Two separate experiments were conducted with sheep‘ grazing Pangola grass pastures. In the first experiment, eight groups of pregnant ewes (six ewes/group) were used. Each group received one of the following supplements, no supplement (control), phosphorus, sodium, iodine, cobalt, mineral mixture, sorghum grain and sorghum grain plus urea. Ewes supplemented with cobalt lost less weight during l...

Overview Fluid inclusions are small, sealed, naturally occurring volumes found in mineral host crystals containing encapsulated aqueous and non-aqueous liquids and gases. Discrete mineral phases may also occur within fluid inclusions, either by precipitation from the soluterich fluids or via collocation at a host crystal defect. Fluid inclusions appear in many different patterns. For example, f...

Soil creep is the most widespread and perhaps the least understood process of erosion on soil-mantled hillslopes. Soil is slowly ‘‘stirred’’ by burrowing creatures, and particles are displaced in wetting-drying cycles. These actions can cause downslope creep by processes analogous to particle diffusion. Other possible transport mechanisms include shear and viscous-like creep, such that precise ...

We have discovered an isotopically highly anomalous MgSiO3 grain in the ungrouped carbonaceous chondrite Acfer 094 with a perovskite-like crystal structure resembling the dominant high-pressure mineral of the Earth’s lower mantle. Oxygen isotopic ratios of the silicate grain are O/ O p (4.91 0.36) # 10 (12 times the 3 solar value) and O/O p (1.36 0.19) # 10 (0.4 times the solar value). This sig...

Introduction: Laser Raman spectroscopy offers the exciting opportunity to interrogate rocks in their natural geological context, preserving the mineral constituents along with their textural and morphological information (Figure 1). Microscopic Raman spectroscopy is a nondestructive means of generating two dimensional maps of mineralogy on the order of grain sizes. Because of its versatility, R...

Both the heartwood and the sapwood of living hard maple trees, and to some extent of other hardwoods, of the Lake States and northeastern forests commonly are disfigured by deep olive or greenish black discolorations generally known as mineral stain or mineral streak. These may appear on sawed materials as individual lenticular streaks of various lengths paralleling the grain or as mass discolo...

We have developed a numerical model to investigate the importance of diffusive chemical fractionation during production and transport of melt in Earth’s upper mantle. The model incorporates new experimental data on the diffusion rates of rare earth elements (REE) in high-Ca pyroxene [Van Orman et al., Contrib. Mineral. Petrol. 141 (2001) 687^703] and pyrope garnet [Van Orman et al., Contrib. Mi...