Chemistry and Apparent Quality of Surface Water and Ground Water Associated with Coal Basins

Personnel of the Arkansas Mining and Mineral Resources Research Institute conducted preliminary investigations on the chemistry and quality of surface and ground water associated with 12 coal-bearing sub-basins in the Arkansas Valley coal field. The coal field is approximately 60 miles long and 33 miles wide but only in 12 areas coal is thick enough and has proper quality to be termed commercial. Both surface and underground sample sites were established in each of the sub-basins with some minor variations in four areas where not all types of sites could be located. Water was collected from 19 surface points and 19 underground points in the established areas. Both field and laboratory analyses were made and elemental contents are reported herein. In the main, the chemistry and water quality suggests that all water is suitable for agricultural and industrial uses. To obtain potable water, treatment must be made to reduce calcium, magnesium, sodium sulfate and iron. The mineral content of the water is due to its contact with coal-bearing zones and, as such, reflects the mineral content of the coal. However, it is recommended that additional studies on the petrography and geochemistry of the coal, overburden and underburden is in order. Also, it is recommended that at least one detailed study be made of one of the coal sub-basins where geologic parameters can be completely established with regard to hydrogeology. This report is an important first step in determining the character and quality of Arkansas coal which must be fully understood to fully utilize this important mineral resource

Animal movements in the Kenya Rift and evidence for the earliest ambush hunting by hominins

Animal movements in the Kenya Rift Valley today are influenced by a combination of topography and trace nutrient distribution. These patterns would have been the same in the past when hominins inhabited the area. We use this approach to create a landscape reconstruction of Olorgesailie, a key site in the East African Rift with abundant evidence of large-mammal butchery between ~1.2 and ~0.5 Ma BP. The site location in relation to limited animal routes through the area show that hominins were aware of animal movements and used the location for ambush hunting during the Lower to Middle Pleistocene. These features explain the importance of Olorgesailie as a preferred location of repeated hominin activity through multiple changes in climate and local environmental conditions, and provide insights into the cognitive and hunting abilities of Homo erectus while indicating that their activities at the site were aimed at hunting, rather than scavenging

Balltracking: an highly efficient method for tracking flow fields

We present a method for tracking solar photospheric flows that is highly efficient, and demonstrate it using high resolution MDI continuum images. The method involves making a surface from the photospheric granulation data, and allowing many small floating tracers or balls to be moved around by the evolving granulation pattern. The results are tested against synthesised granulation with known flow fields and compared to the results produced by Local Correlation tracking (LCT). The results from this new method have similar accuracy to those produced by LCT. We also investigate the maximum spatial and temporal resolution of the velocity field that it is possible to extract, based on the statistical properties of the granulation data. We conclude that both methods produce results that are close to the maximum resolution possible from granulation data. The code runs very significantly faster than our similarly optimised LCT code, making real time applications on large data sets possible. The tracking method is not limited to photospheric flows, and will also work on any velocity field where there are visible moving features of known scale length

Characterization of mesostasis areas in mare basalts: constraining melt compositions from which apatite crystallizes

Crystallization of major silicate and oxide phases from basaltic melts produces late-stage liquids whose chemical compositions differ from the initial melt. These chemically evolved liquids crystallize phases in the interstitial mesostasis regions in lunar basaltic rocks. Enrichment of incompatible elements, including volatiles such as OH, F, Cl, is characteristic of these late-stage liquids and encourages growth of accessory phases including apatite [Ca5(PO4)2(F,Cl,OH)]. Apatite is the main volatile bearing crystalline phase in lunar rocks. It starts crystallizing after ~95% melt solidification in typical mare basalts, but could crystallize earlier, after ~85-90% solidification in KREEP basalts. Using the OH contents of apatites, several researchers have calculated water contents for parental magmas. These calculated parental magma water contents can then be used to estimate a range of values for water in the mantle source regions of mare basalts [e.g.,2-6]. Therefore, a better characterization of the mesostasis areas, and of the melts in which apatite forms, is paramount to gain further insights and constraints on water in the lunar interior, especially because important parameters such as partitioning of volatiles between late-stage melts and apatite remain poorly constrained

Potts-Percolation-Gauss Model of a Solid

We study a statistical mechanics model of a solid. Neighboring atoms are connected by Hookian springs. If the energy is larger than a threshold the "spring" is more likely to fail, while if the energy is lower than the threshold the spring is more likely to be alive. The phase diagram and thermodynamic quantities, such as free energy, numbers of bonds and clusters, and their fluctuations, are determined using renormalization-group and Monte-Carlo techniques.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure

Mean Field Renormalization Group for the Boundary Magnetization of Strip Clusters

We analyze in some detail a recently proposed transfer matrix mean field approximation which yields the exact critical point for several two dimensional nearest neighbor Ising models. For the square lattice model we show explicitly that this approximation yields not only the exact critical point, but also the exact boundary magnetization of a semi--infinite Ising model, independent of the size of the strips used. Then we develop a new mean field renormalization group strategy based on this approximation and make connections with finite size scaling. Applying our strategy to the quadratic Ising and three--state Potts models we obtain results for the critical exponents which are in excellent agreement with the exact ones. In this way we also clarify some advantages and limitations of the mean field renormalization group approach.Comment: 16 pages (plain TeX) + 8 figures (PostScript, appended), POLFIS-TH.XX/9

A Quantum Approach to Classical Statistical Mechanics

We present a new approach to study the thermodynamic properties of $d$-dimensional classical systems by reducing the problem to the computation of ground state properties of a $d$-dimensional quantum model. This classical-to-quantum mapping allows us to deal with standard optimization methods, such as simulated and quantum annealing, on an equal basis. Consequently, we extend the quantum annealing method to simulate classical systems at finite temperatures. Using the adiabatic theorem of quantum mechanics, we derive the rates to assure convergence to the optimal thermodynamic state. For simulated and quantum annealing, we obtain the asymptotic rates of $T(t) \approx (p N) /(k_B \log t)$ and $\gamma(t) \approx (Nt)^{-\bar{c}/N}$, for the temperature and magnetic field, respectively. Other annealing strategies, as well as their potential speed-up, are also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, no figure