U-Pb detrital zircon geochronology of the middle to upper Jurassic strata in the Surat Basin: New insights into provenance, paleogeography, and source-sink processes in eastern Australia

New U-Pb detrital zircon ages from sandstones have been determined for the Walloon Coal Measures-Springbok Sandstone section of the Surat Basin. In the late Jurassic Surat Basin, there is a shift from relatively thick coal measures - the Walloon Coal Measures - consisting of laterally discontinuous coal-seam horizons intercalated with lithic...

Screening Coarse Airborne Dust for Lead-Rich Phase Occurrence during Characterisation of Particle Mineralogy, Chemistry and Provenance: Application to Deposits in the Vicinity of an Integrated Steelworks

A method has been developed to screen large numbers (~103–104 per sample) of coarse airborne dust particles for the occurrence of Pb-rich phases, together with quantification of the particles’ mineralogy, chemistry, and inferred provenance. Using SEM-EDS spectral imaging (SI) at 15 kV, and processing with the custom software PARC, screening of...

Time-dependent reliability analysis of service-proven quay walls subject to corrosion-induced degradation

The assessment of service-proven quay walls subject to corrosion-induced degradation is inherently a time-dependent reliability problem. Two major challenges are the modelling of corrosion and taking into account the decrease of epistemic uncertainty throughout the quay wall’s service life. The main objective of this study is to examine the...

Levee system reliability modeling The length effect and Bayesian updating

In levee system reliability, the length effect is the term given to the phenomenon that the longer the levee, the higher the probability that it will have a weak spot and fail. Quantitatively, it is the ratio of the segment failure probability to the cross-sectional failure probability. The literature is lacking in methods to calculate the...

Aeolian dust supply from the Yellow River floodplain to the Pleistocene loess deposits of the Mangshan Plateau, central China: Evidence from zircon U-Pb age spectra

The thick loess-palaeosol sequences in the Mangshan Loess Plateau (MLP; central China) along the south bank of the lower reach of the Yellow River provide high-resolution records of Quaternary climate change. In addition, substantial increases in grain-size and accumulation rate have been inferred in the upper part of the loess sequence, above...

A natural-stone city walk through Maastricht, the Netherlands

Having been inspired by the leaflet 'Natuursteen in Maastricht. Aardrijkskunde in een oude stad', written by P.J. Felder and published in 1977, we here present descriptions of the main types of natural stones applied in the city of Maastricht. A concise overview of the provenance area, mineralogy and physical properties of a selection of so...

Toward executable scientific publications

Reproducibility of experiments is considered as one of the main principles of the scientific method. Recent developments in data and computation intensive science, i.e. e-Science, and state of the art in Cloud computing provide the necessary components to preserve data sets and re-run code and software that create research data. The Executable...

Petroleum geological atlas of the Southern Permian Basin area: overview SPB-atlas project-organisation and results

The Southern Permian Basin (also referred to as Central European Basin) is Europe s largest sedimentary basin. It is a typical intracontinental basin that evolved from latest Carboniferous to recent times and extends from eastern England to the Belarussian-Polish border and from Denmark to South Germany. The Southern Permian Basin Atlas (SPBA)...

Remarks on the palynology-based chronostratigraphical subdivision of Pliocene terrestrial deposits in NW-Europe

The chronostratigraphical subdivision of the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene as applied in terrestrial deposits of Central and NW-Europe largely relies on the pollen analytical investigations. This subdivision is almost entirely based on the interpretation of quantitative changes of the vegetational cover as recorded by the pollen content of...

Provenance of Pliocene sediments and paleoenvironmental changes in the southern North Sea region using Samarium-Neodymium (Sm/Nd) provenance ages and clay mineralogy

An 800-m-thick sedimentary succession from the Late Pliocene North Sea has been investigated on the provenance of the sediments and on changes of the source regions related to transport processes and climate changes. The lower Zanclean to Piacenzian part of the succession, from 1250 to 1050 m depth, and the middle Early Gelasian part, from 1100...

Spatial prediction of the variability of Early Pleistocene subsurface sediments in the Netherlands - Part 1: Heavy minerals

We investigated the spatial variability of the heavy-mineral composition in the Early Pleistocene fluviatile Kedichem Formation in the Netherlands in order to meet the demand for more information about subsurface sediment composition. We first determined the spatial extension and thickness of the sediment body, then used Fuzzy clustering...

Trace element concentrations and stable lead isotopes in soils as tracers of lead pollution in Graft-De Rijp, the Netherlands

Graft-De Rijp is a former village of whalers, situated twenty-five kilometres north of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since the foundation of De Rijp in 1612 a mixture of sludge, manure and town refuse (containing Pb-based household artefacts and Pb-based building materials) was used to raise and fertilise the land. Gasworks, coal storehouses,...