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The fate of water and water-soluble toxic wastes in the subsurface is of high importance for many scientific and practical applications. Although solute transport is proportional to water flow rates, theoretical and experimental studies show that heavy-tailed (power-law) solute transport distribution can cause chemical transport retardation, prolonging clean-up time-scales greatly. However, no consensus exists as to the physical basis of such transport laws. In percolation theory, the scaling behavior of such transport rarely relates to specific medium characteristics, but strongly to the dimensionality of the connectivity of the flow paths (for example, two- or three-dimensional, as in fractured-porous media or heterogeneous sediments), as well as to the saturation characteristics (i.e., wetting, drying, and entrapped air). In accordance with the proposed relevance of percolation models of solute transport to environmental clean-up, these predictions also prove relevant to transport-limited chemical weathering and soil formation, where the heavy-tailed distributions slow chemical weathering over time. The predictions of percolation theory have been tested in laboratory and field experiments on reactive solute transport, chemical weathering, and soil formation and found accurate. Recently, this theoretical framework has also been applied to the water partitioning at the Earth's surface between evapotranspiration, ET, and run-off, Q, known as the water balance. A well-known phenomenological model by Budyko addressed the relationship between the ratio of the actual evapotranspiration (ET) and precipitation, ET/P, versus the aridity index, ET0/P, with P being the precipitation and ET0 being the potential evapotranspiration. Existing work was able to predict the global fractions of P represented by Q and ET through an optimization of plant productivity, in which downward water fluxes affect soil depth, and upward fluxes plant growth. In the present work, based likewise on the concepts of percolation theory, we extend Budyko's model, and address the partitioning of run-off Q into its surface and subsurface components, as well as the contribution of interception to ET. Using various published data sources on the magnitudes of interception and information regarding the partitioning of Q, we address the variability in ET resulting from these processes. The global success of this prediction demonstrated here provides additional support for the universal applicability of percolation theory for solute transport as well as guidance in predicting the component of subsurface run-off, important for predicting natural flow rates through contaminated aquifers.

Abstract: The 'Grosses Moos' in the Three Lakes Region (Berner Seeland) was formed by the Wallis glacier resulting in a peat bog-dominated landscape. During the last two centuries this area was drained by a complex channel system to enable highly fertile agricultural activity. As such, the region is the vegetable belt of Switzerland. However, as the peat has degraded due to overexploitation, the situation for agriculture production has become critical. Consequently, measures are needed to prevent soil degradation and water accumulation. The extent of surface changes for the last ~ 100 years is, however, not precisely known and is assumed to have varied spatially. To understand the historical evolution of this area, we used a unique map from 1920 to compare the surface height with the newest digital terrain models (DTM) in order to estimate surface subsidence, and thus soil degradation, for the last 100 years. More than 44,000 single measurement points drawn on the historical map were digitized to derive the DTM that served as a basis for further analysis. The in-depth investigation of the observation methods and the accuracy assessment allows us to conclude that differences in the DTMs of up to 2.4 m (i.e., averaged rate of 2.4 cm yr−1) can be attributed to large-scale soil subsidence and that degradation was heterogeneously distributed over the investigated area. The data provide the basis for further soil restoration efforts in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Mt. Etna (Italy), an enhanced Normalized Difference in Vegetation Index (NDVI) signature was detected in the summers of 2001 and 2002 along a distinct line where, in November 2002, a flank eruption subsequently occurred. These observations suggest that pre-eruptive volcanic activity may have enhanced photosynthesis along the future eruptive fissure. If a direct relation between NDVI and future volcanic eruptions could be established, it would provide a straightforward and low-cost method for early detection of upcoming eruptions. However, it is unclear if, or to what extent, the observed enhancement of NDVI can be attributed to volcanic activity prior to the subsequent eruption. We consequently aimed at determining whether an increase in ambient temperature or additional water availability owing to the rise of magma and degassing of water vapour prior to the eruption could have increased photosynthesis of Mt. Etnas trees. Using dendro-climatic analyses we quantified the sensitivity of tree ring widths to temperature and precipitation at high elevation stands on Mt. Etna. Our findings suggest that tree growth at high elevation on Mt. Etna is weakly influenced by climate, and that neither an increase in water availability nor an increase in temperature induced by pre-eruptive activity is a plausible mechanism for enhanced photosynthesis before the 2002/2003 flank eruption. Our findings thus imply that other, yet unknown, factors must be sought as causes of the pre-eruption enhancement of NDVI on Mt. Etna.

As peatlands are a major terrestrial sink in the global carbon cycle, gaining an understanding of their development and changes throughout time is essential in order to predict their future carbon budget and potentially mitigate the adverse outcomes of climate change. With this aim to understand peat development, many studies have investigated the paleoecological dynamics by analyzing various proxies, including pollen, macrofossil, elemental, and biomarker analyses. However, as each of these proxies is known to have its own benefits and limitations, examining them in parallel allows for a deeper understanding of these paleoecological dynamics at the peatland and a systematic comparison of the power of these individual proxies. In this study, we therefore analyzed peat cores from a peatland in Germany (Beerberg, Thuringia) to (a) characterize the vegetation dynamics over the course of the peatland development during the late Holocene and (b) evaluate to what extent the inclusion of multiple proxies, specifically pollen, plant macrofossils, and biomarkers, contributes to a deeper understanding of those dynamics and interaction among factors. We found that, despite a major shift in the regional forest composition from primarily beech to spruce as well as many indicators of human impact in the region, the local plant population in the Beerberg area remained stable over time following the initial phase of peatland development up until the last couple of centuries. Therefore, little variation could be derived from the paleobotanical data alone. The combination of pollen and macrofossil analyses with the elemental and biomarker analyses enabled further understanding of the site development as these proxies added valuable additional information, including the occurrence of climatic variations, such as the Little Ice Age, and more recent disturbances, such as drainage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earth's climate has undergone significant fluctuations in the geologic past. We focus on the glacial episodes that followed the major waves of invasion of land plants. Twice in Earth's history the impacts of land plant innovations on the atmosphere through increased CO2 drawdown have precipitated sufficient cooling to produce ice ages. Each time, however, adaptation of soil ecosystems eventually helped re-establish apparent steady-state conditions, i.e., new equilibrium temperature and atmospheric CO2 content, ending each of the glacial episodes. In each case, the time interval between the initial innovation and the emergence from the glacial episode was approximately 60 Myr. The consistency of the time scale of the response invites an explanation in terms of a universal rate of dispersal of genetic information that encapsulates the biogeochemical cycle of cellulose production and decay. In this paper, we postulate that the long time for adaptation is a consequence of the time required for the spread of an entire clade though the soil to continental scale. Although 60 Myr appears to be a long time, it is very short compared to the time required for diffusion to transport even molecules like HCO3- or sugar through the soil over a continental distance of 5,000 km, which is between 1014 and 1016 years for solutes with such soil diffusion constants in the range 10-11 m²s-1. Horizontal solute transport through heterogeneous media by advection might be considered as a dispersal mechanism, but is also known to require enormous time scales (ca. 150 Myr for 500 m). We also seek a relevant mechanism in the known scaling of plant and fungal growth rates as a function of time, which can facilitate as well the movement of bacteria, and predicted these rates theoretically on the basis of the universal optimal 2D paths tortuosity from percolation. Comparison with actual data pairs (7,000) for plant and fungal growth rates were used to verify these predictions over 13 orders of magnitude of time, from about one minute to 100 kyr; extrapolation over less than three additional orders of time yields a continental-scale transport time of 80 Myr. We now interpret this prediction in terms of Margulis' understanding of emergent behavior of coupled (soil and plant) ecosystems responding to climate shocks induced by plant innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]