Land-sea contamination observed in SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) brightness temperature images is found to have two main contributions: the floor error inherent of image reconstruction and a multiplicative error either in the antenna temperature or in the visibility samples measured by the correlator. The origin of this last one is traced down to SMOS calibration parameters to yield a...

When waves propagate through weakly scattering but correlated, disordered environments they are randomly focused into pronounced branchlike structures, a phenomenon referred to as branched flow, which has been studied in a wide range of isotropic random media. In many natural environments, however, the fluctuations of the random medium typically show pronounced anisotropies. A prominent example...

Miocene through Pleistocene sediments on the New Jersey continental slope (Ocean Drilling Program Site 1073) are undercompacted (porosity between 40 and 65%) to 640 meters below the sea floor, and this is interpreted to record fluid pressures that reach 95% of the lithostatic stress. A two-dimensional model, where rapid Pleistocene sedimentation loads permeable sandy silt of Miocene age, succes...

Wrangellia consists largely of an oceanic plateau, a vast outpouring of basalt and more Mg-rich magma that erupted onto the ocean floor and was subsequently accreted to the western margin of the North American plate. Flood basalts form extensive sequences on Vancouver Island and are believed to have formed by melting in a mantle plume (an upwelling zone of hot mantle rock). They form the oceani...

Microbial life predominates in the ocean, yet little is known about its genomic variability, especially along the depth continuum. We report here genomic analyses of planktonic microbial communities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, from the ocean's surface to near-sea floor depths. Sequence variation in microbial community genes reflected vertical zonation of taxonomic groups, functional ...

The evolutionary success of planktic calcifiers during the Phanerozoic stabilized the climate system by introducing a new mechanism that acts to buffer ocean carbonate-ion concentration: the saturation-dependent preservation of carbonate in sea-floor sediments. Before this, buffering was primarily accomplished by adjustment of shallow-water carbonate deposition to balance oceanic inputs from we...

Manganese nodules on deep ocean floor have received attention as future resources for Co, Ni, Cu, and Mn these 40 years. The mining and metallurgical processing technologies studied these 40 years have been reviewed and re-examined on the basis of current interests, technologies, and economies by the author. The preliminary results of economic evaluation at the three timings, such as the last 1...

continuous and lengthy droughts in previous years not only in the southern provinces of iran but also in the whole country necessitate optimized water management. indian ocean and adjacent seas in south of iran are suppliers of part of the humidity in the region and the variation on indian ocean sea surface temperature has an important role in evaporation from oceans and input humidity into atm...

There has been an increasing interest in the use of autonomous underwater vehicles for ocean exploration. Side scan sonars are often installed onboard these vehicles to survey the sea floor. In this context, the need to transmit side scan sonar images over an acoustic low-bandwidth channel calls for the use of compression techniques. This paper proposes a wavelet-based method for compressing si...

“Biomineralization links soft organic tissues, which are compositionally akin to the atmosphere and oceans, with the hard materials of the solid Earth. It provides organisms with skeletons and shells while they are alive, and when they die these are deposited as sediment in environments from river plains to the deep ocean floor. It is also these hard, resistant products of life which are mainly...