Author: geosciencejournal

A physical environment is considered an area that is tangible and supports, influences, and develops life. On Earth, many different types of physical environments, natural and synthetic, have existed throughout its history. Earth did not technically exist as a physical environment before 2.3 billion years ago. At this time, simple, single-celled bacteria appeared and produced oxygen making the Earth suitable for widespread life. The first members of the animal kingdom, organisms resembling modern-day mollusks, did not appear until around 545 million years ago. At this time, the Earth was covered in a warm, shallow ocean. Between the dawn of complex organisms and the emergence of modern humans, the Earth has experienced a great variety of physical environments including this early planetwide ocean, a supercontinent that formed during the Carboniferous Period and extreme climates unfit for most animal life.

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Water quality testing is an important part of environmental monitoring. When water quality is poor, it affects not only aquatic life but the surrounding ecosystem as well. These sections detail all of the parameters that affect the quality of water in the environment. These properties can be physical, chemical or biological factors. Physical properties of water quality include temperature and turbidity. Chemical characteristics involve parameters such as pH and dissolved oxygen. Biological indicators of water quality include algae and phytoplankton. These parameters are relevant not only to surface water studies of the ocean, lakes and rivers, but to groundwater and industrial processes as well. Water quality monitoring can help researchers predict and learn from natural processes in the environment and determine human impacts on an ecosystem. These measurement efforts can also assist in restoration projects or ensure environmental standards are being met.

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Cenozoic Era, third of the major eras of Earth’s history. It was the interval of time during which the continents assumed their modern configuration and geographic positions and during which Earth’s flora and fauna evolved toward those of the present. Derived from the Greek for recent life, it reflects the sequential development and diversification of life on Earth from the Paleozoic through the Mesozoic. Today, the Cenozoic is internationally accepted as the youngest of the three subdivisions of the fossiliferous part of Earth history. Cenozoic rocks are extensively developed on all the continents, particularly on lowland plains. They are generally less consolidated than older rocks, although some are indurated as a result of high pressure due to deep burial, chemical diagenesis, or high temperature-namely, metamorphism. Sedimentary rocks predominate during the Cenozoic, and more than half the world’s petroleum occurs in such rocks of this age. Igneous rocks are represented by extensive early Cenozoic flood basalts and the late Cenozoic flood basalts of the Columbia River in Washington, as well as by numerous volcanoes in the circum-Pacific System and ocean island chains such as Hawaii.

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Arkose, coarse sandstone primarily made up of quartz and feldspar grains together with small amounts of mica, all moderately well sorted, slightly worn, and loosely cemented with calcite or, less commonly, iron oxides or silica. Arkose is often used informally by geologists as a feldspathic arenite, because it is rich in feldspar (more than 25 percent of the sand grains) and distinguished from graywacke by its lighter colour. In the absence of stratification, arkose may bear superficial resemblance to granite, and it aptly has been described as reconstituted granite, or granite wash. Like the granites from which they were formed, arkoses are pink or gray. The geological significance of arkose has been much debated. Under normal conditions most of the feldspar decomposes and is converted to clay minerals during weathering of the source rocks, whereas under conditions of extreme dryness or low temperatures, decomposition of the feldspar is inhibited or greatly retarded. Arkoses were, therefore, presumed to be derived from the erosion of a granitic terrane characterized by an arid or glacial climate. Now, however, it is known that the feldspar may escape destruction and thus be transported and deposited with quartz sands if rates of uplift, erosion, and deposition are great enough. Under such conditions, irrespective of the climate, weathering processes are incomplete and the sands derived from such terrane are high in feldspar content. Arkoses, therefore, may be said to indicate either a climatic extreme or high relief. Most ancient arkose deposits seem to be the product of high relief.

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Stromatolite, layered deposit, mainly of limestone, formed by the growth of blue-green algae. These structures are usually characterized by thin, alternating light and dark layers that may be flat, hummocky, or dome-shaped. The alternating layers are largely produced by the trapping of sediment washed up during storms on some occasions and by limestone precipitation by the blue-green algae on others. Stromatolites were common in Precambrian time. Some of the first forms of life on Earth are recorded in stromatolites present in rocks 3.5 billion years old. Although stromatolites continue to form in certain areas of the world today, they grow in greatest abundance in Shark Bay in western Australia. A matlike layer of blue-green algae is able to grow on the surface of sediments in the shallow waters there because evaporation causes high concentrations of salt that discourage snails and other organisms from eating the blue-green algae.

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Mud volcano, mound of mud heaved up through overlying sediments. The craters are usually shallow and may intermittently erupt mud. These eruptions continuously rebuild the cones, which are eroded relatively easily. Some mud volcanoes are created by hot-spring activity where large amounts of gas and small amounts of water react chemically with the surrounding rocks and form a boiling mud. Variations are the porridge pot and the paint pot. Other mud volcanoes, entirely of a nonigneous origin, occur only in oil-field regions that are relatively young and have soft, unconsolidated formations. Under compactional stress, methane and related hydrocarbon gases mixed with mud force their way upward and burst through to the surface, spewing mud into a cone like shape. Because of the compactional stress and the depth from which the mixture comes, the mud is often hot and may have an accompanying steam cloud.

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Lagoon, area of relatively shallow, quiet water situated in a coastal environment and having access to the sea but separated from the open marine conditions by a barrier. The barrier may be either a sandy or shingly wave-built feature, or it may be a coral reef. Thus, there are two main types of lagoons: elongated or irregular stretches of water that lie between coastal barrier islands and the shoreline and circular or irregular stretches of water surrounded by coral atoll reefs or protected by barrier coral reefs from direct wave action. Lagoon depths are maintained at a moderate level by sedimentation, and this compensates for the subsidence that commonly attends reef formation. Because the reef is an organic structure, the lagoonal sediments contain much calcareous material. The sheltered waters support highly productive ecosystems made up of a distinctive flora and fauna. Barrier island, or coastal, lagoons are characterized by quiet water conditions, fine-grained sedimentation, and, in many cases, brackish marshes. Water movements are related to discharge of river flow through the lagoon and to the regular influx and egress of tidal waters through the inlets that normally separate the barrier islands. Coastal lagoons are generally characteristic of coasts of low or moderate energy, occurring especially on the east coasts of continents where the swells are less violent and in high latitudes where offshore ice provides some protection. They also are associated with low coasts and rarely occur where high cliffs form the coast. They can form only where there is abundant sediment for construction of the protective barrier islands. Too much sediment from the mainland, however, can lead to delta formation rather than lagoons, although lagoons frequently occur along the outer delta margin and between delta distributaries.

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Canyon, deep, steep-walled, V-shaped valley cut by a river through resistant rock. Such valleys often occur in the upper courses of rivers, where the stream has a strong, swift current that digs its valley relatively rapidly. Smaller valleys of similar appearance are called gorges. The term canyon is taken from the Spanish word canon, meaning tube. The largest and most famous canyons have been cut through arid or semiarid lands by swift streams fed by rain or melting snow transported from moister regions upstream. The walls remain steep and angular because they are not worn and softened by frequent rainfall and surface drainage. Notable canyons in the United States are those of the Colorado, Snake, and Arkansas rivers, the Rio Grande, and the Yellowstone River. Cutting across the continental shelves and down the continental slopes beneath the sea in many parts of the world are prominent submarine canyons. A few of these landforms—such as the Zemchung Canyon in the Bering Sea and Monterey Canyon near the coast of California—occur on the same enormous scale as the Grand Canyon. The heads of these canyons were cut by rivers at a time when sea level was several hundred feet lower than today, probably during the Pleistocene Epoch when considerably more water than at present was tied up in continental ice sheets. The continuations of the canyons down the continental slopes were probably cut and are maintained by deep-water currents containing large amounts of suspended sediment or by sudden avalanche-like movements of loose sedimentary material that collected in the upper parts of the submarine canyons.

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Halide mineral, any of a group of naturally occurring inorganic compounds that are salts of the halogen acids. Such compounds, with the notable exceptions of halite, sylvite, and fluorite, are rare and of very local occurrence.  Compositionally and structurally, three broad categories of halide minerals are recognized; these categories, which are also distinguishable in their modes of occurrence, include the simple halides, the halide complexes, and the oxyhydroxy-halides. The simple halides are salts of the alkali, alkaline earth, and transition metals. Most are soluble in water; the transition-metal halides are unstable under exposure to air. Halite, sodium chloride, is the most familiar example; it often occurs with other evaporite minerals in enormous beds resulting from the accumulation of brines and trapped oceanic water in impermeable basins and their evaporation. Minor amounts of sylvite, potassium chloride, also are present in such beds. Other simple halides such as sal-ammoniac, ammonium chloride; lawrencite, ferrous chloride; and molysite, ferric chloride occur in fumarolic vents and are highly unstable in air. A few hydrothermal vein minerals in silver deposits, such as chlorargyrite and calomel, serve as minor and occasional ores of silver and mercury, respectively. A few double salts included among the simple halides have formed under conditions similar to the formation of halite. In the halide complexes, halide anions are tightly bound to a cation, usually aluminum; the resulting unit behaves as a single negative ion. The most common examples are the fluoroaluminates cryolite, cryolithionite, thomsenolite, and weberite. Enormous quantities of cryolite formerly were mined at Ivigtut, Greenland, to be used for flux in the recovery of aluminum from bauxite.

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Clay mineral, any of a group of important hydrous aluminum silicates with a layer structure and very small particle size. They may contain significant amounts of iron, alkali metals, or alkaline earths. The term clay is generally applied to a natural material with plastic properties, particles of very fine size, customarily those defined as particles smaller than two micrometres and very fine mineral fragments or particles composed mostly of hydrous-layer silicates of aluminum, though occasionally containing magnesium and iron. Although, in a broader sense, clay minerals can include virtually any mineral of the above-cited particle size, the definition adapted here is restricted to represent hydrous-layer silicates and some related short-range ordered aluminosilicates, both of which occur either exclusively or frequently in very fine-size grades. The development of X-ray diffraction techniques in the 1920s and the subsequent improvement of microscopic and thermal procedures enabled investigators to establish that clays are composed of a few groups of crystalline minerals. The introduction of electron microscopic methods proved very useful in determining the characteristic shape and size of clay minerals. More recent analytical techniques such as infrared spectroscopy, neutron diffraction analysis, Mössbauer spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy have helped advance scientific knowledge of the crystal chemistry of these minerals.

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