No abstract

Abstract:The presence of natural gas hydrates at all active and passive continental margins has been proven. Their global occurrence as well as the fact that huge amounts of methane and other lighter hydrocarbons are stored in natural gas hydrates has led to the idea of using hydrate bearing sediments as an energy resource. However, natural gas hydrates remain stable as long as they are in mechanical, thermal and chemical equilibrium with their environment. Thus, for the production of gas from hydrate bearing sediments, at least one of these equilibrium states must be disturbed by depressurization, heating or addition of chemicals such as CO 2 . Depressurization, thermal or chemical stimulation may be used alone or in combination, but the idea of producing hydrocarbons from hydrate bearing sediments by CO 2 injection suggests the potential of an almost emission free use of this unconventional natural gas resource. However, up to now there are still open questions regarding all three production principles. Within the framework of the German national research project SUGAR the thermal stimulation method by use of in situ combustion was developed and tested on a pilot plant scale and the CH 4 -CO 2 swapping process in gas hydrates studied on a molecular level. Microscopy, confocal Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction were used for in situ investigations of the CO 2 -hydrocarbon exchange process in gas hydrates and its driving forces. For the thermal stimulation a heat exchange reactor was designed and tested for the exothermal catalytic oxidation of methane. OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2011, 4 152 Furthermore, a large scale reservoir simulator was realized to synthesize hydrates in sediments under conditions similar to nature and to test the efficiency of the reactor. Thermocouples placed in the reservoir simulator with a total volume of 425 L collect data regarding the propagation of the heat front. In addition, CH 4 sensors are placed in the water saturated sediment to detect the distribution of CH 4 in the sample. These data are used for numerical simulations for up-scaling from laboratory to field conditions. This study presents the experimental set up of the large scale reservoir simulator and the reactor design. Preliminary results indicate that the catalytic oxidation of CH 4 operated as a temperature controlled, autothermal reaction in a countercurrent heat exchange reactor is a safe and promising tool for the thermal stimulation of hydrates. In addition, preliminary results from the laboratory studies on the CO 2 -hydrocarbon swapping process in simple and mixed gas hydrates are presented.

Researchers require infrastructures that ensure a maximum of accessibility, stability and reliability to facilitate working with and sharing of research data. Such infrastructures are being increasingly summarized under the term Research Data Repositories (RDR). The project re3data.org–Registry of Research Data Repositories–has begun to index research data repositories in 2012 and offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries and publishers an overview of the heterogeneous research data repository landscape. In July 2013 re3data.org lists 400 research data repositories and counting. 288 of these are described in detail using the re3data.org vocabulary. Information icons help researchers to easily identify an adequate repository for the storage and reuse of their data. This article describes the heterogeneous RDR landscape and presents a typology of institutional, disciplinary, multidisciplinary and project-specific RDR. Further the article outlines the features of re3data.org, and shows how this registry helps to identify appropriate repositories for storage and search of research data.

The 'Berlin Declaration' was published in 2003 as a guideline to policy makers to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base. Because knowledge is derived from data, the principles of the 'Berlin Declaration' should apply to data as well. Today, access to scientific data is hampered by structural deficits in the publication process. Data publication needs to offer authors an incentive to publish data through long-term repositories. Data publication also requires an adequate licence model that protects the intellectual property rights of the author while allowing further use of the data by the scientific community.

No abstract

Analyses of terrigenous sediments from the Chilean continental slope off the southern border of the Atacama desert (27.5°S), focusing on illite crystallinity and the Fe:Al ratio of the sediments, reveal a high‐frequency variability of the position of the Southern Westerlies, which is very similar to the coeval short‐term climatic events known from Greenland ice cores and from North Atlantic sediments. Besides showing dominantly precession‐driven variability in precipitation over the Andes, these analyses also reveal rapid changes in weathering intensity along the Chilean Coastal Range during the last 80,000 years. These rapid changes occur at much shorter timescales than the 19–100 kyr orbital forcing of the Milankovitch cycles.

The first minting of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for research data happened in 2004 in the context of the project "Publication and citation of primary scientific data" (STD-DOI). Some of the concepts and perceptions about DOI for data today have their roots in the way this project implemented DOI for research data and the decisions made in those early days still shape the discussion about the use of persistent identifiers for research data today. This project also laid the foundation for a tighter integration of journal publications and data. Promoted by early adopters, such as PANG AEA, DOI registration for data has reached a high level of maturity and has become an integral part of scientific publishing. This paper discusses the fundamental concepts applied in the identification of DOI for research data and how these can be interpreted for alternative and future applications of persistent identifiers for research data.

pyrolite is a Python package for working with multivariate geochemical data, with a particular focus on rock and mineral chemistry. The project aims to contribute to more robust, efficient and reproducible data-driven geochemical research.