As a result of extensive gold and silver mining in the Mojave Desert, southern California, mine wastes and tailings containing highly elevated arsenic (As) concentrations remain exposed at a number of former mining sites. Decades of weathering and erosion have contributed to the mobilization of As-enriched tailings, which now contaminate surrounding communities. Fluvial transport plays an intermittent yet important and relatively undocumented role in the migration and dispersal of As-contaminated mine wastes in semi-arid climates. Assessing the contribution of fluvial systems to tailings mobilization is critical in order to assess the distribution and long-term exposure potential of tailings in a mining-impacted environment. Extensive sampling, chemical analysis, and geospatial mapping of dry streambed (wash) sediments, tailings piles, alluvial fans, and rainwater runoff at multiple mine sites have aided the development of a conceptual model to explain the fluvial migration of mine wastes in semi-arid climates. Intense and episodic precipitation events mobilize mine wastes downstream and downslope as a series of discrete pulses, causing dispersion both down and lateral to washes with exponential decay behavior as distance from the source increases. Accordingly a quantitative model of arsenic concentrations in wash sediments, represented as a series of overlapping exponential power-law decay curves, results in the acceptable reproducibility of observed arsenic concentration patterns. Such a model can be transferable to other abandoned mine lands as a predictive tool for monitoring the fate and transport of arsenic and related contaminants in similar settings. Effective remediation of contaminated mine wastes in a semi-arid environment requires addressing concurrent changes in the amounts of potential tailings released through fluvial processes and the transport capacity of a wash.
We report on a set of measurements made in December 2005 by researchers from the University of Central Florida, SPAWAR's Innovative Science and Technology Experiment Facility (ISTEF), Harris Corporation, NASA Kennedy Space Center, and Northrop Grumman. The experiments were conducted on the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) over terrestrial paths of 1, 2, and 5 km. The purpose of the experiments was to determine the atmospheric-induced beam spreading and beam wander at various ranges. Two lasers were used in the experiments. Both were a pulsed 1.06 µm laser; however, one was single-mode and the other was multi-mode. Beam profiles were recorded near the target position. Simultaneous measurements of C n 2 , wind speed and direction, humidity, visibility, temperature, and surface temperature profiles were all recorded.
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