Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms

Today's surface ocean is saturated with respect to calcium carbonate, but increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are reducing ocean pH and carbonate ion concentrations, and thus the level of calcium carbonate saturation. Experimental evidence suggests that if these trends continue, key marine organisms--such as corals and some plankton--will have difficulty maintaining their external calcium carbonate skeletons. Here we use 13 models of the ocean-carbon cycle to assess calcium carbonate saturation under the IS92a 'business-as-usual' scenario for future emissions of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. In our projections, Southern Ocean surface waters will begin to become undersaturated with respect to aragonite, a metastable form of calcium carbonate, by the year 2050. By 2100, this undersaturation could extend throughout the entire Southern Ocean and into the subarctic Pacific Ocean. When live pteropods were exposed to our predicted level of undersaturation during a two-day shipboard experiment, their aragonite shells showed notable dissolution. Our findings indicate that conditions detrimental to high-latitude ecosystems could develop within decades, not centuries as suggested previously.     

Active out-of-sequence thrust faulting in the central Nepalese Himalaya

Recent convergence between India and Eurasia is commonly assumed to be accommodated mainly along a single fault--the Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT)--which reaches the surface in the Siwalik Hills of southern Nepal. Although this model is consistent with geodetic, geomorphic and microseismic data, an alternative model incorporating slip on more northerly surface faults has been proposed to be consistent with these data as well. Here we present in situ cosmogenic 10Be data indicating a fourfold increase in millennial timescale erosion rates occurring over a distance of less than 2 km in central Nepal, delineating for the first time an active thrust fault nearly 100 km north of the surface expression of the MHT. These data challenge the view that rock uplift gradients in central Nepal reflect only passive transport over a ramp in the MHT. Instead, when combined with previously reported 40Ar-39Ar data, our results indicate persistent exhumation above deep-seated, surface-breaking structures at the foot of the high Himalaya. These results suggest that strong dynamic interactions between climate, erosion and tectonics have maintained a locus of active deformation well to the north of the Himalayan deformation front.     

35 ka BP climate simulations in East Asia and probing the mechanisms of climate changes

Interglacial or postglacial climates are all of charac-teristic of warmer conditions. However, if condition asso-ciated with the warm feature is wetter or drier than today,it would produce different impacts on natural environ-ments and human society. Quaternary studies found thatclimate with warm-dry or warm-wet conditions had oc-curred in China during the last 40—30 ka BP[1]. For ex-ample, it was warmer than the present during themid-Holocene (3—8 ka BP) and the late phases of MarineIsot…     

乳糜尿病人的免疫系统异常

<正> 乳糜尿病人的免疫系统,以前并未研究过,但只知道有淋巴细胞尿(Koo 和 Van langenerg,1969,Wiggelink Huizer 等,1972)和周围血液淋巴细胞计数低下(Date 等1980)。本文证实了乳糜尿病人其免疫系统有某些异常。