In the mountainous headwaters of the Colorado River episodic dust deposition from adjacent arid and disturbed landscapes darkens snow and accelerates snowmelt, impacting basin hydrology. Patterns and impacts across the heterogenous landscape cannot be inferred from current in situ observations. To fill this gap daily remotely sensed retrievals of radiative forcing and contribution to melt were analyzed over the MODIS period of record (2001-2023) to quantify spatiotemporal impacts of snow darkening. Each season radiative forcing magnitudes were lowest in early spring and intensified as snowmelt progressed, with interannual variability in timing and magnitude of peak impact. Over the full record, radiative forcing was elevated in the first decade relative to the last decade. Snowmelt was accelerated in all years and impacts were most intense in the central to southern headwaters. The spatiotemporal patterns motivate further study to understand controls on variability and related perturbations to snow water resources.

Study area: Urumqi Glacier No.1 Catchment in central Asia. Study focus: Chemical weathering at the basin scale is important process for understanding the feedback mechanism of the carbon cycle and climate change. This study mainly used the actual sampling data in 2013, 2014, and 2016, and the first collection from the literature in same catchment to analyze the seasonal and interannual characteristics of meltwater runoff, as well as cation denudation rate (CDR). New hydrological insights for the study region: The dominant ions of meltwater runoff are Ca2 +, HCO3- , and SO42-, which are mainly derived from calcite dissolution, feldspar weathering and sulfide oxidation. Meltwater runoff at Urumqi Glacier No.1 has higher concentrations of Ca2+ and lower concentrations of HCO3- than that from glaciers in Asia. Compared to 2006 and 2007, cation concentrations increased in 2013 and 2014, while SO42- concentration decreased. The daily ion concentration has seasonality and exhibits a negative relationship with discharge. Daily CDR is positively related to discharge and temperature. Annual CDR values range from 12.34 to 19.04 t/ km2/yr in 2013, 2014, and 2016, which are 1-1.7 times higher than those in 2006 and 2007 and higher than some glaciers in Asia. These results indicate that chemical weathering rate in the Urumqi Glacier No.1 catchment has increased with climate warming, and it is stronger than that of some glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau and surroundings.

The rich resources and unique environment of the Moon make it an ideal location for human expansion and the utilization of extraterrestrial resources. Oxygen, crucial for supporting human life on the Moon, can be extracted from lunar regolith, which is highly rich in oxygen and contains polymetallic oxides. This oxygen and metal extraction can be achieved using existing metallurgical techniques. Furthermore, the ample reserves of water ice on the Moon offer another means for oxygen production. This paper offers a detailed overview of the leading technologies for achieving oxygen production on the Moon, drawing from an analysis of lunar resources and environmental conditions. It delves into the principles, processes, advantages, and drawbacks of water-ice electrolysis, two-step oxygen production from lunar regolith, and one-step oxygen production from lunar regolith. The two-step methods involve hydrogen reduction, carbothermal reduction, and hydrometallurgy, while the one-step methods encompass fluorination/chlorination, high-temperature decomposition, molten salt electrolysis, and molten regolith electrolysis (MOE). Following a thorough comparison of raw materials, equipment, technology, and economic viability, MOE is identified as the most promising approach for future in-situ oxygen production on the Moon. Considering the corrosion characteristics of molten lunar regolith at high temperatures, along with the Moon's low-gravity environment, the development of inexpensive and stable inert anodes and electrolysis devices that can easily collect oxygen is critical for promoting MOE technology on the Moon. This review significantly contributes to our understanding of in-situ oxygen production technologies on the Moon and supports upcoming lunar exploration initiatives.

This article investigates the use of a bespoke fund, the Space Resources Fund (SRF), to facilitate monetary benefit sharing from commercial space resource utilisation (SRU) and at the same time provide a source of funding for a developing space resource industry. The study investigates the possible objectives such a fund could have and compares these to range of terrestrial fund types that could have similar objectives. We find that there is no one fund type that could meet the possible objectives for a SRF, however, by combining several fund types, it is possible to construct a dedicated fund that meets the objectives initially developed. The study proposes a fund with the Double Bottom Line of both generating monetary benefits from commercial SRU and providing investment capital to an industry targeting SRU. The study also proposes a possible strategy, structure, funding mechanism and benefit distribution mechanism for the SRF and undertakes high level financial modelling to illustrate the wealth creation potential of such a fund. Further, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the approach proposed in this study compared to the use of a royalty mechanism for monetary benefit sharing, should monetary benefit sharing ultimately be proposed, by the UN Committee On the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) for example. This work builds on previous work that reviews the ongoing debate concerning benefit sharing from commercial SRU and explores the use of royalties for such monetary benefit sharing in the context of commercial lunar ice mining. We conclude that a SRF as proposed here could help resolve the long standing dilemma of how to facilitate monetary benefit sharing from commercial SRU without impacting the development of such an industry.

Despite the increasing number of space launches, growth of the commercial space sector, signing of the Artemis Accords, maturation of space mining technologies, the emergence of a regulatory environment through domestic legislation, and a comprehensive body of international law, an intergovernmental governing authority has yet to be established to manage mining activities on the Moon. We developed a Lunar Mining Code and mapping tool to regulate and manage prospecting and exploration activities for water ice at the Moon's poles. The Lunar Mining Code is composed of a notification system to manage prospecting, a contract system for issuing exploration licenses to allotted areas on the Moon, and best mining practices and principles to promote equal access and safeguard the lunar environment.

Study region: Urumqi River headwater region in eastern Tianshan, central Asia. Study focus: Climate change is anticipated to accelerate glacier shrinkage and alter hydrological conditions, causing variations in the runoff patterns in the catchment and significantly threatening the regional water resources. However, few models exhibit adequate performance to simulate both surface alterations and glacier/snow runoff. Therefore, this study combined the glacier module with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to estimate the effect of climate change on the streamflow in the Urumqi River headwater region. The Urumqi River Headwater region is representative because of its long data series, viatal location, and local water availability, and it contains the longest-observed reference glacier (Urumqi Glacier No.1) in China, which spans the period from 1958 to the present. New hydrological insights for the region: The SWAT model performed satisfactorily for both calibration (1983-2005) and validation (2006-2016) periods with a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) greater than 0.80. The water balance analysis suggested that the snow/glacier melt contributed approximately 25% to the water yield. At the end of the 21st century, the temperature would increase by 2.4-3.8 degrees C while the precipitation would decrease by 1-2% under two future scenarios (ssp245 and ssp585). Thus, a 34-36% reduction in streamflow was projected due to above climate change impacts. This information would contribute to the development of adaptation strategies for sustainable water resource management.

Permafrost carbon could produce a positive climate feedback. Until now, the ecosystem carbon budgets in the permafrost regions remain uncertain. Moreover, the frequently used models have some limitations especially regarding to the freeze-thaw process. Herein, we improved the IBIS model by incorporating an unfrozen water scheme and by specifying the parameters to estimate the present and future carbon budget of different land cover types (desert steppe, steppe, meadow, and wet meadow) in the permafrost regions. Incorporating an unfrozen water scheme reduced the mean errors in the soil temperature and soil water content by 25.2%, and the specifying leaf area parameters reduced the errors in the net primary productivity (NPP) by 79.9%. Further, the simulation results showed that steppes are carbon sources (39.16 gC/m(2)/a) and the meadows are carbon sinks (-63.42 gC/m(2)/a ). Under the climate warming scenarios of RCP 2.6, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5, the desert steppe and alpine steppe would assimilated more carbon, while the meadow and wet meadow were projected to shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources in 2071-2100, implying that the land cover type plays an important role in simulating the source/sink effects of permafrost ecosystem carbon in the IBIS model. The results highlight the importance of unfrozen water to the soil hydrothermal regime and specific leaf area for the growth of alpine vegetation, and present new insights on the difference of the responses of various permafrost ecosystems to climate warming.

Mining can greatly affect water quality in nearby areas, especially when mines are abandoned and lead to contamination from tailings and drainage. This study examines the impact of the abandoned Ze & iuml;da lead mine on water sources in the Upper Moulouya region of northwestern Morocco. We aimed to evaluate water quality, understand geochemical processes, and determine the suitability of water for drinking and irrigation. In summer 2021, 21 water samples were collected from rivers, dams, groundwater, and quarry lakes. We analyzed 18 physicochemical and metallic parameters, finding significant variations in ion concentrations. The main ions were ranked as Na+ > Mg2+ > Ca2+ > K+ and HCO3- > Cl- > SO42- > NO3-. Metal concentrations followed the order Zn > Cu > Pb > As > Cd. The Drinking Water Quality Index (DWQI) showed that 95% of the samples were not suitable for drinking. Similarly, the Irrigation Water Quality Indexes (IWQIs) indicated that quarry lakes were unsuitable for irrigation, while groundwater met acceptable criteria. Over 70% of the samples showed no significant metal contamination based on the Heavy Metal Evaluation Index (HEI) and Heavy Metal Pollution Index (HPI). The data suggest that water-rock interactions are the main drivers of hydrochemical changes, with processes like calcite, dolomite, otavite, and cerussite precipitation, as well as the weathering of minerals like halite, starkeyite, and sylvite. To protect water quality and prevent environmental damage, ongoing monitoring and appropriate measures are recommended for the Ze & iuml;da mining area.

Hydraulic conductivity (K) is a crucial parameter in hydrogeology but is highly heterogeneous and anisotropic due to variations in sediment texture, making its large-scale estimation challenging. Traditional laboratory and empirical methods based on grain-size distribution (GSD) analysis from limited data provide local K measurements, resulting in a poor representation of aquifer heterogeneity. In contrast, pumping tests estimate an integrated K value over a of the aquifer within the cone of depression but still lack the spatial resolution needed to reveal detailed variations in K across larger aquifer extents. In this study, the Di models method was used to simulate local GSD in three-dimensional (3-D) detrital systems. The focus was to explore the potential to estimate K through simulated particle-size fractions derived from a 3-D geological model of the City of Munich. By employing log-cubic interpolation, a complete and accurate representation of the fictive GSD enabled the application of multiple empirical relationships for K estimation. The resulting 3-D K fields preserved the variability in K within each aquifer system. When averaged for each separate aquifer system across different lateral extents, i.e., 50-150 and 550 m, the predicted K values showed success rates of 44-47% with deviations of at least one order of magnitude in 15-19% of cases when compared to 364 K values derived from pumping-test data. The results highlight the ability of the approach to successfully estimate K while accounting for spatial heterogeneity, suggesting its potential for groundwater modeling, aquifer yield assessments and groundwater heat pump system design.

This work focuses on thermal water extraction on the lunar surface. We previously developed a three-dimensional finite element model (FEM) implementing heat and gas diffusion in the porous granular medium that is icy lunar regolith. Here, we present an improved version of this work in which we implemented a more realistic regolith model. In particular, we addressed previous model simplifications on regolith emissivity and porosity, water sublimation rate, as well as regolith and water ice thermal conductivity and permeability. Incorporating recent modeling and experimental work from the literature, we investigated the effect of these soil properties on the outcome of our simulations, with a particular interest in the yield of the thermal extraction process. Aiming at understanding what thermal water extraction would produce if heating the lunar surface directly, we also studied the effect of open borders on extraction yields. We find that the crude icy regolith approximation we implemented in Paper I provided a lower estimation of water vapor yields upon heating. Overall and using the same heating methods (surface heating as well as inserted drills), our more accurate regolith model implementation extracted more water from the simulation volume. With this new model, we observed that extraction yields depended mostly on the ice content of the regolith, and to a lesser extent on the heating configuration (number of drills) and power. In two specific configurations, 16 and 25 drills at 104 W in 1%vol icy regolith, heating allowed the extraction of nearby ice, efficiently desiccating the entire simulation volume. Apart from these two cases, the highest extraction yields were obtained for 104 W surface heating of a volume with closed borders with values over 80%. In open border volumes, highest yields were around 70% achieved for the highest number of drills (16 and 25), at the highest power (104 W) in the regolith with the largest icy fraction. Extraction masses started being noticeable around a few minutes, but reaching most of the maximum possible yields took up to several days in some cases. Defining an extraction efficiency by combining the yield and extraction times, we found that the best compromise between hardware complexity, time, and yield would be working in open border environments, using dense drill configurations in ice-rich regolith, and loose drill configurations in ice-poor regolith. In both cases, extraction efficiencies were similar at 102 W and 103 W per drill, indicating that low power solutions would yield similar results than higher power ones. Overall, our results support the viability of thermal water extraction in future ISRU architectures.