A unified earthquake catalogue for the North Sea to derisk European CCS operations

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is essential to European decarbonisation efforts, and several offshore CO2 storage projects are being developed in the North Sea. Understanding the geomechanical response to CO2 injection is key to both the pre-characterisation and operation of a storage reservoir. A thorough assessment of seismicity gives critical insights into the stress field and faulting around reservoirs, both key controls on the geomechanical response to injection. Seismicity also illuminates potential hydraulic pathways for leakage, be it directly by revealing the extent of faults, or indirectly through fractures imaged by measurements of seismic anisotropy. High quality seismicity data is critical to underpin all of these methods of analysis. This paper presents the most complete catalogue of seismicity in the North Sea to date. The combined data are enabling revised assessments of seismic hazard and leakage risk in the North Sea, as well as a better understanding of faulting and stress. This study shows the value of unifying disparate seismicity data, allowing for more accurate seismological analyses. These lay the foundation for better management of risks for not only geologic CO2 storage, but other offshore industries and infrastructure

Tradeoffs and Synergies in Tropical Forest Root Traits and Dynamics for Nutrient and Water Acquisition: Field and Modeling Advances

Vegetation processes are fundamentally limited by nutrient and water availability, the uptake of which is mediated by plant roots in terrestrial ecosystems. While tropical forests play a central role in global water, carbon, and nutrient cycling, we know very little about tradeoffs and synergies in root traits that respond to resource scarcity. Tropical trees face a unique set of resource limitations, with rock-derived nutrients and moisture seasonality governing many ecosystem functions, and nutrient versus water availability often separated spatially and temporally. Root traits that characterize biomass, depth distributions, production and phenology, morphology, physiology, chemistry, and symbiotic relationships can be predictive of plants’ capacities to access and acquire nutrients and water, with links to aboveground processes like transpiration, wood productivity, and leaf phenology. In this review, we identify an emerging trend in the literature that tropical fine root biomass and production in surface soils are greatest in infertile or sufficiently moist soils. We also identify interesting paradoxes in tropical forest root responses to changing resources that merit further exploration. For example, specific root length, which typically increases under resource scarcity to expand the volume of soil explored, instead can increase with greater base cation availability, both across natural tropical forest gradients and in fertilization experiments. Also, nutrient additions, rather than reducing mycorrhizal colonization of fine roots as might be expected, increased colonization rates under scenarios of water scarcity in some forests. Efforts to include fine root traits and functions in vegetation models have grown more sophisticated over time, yet there is a disconnect between the emphasis in models characterizing nutrient and water uptake rates and carbon costs versus the emphasis in field experiments on measuring root biomass, production, and morphology in response to changes in resource availability. Closer integration of field and modeling efforts could connect mechanistic investigation of fine-root dynamics to ecosystem-scale understanding of nutrient and water cycling, allowing us to better predict tropical forest-climate feedbacks

A starting guide to root ecology: strengthening ecological concepts and standardising root classification, sampling, processing and trait measurements

In the context of a recent massive increase in research on plant root functions and their impact on the environment, root ecologists currently face many important challenges to keep on generating cutting-edge, meaningful and integrated knowledge. Consideration of the below-ground components in plant and ecosystem studies has been consistently called for in recent decades, but methodology is disparate and sometimes inappropriate. This handbook, based on the collective effort of a large team of experts, will improve trait comparisons across studies and integration of information across databases by providing standardised methods and controlled vocabularies. It is meant to be used not only as starting point by students and scientists who desire working on below-ground ecosystems, but also by experts for consolidating and broadening their views on multiple aspects of root ecology. Beyond the classical compilation of measurement protocols, we have synthesised recommendations from the literature to provide key background knowledge useful for: (1) defining below-ground plant entities and giving keys for their meaningful dissection, classification and naming beyond the classical fine-root vs coarse-root approach; (2) considering the specificity of root research to produce sound laboratory and field data; (3) describing typical, but overlooked steps for studying roots (e.g. root handling, cleaning and storage); and (4) gathering metadata necessary for the interpretation of results and their reuse. Most importantly, all root traits have been introduced with some degree of ecological context that will be a foundation for understanding their ecological meaning, their typical use and uncertainties, and some methodological and conceptual perspectives for future research. Considering all of this, we urge readers not to solely extract protocol recommendations for trait measurements from this work, but to take a moment to read and reflect on the extensive information contained in this broader guide to root ecology, including sections I–VII and the many introductions to each section and root trait description. Finally, it is critical to understand that a major aim of this guide is to help break down barriers between the many subdisciplines of root ecology and ecophysiology, broaden researchers’ views on the multiple aspects of root study and create favourable conditions for the inception of comprehensive experiments on the role of roots in plant and ecosystem functioning

Seismic monitoring of Nature’s Heat Geothermal Project in Kwintsheul (Netherlands)

In 2018, a geothermal doublet started operating in Kwinstheul, Netherlands, for supplying heat to 64 hectares of greenhouses corresponding to Nature’s Heat joint initiative. This kind of geothermal operation requires extraction, circulation, and reinjection of fluids at a depth of 2.4 km. The reservoir used for the geothermal operation has shown good hydraulic parameters which allow the circulation of the fluid. Several authors agree that this kind of geothermal operation is unlikely to generate felt seismicity, nevertheless, adequate seismic monitoring is critical to guarantee sustainable and safe use of the subsurface. To monitor the operation of Nature’s Heat project, 30 three-component short-period seismic sensors were installed by Delft University of Technology and Seismotech (Greece). A challenge for seismic monitoring in Kwinstheul is the high levels of seismic noise coming from anthropogenic and operational activities. Despite the high background noise levels, a seismic event of Md 0.16 was recorded on July 14, 2019. To understand the relation of the event and improve the safety of the geothermal operation, we are developing an optimized monitoring scheme

Seismic attenuation from recordings of ambient noise

We applied seismic interferometry to data from an ocean-bottom survey offshore Norway and found that ambient seismic noise can be used to constrain subsurface attenuation on a reservoir scale. By crosscorrelating only a few days of recordings by broadband ocean bottom seismometers, we were able to retrieve empirical Green's functions associated with surface waves in the frequency range between 0.2 and 0.6 Hz and acoustic waves traveling through the sea water between 1.0 and 2.5 Hz. We discovered that the decay of these surface waves cannot be explained by geometrical spreading alone and required an additional loss of energy with distance. We quantified this observed attenuation in the frequency domain using a modified Bessel function to describe the cross-spectrum in a stationary field. We averaged cross-spectra of equally spaced station couples and sorted these azimuthally averaged cross-spectra with distance. We then obtained frequency-dependent estimates of attenuation by minimizing the misfit of the real parts to a damped Bessel function. The resulting quality factors as function of frequency are indicative of the depth variation of attenuation and correlated with the geology in the survey area. OI Weemstra, Cornelis/0000-0003-3509-835