The Vestnesa Ridge, located off the west Svalbard margin, is a >60 km long ridge consisting of fine-grained sediments that host a deep-marine gas hydrate and associated seepage system. Geological and geophysical observations indicate the predominance of vertical fluid expulsion through fractures with pockmarks expressed on the seafloor along the entire ridge. However, despite the apparent evidence ...

Large quantities of methane are stored in hydrates and permafrost within shallow marine sediments in the Arctic Ocean. These reservoirs are highly sensitive to climate warming, but the fate of methane released from sediments is uncertain. Here, we review the principal physical and biogeochemical processes that regulate methane fluxes across the seabed, the fate of this methane in the water column, ...

Introduced by the late Per Bak and his colleagues, self-organized criticality (SOC) has been one of the most stimulating concepts to come out of statistical mechanics and condensed matter theory in the last few decades, and has played a significant role in the development of complexity science. SOC, and more generally fractals and power laws, have attracted much comment, ranging from the very ...

Hydrothermal vents modify and displace subsurface dissolved organic matter (DOM) into the ocean. Once in the ocean, this DOM is transported together with elements, particles, dissolved gases and biomass along with the neutrally buoyant plume layer. Considering the number and extent of actively venting hydrothermal sites in the oceans, their contribution to the oceanic DOM pool may be substantial. ...

The nuclear spin-rotation (NSR) and absolute nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) shielding tensors of the nuclei in the series of X⁷⁷Se and X¹²⁵Te (X = ²⁹Si, ⁷³Ge, ¹¹⁹Sn and ²⁰⁷Pb) are calculated using fourcomponent relativistic density functional theory (DFT) and coupled-cluster singles-doubles with a perturbative triples correction ...

Wide-field fluorescence microscopy, while much faster than confocal microscopy, suffers from a lack of optical sectioning and poor axial resolution. 3D structured illumination microscopy (SIM) has been demonstrated to provide optical sectioning and to double the resolution limit both laterally and axially, but even with this the axial resolution is still worse than the lateral resolution of ...

Intraoperative tracking of laparoscopic instruments is often a prerequisite for computer and roboticassisted interventions. While numerous methods for detecting, segmenting and tracking of medical instruments based on endoscopic video images have been proposed in the literature, key limitations remain to be addressed: Firstly, robustness, that is, the reliable performance of state-of-the-art methods ...

Background: Large-scale events such as COVID-19 show that there are situations that can lead to huge stress on health infrastructure systems (HIS). The pandemic reveals that it is very difficult to protect HIS from all kinds of possible hazards. They can be unpredictable and spread rapidly; hence, it is hard to find an effective mitigation strategy to completely protect society and its important ...

Recently, to evaluate the response of systems against disruptive events, the application of the resilience concept has been increased. Resilience depicts the system’s ability to return to its normal operational status after the disruption. Various studies in the field of engineering and non-engineering systems have only considered systems’ performance indicators to estimate resilience. Therefore, ...

Throughput capacity (TC) is defined as the total amount of material processed or produced by the system in the given time. In practice, full capacity performance for industrial equipment is impossible because the failures are affected and cause a reduction. Therefore, failure interruptions, especially critical ones (bottlenecks), must be detected and considered in production management. From the ...