לוח שנה משולב

Rivers are the most effective agent of erosion on earth, transporting massive amounts of detrital and dissolved matter into depositional basins, making them a significant part of the rock cycle. To better understand the relationship between denudation of continents and the rivers that drain them, numerous studies examine the pathways of sediment transport through large drainage systems. However, due to the complex nature of sediment storage and transport dynamics in large-scale fluvial systems, the amount of time sediment spends in the sedimentary system is poorly constrained.
We measured cosmogenic 21Ne to quantify the exposure time of sediments within large-scale fluvial systems in large rivers: the modern Colorado river, the Miocene Hazeva River (~18 Ma), and the Lower Cretaceous (~130 Ma) Kurnub fluvial system. We observe that fluvial transport dynamics in large rivers are complex and that sediment transport time varies significantly and can last between very rapid (faster than our analytical measurement limitation ~103 yr) and 105 yr. To better understand the nature of fluvial transport dynamics in large rivers, we constructed a stochastic model that simulates repeated episodes of burial and exposure and examines the changes in concentrations of cosmogenic 26Al, 10Be, and 21Ne. We compared the simulated results to the concentrations measured in the Colorado River, and we predict that the total that sediment spent both buried and exposed – the residence time in large rivers is ~103-105 years. These observations suggest that the time-scales of sediment transport in large rivers have not changed significantly over the past 130 Myr and have remained significantly fast compared to other processes in the rock-cycle.

Active materials are composed of many components that can convert energy from its environment (usually in the form of chemical energy) into directed mechanical motion. Time reversal symmetry is thus locally broken, leading to a variety of novel phenomena such as motility induced phase separation, reversal of the Ostwald process and flocking. Examples of active matter are abundant and range from living matter such as bacteria, actomyosin networks and bird flocks to Janus particles, colloidal rollers and macroscale driven chiral rods. Nevertheless, in many cases experiments on active materials exhibit equilibrium like properties (e.g., sedimentation of bacteria). In the first part of the talk I will try to answer the important question: how do we know a system is `active’? And if it is, can we have generic observables as in equilibrium thermodynamics? Can we measure how far it is from equilibrium? In the second part of the talk I will focus on examples of activity in biopolymer gels, such as the cytoskeleton of living cells. I will show some of the effects of active motors with emphasis on chiral motors. The latter does not have a unique hydrodynamic description, which one can utilize to gain access to the microscopic details of the complex motors using macroscopic measurements. I will also discuss non-motor activity and demonstrate how it can result in contractility, e.g., in the process of cell division.