East European sedimentary basins long heated by a fading mantle upwelling.

A strong negative anomaly of seismic wave velocities at the core-mantle boundary (the Perm Anomaly) beneath the East European platform is attributed to the remnant of a deep mantle upwelling. The interaction between the upwelling and the East European lithosphere in the geological past and its resulting surface manifestations are still poorly understood. Using mantle plume modelling and global plate motion reconstructions, we show here that the East European lithosphere is likely to have been situated over the weakening Perm Anomaly upwelling for about 150-200 million years. As the East European platform moved above the Perm Anomaly in post-Jurassic times, the vertical tectonic movements recorded in sedimentary hydrocarbon-rich basins show either hiatus/uplift or insignificant subsidence. Analytical modelling of heat conduction through the lithosphere demonstrates that the basins have been slowly heated for a long time by the Perm Anomaly upwelling, creating suitable conditions for hydrocarbon maturation. This suggests a profound relationship between mantle plume dynamics, basin evolution, and hydrocarbon generation.

Natural hazards and climate change are not drivers of disasters.

Many nations face challenges in assessing, understanding, and responding to the time-dependent nature of disaster risk. Changes in the intensity of occurrences of extreme events coupled with changes in vulnerability and exposure alter the impacts of natural hazards on society in mostly negative ways. Here an interrelationship between natural hazard (NH), climate change (CC), vulnerability (V), exposure (E), and decisionmaking (DM) is considered. While NHs trigger disasters and CC is likely to intensify occurrences of disasters, V and E present major drivers of disasters. Informed DM on disaster risk reduction should be based on scientific evidence from NH and CC, knowledge of V and E, and relevant options for actions on preventive disaster measures as a part of preparedness and public awareness.

Active cloaking and illusion of electric potentials in electrostatics.

Cloaking and illusion has been demonstrated theoretically and experimentally in several research fields. Here we present for the first time an active exterior cloaking device in electrostatics operating in a two-horizontally-layered electroconductive domain, and use the superposition principle to cloak electric potentials. The device uses an additional current source pattern introduced on the interface between two layers to cancel the total electric potential to be measured. Also, we present an active exterior illusion device allowing for detection of a signal pattern corresponding to any arbitrarily chosen current source instead of the existing current source. The performance of the cloaking/illusion devices is demonstrated by three-dimensional models and numerical experiments using synthetic measurements of the electric potential. Sensitivities of numerical results to a noise in measured data and to a size of cloaking devices are analysed. The numerical results show quite reasonable cloaking/illusion performance, which means that a current source can be hidden electrostatically. The developed active cloaking/illusion methodology can be used in subsurface geo-exploration studies, electrical engineering, live sciences, and elsewhere.

Linking mantle upwelling with the lithosphere descent [corrected] and the Japan Sea evolution: a hypothesis.

Recent seismic tomography studies image a low velocity zone (interpreted as a high temperature anomaly) in the mantle beneath the subducting Pacific plate near the Japanese islands at the depth of about 400 km. This thermal feature is rather peculiar in terms of the conventional view of mantle convection and subduction zones. Here we present a dynamic restoration of the thermal state of the mantle beneath this region assimilating geophysical, geodetic, and geological data up to 40 million years. We hypothesise that the hot mantle upwelling beneath the Pacific plate partly penetrated through the subducting plate into the mantle wedge and generated two smaller hot upwellings, which contributed to the rapid subsidence in the basins of the Japan Sea and to back-arc spreading. Another part of the hot mantle migrated upward beneath the Pacific lithosphere, and the presently observed hot anomaly is a remnant part of this mantle upwelling.