Humanity is confronted with the grand challenge of how to increase agricultural production to achieve food security during the 21st century and feed a population that is expected to grow to 10 billion people. This needs to be done while maintaining sustainable agricultural systems and simultaneously facing challenges such as a changing climate, depletion of water resources, and the potential for increased erosion and loss of productivity due to the occurrence of extreme weather events. Precision Agriculture emerged out of the advances in the 1980s because of the development of several key technologies like GPS and satellite imagery. This paper argues that with the increasing impact of climate change, the next revolution in precision agriculture and agriculture in general will be driven by Sustainable Precision Agriculture and Environment (SPAE, similar to the 7 Rs), which could leverage past technologies combined with Big Data analysis. This new, technology-focused SPAE transitions from a site-specific management focus to the notion of global sustainability. To accomplish this transition, we introduced the WebGIS framework as an organizing principle that connects local, site-specific data generators called smart farms to a regional and global view of agriculture that can support both the agricultural industry and policymakers in government. This will help integrate databases located in networks of networks into a system of systems to achieve the needed SPAE management and connect field, watershed, national, and worldwide sustainability. Automation and the use of artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), drones, robots, and Big Data serve as a basis for a global "Digital Twin," which will contribute to the development of site-specific conservation and management practices that will increase incomes and global sustainability of agricultural systems.
Inclusions of granitic basement rocks, collected from the sparse ‘lava’ exposed at the 1.8‐km‐diameter Tenoumer crater, Mauritania, exhibit distinctive petrographic features considered indicative of shock‐wave action and diagnostic for meteorite impact. The observed effects include (1) distinctive planar features in quartz, oriented parallel to ω{ 101¯3 } and to other specific planes; (2) intense selective vesiculation of quartz and felspar grains; (3) presence of lechatelierite apparently formed by fusion of quartz grains; and (4) partial fusion and decomposition of biotite grains. These effects are quite distinct from those produced from conventional fusion of granitic xenoliths in lavas. The evidence from these inclusions supports the theory of a meteorite impact origin for the Tenoumer crater. The lava, which is chemically similar to the basement rocks and which has apparently been rapidly quenched, is interpreted as an impact melt formed by fusion of the basement rocks at the time of impact and injected into fractures in the crater wall, carrying with it highly shocked inclusions of basement rock. Values of Sr87/Sr86 determined for the lava are approximately 0.720; they are almost identical with values determined for basement rock samples and are too high to represent primary melt derived from the mantle. Potassium‐argon age determinations on the melt rock establish the age of the Tenoumer crater as 2.5±0.5 m.y.
The Manson impact structure is a 36.5-km-wide, well-preserved crater centered 130 km northwest of Des Moines, Iowa, that formed about 74 Ma. Its diverse lithologies (sandstone, shale, carbonate; leucogranite, gabbro/diabase, gneiss, amphibolite) contain a wide range of shock damage. Seventy-six samples from drill hole 2-A (1953, drilled to a total depth of 144 m) and M-1 (1991, to 212 m depth), located on the upper eastern flank of the 12 km (at base) central peak, were analyzed by optical petrography to determine shock index values useful for determining several key aspects of shock level distribution and modes of emplacement. Core samples from the upper half of hole 2-A consist of breccia with clasts comprised mainly of biotite granites, granodiorites, and gneisses; these lithologies also dominate the crystalline basement blocks that make up the lower half of the 2-A core. Planar deformation features (PDFs) in quartz (2-6 sets/crystal) and feldspars occur at all depths; biotite is readily kinked and variably decomposed. A diagnostic shock feature in quartz (uncommon in feldspars), referred to descriptively as "toasting," may be an optical rather than a compositional phenomenon. Subdivision of larger quartz crystals into numerous polygonal interlocked domains (commonly with thin boundaries of clear, post-impact quartz) produces a distinctive polycrystalline texture; individual domains contain PDF sets, many having no continuity of orientations with neighbors. Feldspars may show internal melt flow and recrystallization; alternate albite twins are selectively more shock disordered and subsequently altered.Shock levels are higher in the upper 38 m of the 2-A core, decreasing downward over the next 81 m as the drill hole passed through the lower impact melt breccia into the crystalline rock megablock zone. M-1 units (distinguished overall by fewer PDFs in quartz) are mostly shales (with a few possibly melted clasts) and quartz sandstone (uncommonly with PDFs) in the upper 57 m; below this a 34 m interval of breccia with mainly leucogranite clasts having high shock indexes, characterized by extensive clast recrystallization and matrix glass; then 18 m of light and dark igneous and metamorphic clasts (variably shocked) with a few clasts of shocked sandstones and shales and some devitrified glass; and bottomed by 49 m of amphibole-rich suevite breccias with less obvious shock damage.
Loose quartz grains packed around chemical explosives are forced during cratering explosions into compacted, coherent masses resembling sand stone blocks found at certain meteorite craters. Sandstone-like lumps found at the Wabar (Arabia) meteorite craters are similar to these shock-lithified sands. Shock-lithification by impact may be effected on Moon as large meteorites strike surfaces covered with rubble from earlier collisions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.