Volatile methyl siloxanes (VMS) are ubiquitous in indoor environments due to their use in personal care products. This paper builds on previous work identifying sources of VMS by synthesizing time-resolved proton-transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer VMS concentration measurements from four multiweek indoor air campaigns to elucidate emission sources and removal processes. Temporal patterns of VMS emissions display both continuous and episodic behavior, with the relative importance varying among species. We find that the cyclic siloxane D5 is consistently the most abundant VMS species, mainly attributable to personal care product use. Two other cyclic siloxanes, D3 and D4, are emitted from oven and personal care product use, with continuous sources also apparent. Two linear siloxanes, L4 and L5, are also emitted from personal care product use, with apparent additional continuous sources. We report measurements for three other organosilicon compounds found in personal care products. The primary air removal pathway of the species examined in this paper is ventilation to the outdoors, which has implications for atmospheric chemistry. The net removal rate is slower for linear siloxanes, which persist for days indoors after episodic release events. This work highlights the diversity in sources of organosilicon species and their persistence indoors.
North Pacific deoxygenation events during the last deglaciation were sustained over millennia by high export productivity, but the triggering mechanisms and their links to deglacial warming remain uncertain1–3. Here we find that initial deoxygenation in the North Pacific immediately after the Cordilleran ice sheet (CIS) retreat4 was associated with increased volcanic ash in seafloor sediments. Timing of volcanic inputs relative to CIS retreat suggests that regional explosive volcanism was initiated by ice unloading5,6. We posit that iron fertilization by volcanic ash7–9 during CIS retreat fuelled ocean productivity in this otherwise iron-limited region, and tipped the marine system towards sustained deoxygenation. We also identify older deoxygenation events linked to CIS retreat over the past approximately 50,000 years (ref. 4). Our findings suggest that the apparent coupling between the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and solid-Earth systems occurs on relatively short timescales and can act as an important driver for ocean biogeochemical change.
Rapid atmospheric warming since the mid-twentieth century has increased temperature-dependent erosion and sediment-transport processes in cold environments, affecting food, energy and water security. In this Review, we summarize landscape changes in cold environments and provide a global inventory of increases in erosion and sediment yield driven by cryosphere degradation. Anthropogenic climate change, deglaciation, and thermokarst disturbances are causing increased sediment mobilization and transport processes in glacierized and periglacierized basins. With continuous cryosphere degradation, sediment transport will continue to increase until reaching a maximum (peak sediment). Thereafter, transport is likely to shift from a temperature-dependent regime toward a rainfall-dependent regime roughly between 2100–2200. The timing of the regime shift would be regulated by changes in meltwater, erosive rainfall and landscape erodibility, and complicated by geomorphic feedbacks and connectivity. Further progress in integrating multisource sediment observations, developing physics-based sediment-transport models, and enhancing interdisciplinary and international scientific collaboration is needed to predict sediment dynamics in a warming world.
Our understanding of past ocean-climate dynamics is informed by multiple paleocirculation proxies including δ13C, 231Pa/230Th, and radiogenic neodymium isotopes (εNd). Of these, the εNd signature of marine authigenic phases is of particular importance as it is considered a robust circulation proxy applicable across timescales, permitting circulation reconstructions during periods of rapid, climatically-induced biological or chemical change (e.g. productivity, pH). However, growing evidence of non-conservative behavior and a widespread sedimentary source (benthic flux via pore water) of Nd to the global ocean suggests that authigenic εNd records do not strictly record a water mass signature, highlighting the need to reconsider interpretations of the authigenic record. To examine the impact of a sedimentary influence on the authigenic record, here we compile paired authigenic and detrital neodymium records from every major ocean basin and from 80 Ma to present. We then focus on just the North Atlantic Ocean basin to examine if this relationship holds up regionally and how authigenic εNd changes relate to sediment composition changes from two scientific ocean drill cores spanning the past 25 ka. We present a new conceptual framework to guide our discussion that examines the coupling or decoupling of authigenic and detrital εNd in terms of the relative importance of each of the three major potential controls as defined in the existing literature (bottom water, pore water, sediments) on the authigenic record. Our compilation reveals a strong linear relationship between detrital εNd and authigenic εNd (correlation coefficient = 0.86, n = 871), demonstrating a widespread influence of lithogenically sourced neodymium on authigenic εNd. We find the same is true within the North Atlantic, with the authigenic records at both locations strongly influenced by the sediments and likely not recording bottom water neodymium values. Emerging evidence for a lithogenic or benthic flux influence on the budgets of a wide range of trace elements suggests that our interpretative framework will be broadly useful for understanding the behavior of trace elements and their isotopes at the sediment-water interface.
This paper proposes a Bayesian multilevel spatio-temporal model with a time-varying spatial autoregressive coefficient to estimate temporally heterogeneous network interdependence. To tackle the classic reflection problem, we use multiple factors to control for confounding caused by latent homophily and common exposures. We develop a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate parameters and adopt Bayesian shrinkage to determine the number of factors. Tests on simulated and empirical data show that the proposed model improves identification of network interdependence and is robust to misspecifcation. Our method is applicable to various types of networks and provides a simpler and more flexible alternative to coevolution models.
The regime divide is one of the most studied cleavages in international politics, and the current discussion centers on whether the great power competition between the United States and China divides the world along regime lines. This paper focuses on the US-China competition in forming voting alignments in the United Nations General Assembly and disentangles the effects of regime type on actions, preferences, and strategic calculations of the rival powers and developing countries. We develop a formal model to theorize the competition and convert the game into a Bayesian statistical estimator. Empirical evidence suggests that the US-China competition increases the democracy/authoritarianism voting cleavage. States' regime-oriented voting or vote-buying choices, however, are not driven by their sincere preferences but by differential strategies shaped by regime type. These findings shed light on the nature of the US-China competition and its implications for the world order.
This paper proposes a Bayesian alternative to the synthetic control method for comparative case studies with a single or multiple treated units. We adopt a Bayesian posterior predictive approach to Rubin’s causal model, which allows researchers to make inferences about both individual and average treatment effects on treated observations based on the empirical posterior distributions of their counterfactuals. The prediction model we develop is a dynamic multilevel model with a latent factor term to correct biases induced by unit-specific time trends. It also considers heterogeneous and dynamic relationships between covariates and the outcome, thus improving precision of the causal estimates. To reduce model dependency, we adopt a Bayesian shrinkage method for model searching and factor selection. Monte Carlo exercises demonstrate that our method produces more precise causal estimates than existing approaches and achieves correct frequentist coverage rates even when sample sizes are small and rich heterogeneities are present in data. We illustrate the method with two empirical examples from political economy. (For software to implement the method, please visit https://github.com/liulch/bpCausal)