pass through different chemical regimes of the Bay? These are important questions facing scientists who aim to understand the cycling of sedimentary materials and to predict the fate of attached chemicals. These are also significant questions facing managers Concerned with causative agents, regional attributes of receiving waters as well as locating disposal sites.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/vimsbooks/1174/thumbnail.jp

    Kepone in bed sediments of the James River estuary

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    This report describes procedures and presents data concerning the concentrations of Kepone in bed sediments of the James River estuary, Virginia

    Sediment Characterization of Coastal Lagoons and Bays, Mid-Atlantic Region

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    Sediment characterizations for the following lagoons and bays: Great South Bay Barnegat Bay New Jersey Inland Bays, Great Sound Delaware Inland Bays Chincoteague Ba

    Geochemistry and deposition of Be-7 in river‐estuarine and coastal waters

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    The atmospheric flux of cosmogenic Be-7 (53.3-day half-life) and the mode of ?Be deposition in river- estuarine and coastal environments have been examined. The atmospheric flux of ?Be commonly sup- ports inventories ranging from 1.0 to 2.0 pCi/cm 2 (1 pCi = 0.037 Bq). Beryllium 7 concentrations in water phase samples, collected across salinity gradients in several estuaries along the eastern coastline of the United States, range from 0.03 to 0.53 pCi/L and primarily reflect variations in Be-7supply and sorption kinetics. The major process controlling the concentration of Be-7 on estuarine suspended particles appears to be the length of time that these particles remain in the water column. Field particle-to- water distribution coefficients for Be-7have a median value of about 4 x 10 \u27• but range over an order of magnitude reflecting short-term variations in 7Be input, particle dynamics, and particulate iron content rather than equilibrium sorption-desorption responses to changes in water salinity or particle type. Residence times of 7Be in the water column range from a few days in estuarine areas of rapid fine-particle deposition, to several weeks in high-energy environments where pronounced sediment resuspension reintroduces deposited 7Be back into the water column. Inventories of ?Be in sediments range-from nondetectable to 3.3 pCi/cm 2, with the highest inventories in areas where fine particles are accumulating rapidly. Such sites are also major repositories for other particle-reactive substances. A ?Be budget for the James estuary indicates that less than 5% of the expected ?Be input is in the water column and that the short-term estuarine trapping efficiency for atmospherically derived ?Be is somewhere between 50 and 100%

    Phenotypic Signatures Arising from Unbalanced Bacterial Growth

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    Fluctuations in the growth rate of a bacterial culture during unbalanced growth are generally considered undesirable in quantitative studies of bacterial physiology. Under well-controlled experimental conditions, however, these fluctuations are not random but instead reflect the interplay between intra-cellular networks underlying bacterial growth and the growth environment. Therefore, these fluctuations could be considered quantitative phenotypes of the bacteria under a specific growth condition. Here, we present a method to identify “phenotypic signatures” by time-frequency analysis of unbalanced growth curves measured with high temporal resolution. The signatures are then applied to differentiate amongst different bacterial strains or the same strain under different growth conditions, and to identify the essential architecture of the gene network underlying the observed growth dynamics. Our method has implications for both basic understanding of bacterial physiology and for the classification of bacterial strains

    Rab protein evolution and the history of the eukaryotic endomembrane system

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    Spectacular increases in the quantity of sequence data genome have facilitated major advances in eukaryotic comparative genomics. By exploiting homology with classical model organisms, this makes possible predictions of pathways and cellular functions currently impossible to address in intractable organisms. Echoing realization that core metabolic processes were established very early following evolution of life on earth, it is now emerging that many eukaryotic cellular features, including the endomembrane system, are ancient and organized around near-universal principles. Rab proteins are key mediators of vesicle transport and specificity, and via the presence of multiple paralogues, alterations in interaction specificity and modification of pathways, contribute greatly to the evolution of complexity of membrane transport. Understanding system-level contributions of Rab proteins to evolutionary history provides insight into the multiple processes sculpting cellular transport pathways and the exciting challenges that we face in delving further into the origins of membrane trafficking specificity

    GW190412: Observation of a Binary-Black-Hole Coalescence with Asymmetric Masses

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    We report the observation of gravitational waves from a binary-black-hole coalescence during the first two weeks of LIGO’s and Virgo’s third observing run. The signal was recorded on April 12, 2019 at 05∶30∶44 UTC with a network signal-to-noise ratio of 19. The binary is different from observations during the first two observing runs most notably due to its asymmetric masses: a ∼30 M_⊙ black hole merged with a ∼8 M_⊙ black hole companion. The more massive black hole rotated with a dimensionless spin magnitude between 0.22 and 0.60 (90% probability). Asymmetric systems are predicted to emit gravitational waves with stronger contributions from higher multipoles, and indeed we find strong evidence for gravitational radiation beyond the leading quadrupolar order in the observed signal. A suite of tests performed on GW190412 indicates consistency with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. While the mass ratio of this system differs from all previous detections, we show that it is consistent with the population model of stellar binary black holes inferred from the first two observing runs

    Properties and Astrophysical Implications of the 150 M_⊙ Binary Black Hole Merger GW190521

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    The gravitational-wave signal GW190521 is consistent with a binary black hole (BBH) merger source at redshift 0.8 with unusually high component masses, 85⁺²¹₋₁₄ M_⊙ and 66⁺¹⁷₋₁₈ M_⊙, compared to previously reported events, and shows mild evidence for spin-induced orbital precession. The primary falls in the mass gap predicted by (pulsational) pair-instability supernova theory, in the approximate range 65–120 M_⊙. The probability that at least one of the black holes in GW190521 is in that range is 99.0%. The final mass of the merger 142⁺²⁸₋₁₆ M_⊙) classifies it as an intermediate-mass black hole. Under the assumption of a quasi-circular BBH coalescence, we detail the physical properties of GW190521's source binary and its post-merger remnant, including component masses and spin vectors. Three different waveform models, as well as direct comparison to numerical solutions of general relativity, yield consistent estimates of these properties. Tests of strong-field general relativity targeting the merger-ringdown stages of the coalescence indicate consistency of the observed signal with theoretical predictions. We estimate the merger rate of similar systems to be 0.13_(-0.11)^(+0.30) Gpc⁻³ yr⁻¹. We discuss the astrophysical implications of GW190521 for stellar collapse and for the possible formation of black holes in the pair-instability mass gap through various channels: via (multiple) stellar coalescences, or via hierarchical mergers of lower-mass black holes in star clusters or in active galactic nuclei. We find it to be unlikely that GW190521 is a strongly lensed signal of a lower-mass black hole binary merger. We also discuss more exotic possible sources for GW190521, including a highly eccentric black hole binary, or a primordial black hole binary
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