skip to main content


Title: Sustainability of soil organic carbon in consolidated gully land in China’s Loess Plateau
Abstract

Massive gully land consolidation projects, launched in China’s Loess Plateau, aim to restore 2667$$\mathrm{km}^2$$km2agricultural lands in total by consolidating 2026 highly eroded gullies. This effort represents a social engineering project where the economic development and livelihood of the farming families are closely tied to the ability of these emergent landscapes to provide agricultural services. Whether these ‘time zero’ landscapes have the resilience to provide a sustainable soil condition such as soil organic carbon (SOC) content remains unknown. By studying two watersheds, one of which is a control site, we show that the consolidated gully serves as an enhanced carbon sink, where the magnitude of SOC increase rate (1.0$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$gC/m2/year) is about twice that of the SOC decrease rate (− 0.5$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$gC/m2/year) in the surrounding natural watershed. Over a 50-year co-evolution of landscape and SOC turnover, we find that the dominant mechanisms that determine the carbon cycling are different between the consolidated gully and natural watersheds. In natural watersheds, the flux of SOC transformation is mainly driven by the flux of SOC transport; but in the consolidated gully, the transport has little impact on the transformation. Furthermore, we find that extending the surface carbon residence time has the potential to efficiently enhance carbon sequestration from the atmosphere with a rate as high as 8$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$gC/m2/yearcompared to the current 0.4$$\mathrm{g\,C}/\mathrm{m}^2/\mathrm{year}$$gC/m2/year. The success for the completion of all gully consolidation would lead to as high as 26.67$$\mathrm{Gg\,C}/\mathrm{year}$$GgC/yearsequestrated into soils. This work, therefore, not only provides an assessment and guidance of the long-term sustainability of the ‘time zero’ landscapes but also a solution for sequestration$$\hbox {CO}_2$$CO2into soils.

 
more » « less
NSF-PAR ID:
10197459
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Nature Publishing Group
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Scientific Reports
Volume:
10
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2045-2322
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract

    We prove that$${{\,\textrm{poly}\,}}(t) \cdot n^{1/D}$$poly(t)·n1/D-depth local random quantum circuits with two qudit nearest-neighbor gates on aD-dimensional lattice withnqudits are approximatet-designs in various measures. These include the “monomial” measure, meaning that the monomials of a random circuit from this family have expectation close to the value that would result from the Haar measure. Previously, the best bound was$${{\,\textrm{poly}\,}}(t)\cdot n$$poly(t)·ndue to Brandão–Harrow–Horodecki (Commun Math Phys 346(2):397–434, 2016) for$$D=1$$D=1. We also improve the “scrambling” and “decoupling” bounds for spatially local random circuits due to Brown and Fawzi (Scrambling speed of random quantum circuits, 2012). One consequence of our result is that assuming the polynomial hierarchy ($${{\,\mathrm{\textsf{PH}}\,}}$$PH) is infinite and that certain counting problems are$$\#{\textsf{P}}$$#P-hard “on average”, sampling within total variation distance from these circuits is hard for classical computers. Previously, exact sampling from the outputs of even constant-depth quantum circuits was known to be hard for classical computers under these assumptions. However the standard strategy for extending this hardness result to approximate sampling requires the quantum circuits to have a property called “anti-concentration”, meaning roughly that the output has near-maximal entropy. Unitary 2-designs have the desired anti-concentration property. Our result improves the required depth for this level of anti-concentration from linear depth to a sub-linear value, depending on the geometry of the interactions. This is relevant to a recent experiment by the Google Quantum AI group to perform such a sampling task with 53 qubits on a two-dimensional lattice (Arute in Nature 574(7779):505–510, 2019; Boixo et al. in Nate Phys 14(6):595–600, 2018) (and related experiments by USTC), and confirms their conjecture that$$O(\sqrt{n})$$O(n)depth suffices for anti-concentration. The proof is based on a previous construction oft-designs by Brandão et al. (2016), an analysis of how approximate designs behave under composition, and an extension of the quasi-orthogonality of permutation operators developed by Brandão et al. (2016). Different versions of the approximate design condition correspond to different norms, and part of our contribution is to introduce the norm corresponding to anti-concentration and to establish equivalence between these various norms for low-depth circuits. For random circuits with long-range gates, we use different methods to show that anti-concentration happens at circuit size$$O(n\ln ^2 n)$$O(nln2n)corresponding to depth$$O(\ln ^3 n)$$O(ln3n). We also show a lower bound of$$\Omega (n \ln n)$$Ω(nlnn)for the size of such circuit in this case. We also prove that anti-concentration is possible in depth$$O(\ln n \ln \ln n)$$O(lnnlnlnn)(size$$O(n \ln n \ln \ln n)$$O(nlnnlnlnn)) using a different model.

     
    more » « less
  2. Abstract

    The selection of low-radioactive construction materials is of utmost importance for the success of low-energy rare event search experiments. Besides radioactive contaminants in the bulk, the emanation of radioactive radon atoms from material surfaces attains increasing relevance in the effort to further reduce the background of such experiments. In this work, we present the$$^{222}$$222Rn emanation measurements performed for the XENON1T dark matter experiment. Together with the bulk impurity screening campaign, the results enabled us to select the radio-purest construction materials, targeting a$$^{222}$$222Rn activity concentration of$$10\,\mathrm{\,}\upmu \mathrm{Bq}/\mathrm{kg}$$10μBq/kgin$$3.2\,\mathrm{t}$$3.2tof xenon. The knowledge of the distribution of the$$^{222}$$222Rn sources allowed us to selectively eliminate problematic components in the course of the experiment. The predictions from the emanation measurements were compared to data of the$$^{222}$$222Rn activity concentration in XENON1T. The final$$^{222}$$222Rn activity concentration of$$(4.5\pm 0.1)\,\mathrm{\,}\upmu \mathrm{Bq}/\mathrm{kg}$$(4.5±0.1)μBq/kgin the target of XENON1T is the lowest ever achieved in a xenon dark matter experiment.

     
    more » « less
  3. Abstract

    In this article, we study the moduli of irregular surfaces of general type with at worst canonical singularities satisfying$$K^2 = 4p_g-8$$K2=4pg-8, for any even integer$$p_g\ge 4$$pg4. These surfaces also have unbounded irregularityq. We carry out our study by investigating the deformations of the canonical morphism$$\varphi :X\rightarrow {\mathbb {P}}^N$$φ:XPN, where$$\varphi $$φis a quadruple Galois cover of a smooth surface of minimal degree. These canonical covers are classified in Gallego and Purnaprajna (Trans Am Math Soc 360(10):5489-5507, 2008) into four distinct families, one of which is the easy case of a product of curves. The main objective of this article is to study the deformations of the other three, non trivial, unbounded families. We show that any deformation of$$\varphi $$φfactors through a double cover of a ruled surface and, hence, is never birational. More interestingly, we prove that, with two exceptions, a general deformation of$$\varphi $$φis two-to-one onto its image, whose normalization is a ruled surface of appropriate irregularity. We also show that, with the exception of one family, the deformations ofXare unobstructed even though$$H^2(T_X)$$H2(TX)does not vanish. Consequently,Xbelongs to a unique irreducible component of the Gieseker moduli space. These irreducible components are uniruled. As a result of all this, we show the existence of infinitely many moduli spaces, satisfying the strict Beauville inequality$$p_g > 2q-4$$pg>2q-4, with an irreducible component that has a proper quadruple sublocus where the degree of the canonical morphism jumps up. These components are above the Castelnuovo line, but nonetheless parametrize surfaces with non birational canonical morphisms. The existence of jumping subloci is a contrast with the moduli of surfaces with$$K^2 = 2p_g- 4$$K2=2pg-4, studied by Horikawa. Irreducible moduli components with a jumping sublocus also present a similarity and a difference to the moduli of curves of genus$$g\ge 3$$g3, for, like in the case of curves, the degree of the canonical morphism goes down outside a closed sublocus but, unlike in the case of curves, it is never birational. Finally, our study shows that there are infinitely many moduli spaces with an irreducible component whose general elements have non birational canonical morphism and another irreducible component whose general elements have birational canonical map.

     
    more » « less
  4. Abstract

    Hemiwicking is the phenomena where a liquid wets a textured surface beyond its intrinsic wetting length due to capillary action and imbibition. In this work, we derive a simple analytical model for hemiwicking in micropillar arrays. The model is based on the combined effects of capillary action dictated by interfacial and intermolecular pressures gradients within the curved liquid meniscus and fluid drag from the pillars at ultra-low Reynolds numbers$${\boldsymbol{(}}{{\bf{10}}}^{{\boldsymbol{-}}{\bf{7}}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{\bf{Re}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{{\bf{10}}}^{{\boldsymbol{-}}{\bf{3}}}{\boldsymbol{)}}$$(107Re103). Fluid drag is conceptualized via a critical Reynolds number:$${\bf{Re}}{\boldsymbol{=}}\frac{{{\bf{v}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{{\bf{x}}}_{{\bf{0}}}}{{\boldsymbol{\nu }}}$$Re=v0x0ν, wherev0corresponds to the maximum wetting speed on a flat, dry surface andx0is the extension length of the liquid meniscus that drives the bulk fluid toward the adsorbed thin-film region. The model is validated with wicking experiments on different hemiwicking surfaces in conjunction withv0andx0measurements using Water$${\boldsymbol{(}}{{\bf{v}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{\boldsymbol{\approx }}{\bf{2}}\,{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{/}}{\bf{s}}{\boldsymbol{,}}\,{\bf{25}}\,{\boldsymbol{\mu }}{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{{\bf{x}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{\bf{28}}\,{\boldsymbol{\mu }}{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{)}}$$(v02m/s,25µmx028µm), viscous FC-70$${\boldsymbol{(}}{{\boldsymbol{v}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{\boldsymbol{\approx }}{\bf{0.3}}\,{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{/}}{\bf{s}}{\boldsymbol{,}}\,{\bf{18.6}}\,{\boldsymbol{\mu }}{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{{\boldsymbol{x}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{\bf{38.6}}\,{\boldsymbol{\mu }}{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{)}}$$(v00.3m/s,18.6µmx038.6µm)and lower viscosity Ethanol$${\boldsymbol{(}}{{\boldsymbol{v}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{\boldsymbol{\approx }}{\bf{1.2}}\,{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{/}}{\bf{s}}{\boldsymbol{,}}\,{\bf{11.8}}\,{\boldsymbol{\mu }}{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{{\bf{x}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{\boldsymbol{\lesssim }}{\bf{33.3}}\,{\boldsymbol{\mu }}{\bf{m}}{\boldsymbol{)}}$$(v01.2m/s,11.8µmx033.3µm).

     
    more » « less
  5. Abstract

    Let$$\phi $$ϕbe a positive map from the$$n\times n$$n×nmatrices$$\mathcal {M}_n$$Mnto the$$m\times m$$m×mmatrices$$\mathcal {M}_m$$Mm. It is known that$$\phi $$ϕis 2-positive if and only if for all$$K\in \mathcal {M}_n$$KMnand all strictly positive$$X\in \mathcal {M}_n$$XMn,$$\phi (K^*X^{-1}K) \geqslant \phi (K)^*\phi (X)^{-1}\phi (K)$$ϕ(KX-1K)ϕ(K)ϕ(X)-1ϕ(K). This inequality is not generally true if$$\phi $$ϕis merely a Schwarz map. We show that the corresponding tracial inequality$${{\,\textrm{Tr}\,}}[\phi (K^*X^{-1}K)] \geqslant {{\,\textrm{Tr}\,}}[\phi (K)^*\phi (X)^{-1}\phi (K)]$$Tr[ϕ(KX-1K)]Tr[ϕ(K)ϕ(X)-1ϕ(K)]holds for a wider class of positive maps that is specified here. We also comment on the connections of this inequality with various monotonicity statements that have found wide use in mathematical physics, and apply it, and a close relative, to obtain some new, definitive results.

     
    more » « less