Evaluating integrated urban water systems alternatives for Brisbane, Australia.

The Brazil Development Study investigates the feasibility of alternative approaches to providing sustainable water services to a 226 ha mixed residential and industrial greenfield development within the city of Brisbane, Australia. The alternatives include techniques such a the use of rainwater tanks, water use efficiency, a local wastewater treatment plant for recycling of reclaimed water and composting toilets amongst others. This paper evaluates a series of urban development scenarios against the objectives of the study. The insights gained into the drivers for cost and environmental impact for this particular site are discussed as well as a number of issues of concern and challenges to Council and the community.

Massive expansion of marine archaea during a mid-Cretaceous oceanic anoxic event.

Biogeochemical and stable carbon isotopic analysis of black-shale sequences deposited during an Albian oceanic anoxic event (approximately 112 million years ago) indicate that up to 80 weight percent of sedimentary organic carbon is derived from marine, nonthermophilic archaea. The carbon-13 content of archaeal molecular fossils indicates that these archaea were living chemoautotrophically. Their massive expansion may have been a response to the strong stratification of the ocean during this anoxic event. Indeed, the sedimentary record of archaeal membrane lipids suggests that this anoxic event marks a time in Earth history at which certain hyperthermophilic archaea adapted to low-temperature environments.

Increased thermohaline stratification as a possible cause for an ocean anoxic event in the Cretaceous period.

Ocean anoxic events were periods of high carbon burial that led to drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide, lowering of bottom-water oxygen concentrations and, in many cases, significant biological extinction. Most ocean anoxic events are thought to be caused by high productivity and export of carbon from surface waters which is then preserved in organic-rich sediments, known as black shales. But the factors that triggered some of these events remain uncertain. Here we present stable isotope data from a mid-Cretaceous ocean anoxic event that occurred 112 Myr ago, and that point to increased thermohaline stratification as the probable cause. Ocean anoxic event 1b is associated with an increase in surface-water temperatures and runoff that led to decreased bottom-water formation and elevated carbon burial in the restricted basins of the western Tethys and North Atlantic. This event is in many ways similar to that which led to the more recent Plio-Pleistocene Mediterranean sapropels, but the greater geographical extent and longer duration (approximately 46 kyr) of ocean anoxic event 1b suggest that processes leading to such ocean anoxic events in the North Atlantic and western Tethys were able to act over a much larger region, and sequester far more carbon, than any of the Quaternary sapropels.