Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A process-based framework for regional landslide debris inundation hazard assessment: application to the West Coast region of New Zealand
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Regional landslide debris inundation hazard assessments commonly rely on scenario-based formulations that require explicit enumeration of discrete landslide events. While effective for local studies, these approaches are computationally intensive, sensitive to scenario design choices, and difficult to apply consistently at regional scales where landslide catalogues are incomplete and long-term [...]
Obliquity limit of megathrust earthquakes
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The largest earthquakes occur on subduction-zone megathrusts, where plates commonly converge obliquely to trenches and generate trench-parallel strain. How this strain is partitioned between megathrust slip and upper-plate deformation remains uncertain, hindering earthquake recurrence estimates. Here we combine global slab geometry, plate motions, and earthquake focal mechanisms to quantify [...]
Model-Free Relative Permeability Estimation and Oil Recovery Prediction in Reservoir Rocks from Capillary Pressure Curves
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper presents and validates a model-free method for predicting the relative permeability and oil recovery of reservoir rocks directly from the shape of the capillary pressure curve, tested against real reservoir core, digital rock models, and a large soil-hydraulic dataset. Relative permeability is the key saturation function governing production forecasts, water cut, and oil recovery in [...]
Locating the Anthropogenic Drivers of Urban Flooding from Centimetre-Resolution Aerial Imagery: A Reproducible Open-Data Pipeline for the Odaw Basin, Accra
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Recurrent inundation in metropolitan Accra is, on the preponderance of the evidence, an anthropogenic rather than a climatological phenomenon: its proximate determinants are the obstruction of drainage by solid waste and the encroachment of structures onto watercourses. These determinants are metre-scale and therefore invisible to the moderate-resolution satellite imagery on which prior work has [...]
IPOC-Deep: a new seismicity catalog for Northern Chile with >2 million events
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a novel seismicity catalog for Northern Chile, which covers 17 years (2007--2023) of data and contains more than 2.2 million events. Raw waveform data from nearly 200 stations including a range of temporary deployments were processed with state-of-the-art algorithms for phase picking (EQTransformer) and association (PyOcto), after which we performed absolute event relocation in a 2.5D [...]
Barrier vulnerability following outwash: A balance of overwash and dune gap recovery
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Existing barrier evolution models only simulate storm impacts from landward-driven flows (overwash), neglecting the impacts of seaward-directed flows (outwash). Here, we modify an existing model to incorporate outwash processes. We find that outwash enhances barrier vulnerability (the tendency to drown) over decadal timescales by scarring the island interior, creating lower, narrower landforms. [...]
Spatiotemporal Patterns and Human Accessibility of the July 2026 Northern Algeria Wildfires: An Event-Based Statistical Analysis
Published: 2026-08-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Northern Algeria experienced a widespread wildfire outbreak between 20 and 24 July 2026, coinciding with an exceptional regional heatwave. This report presents an independent, multi-method statistical analysis of satellite-detected fire activity (NASA VIIRS/FIRMS, n = 4,105 raw detections) to evaluate whether the spatial and temporal structure of these fires — together with their proximity to [...]
Submesoscale frontal dynamics modulate ocean heat transport beneath Antarctic sea ice
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Antarctic sea ice has experienced unprecedented declines in recent years, yet the processes governing the transfer of subsurface ocean heat toward the ice remain poorly understood. Here, sub-kilometer hydrographic observations collected by an instrumented seal reveal intense, intermittent, and bidirectional vertical heat transport beneath sea ice in the East Antarctic marginal ice zone. During a [...]
Mapping Urban Heat Vulnerability in London: Multi-Scale Geospatial Analysis Using Machine Learning, SHAP Explainability, and Temporal Mortality Data
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Urban heat is a significant cause of mortality. In London, during the summer of 2022, the United Kingdom experienced its first recorded 40°C day, resulting in excess mortality levels not observed since pre-antibiotic influenza seasons. On 19 July 2022, London reached a temperature of 40.3°C, the highest recorded in the United Kingdom, which corresponded to 18,435 excess deaths in England and [...]
Split-Spectrum InSAR for Reliable Ionospheric Correction: A Critical Review of Uncertainty, Validation, and Reproducibility
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Split-spectrum interferometry provides a physically grounded means of separating dispersive ionospheric phase from non-dispersive deformation-related phase in Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar observations. Its practical reliability, however, depends on processing choices that are often reported incompletely and validated inconsistently. This critical narrative review examines the physical [...]
Plume Origin Localisation with Computer Vision
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Satellite remote sensing has become a critical tool for monitoring, measuring, and mitigating methane emissions globally. Reliable attribution of methane plumes to their source facility is needed to enable emission mitigation action, robust emissions accounting, and regulatory oversight. Although experts can manually attribute plumes to individual facilities, automated approaches are required for [...]
Scale-Aware Uncertainty-Aware Machine Learning for Gold Prospectivity Mapping: Evidence-Range Audits for Exploration Targeting
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mineral exploration is expensive because most land has not been tested directly. A missing deposit record is therefore not the same as a true absence record. This paper develops a scale-aware positive-unlabeled learning framework for gold prospectivity mapping using public geological and mineral-occurrence data. The main method is the Non-Gold Evidence Transfer Field (NGETF). NGETF removes every [...]
Questioning the Ferromanganese Nodule Dark Oxygen Production Hypothesis
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A registered public-data reproducibility benchmark for the reported PKiKP detection of a Martian inner core
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, The Sun and the Solar System
Bi et al. (2025) infer a 600-km Martian solid inner core partly from a PKiKP vespagram peak at 604 ± 2 s after P and −6.5 ± 0.6 s/deg from stacked InSight marsquakes. We present a registered public-data reimplementation; success criteria, windows, and statistical rules were frozen before outcome inspection, and the headline lane uses the public MPS deglitch stage. We recover a local maximum [...]
Probability-Perturbation McMC for 3D Bayesian TDEM Inversion with Unknown Covariance Parameters
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a hierarchical Bayesian inversion framework for large-scale 3D time-domain electromagnetic (TDEM) data that jointly infers the subsurface conductivity field and the parameters controlling a Gaussian process (GP) covariance function, requiring minimal assumptions about subsurface spatial structure. The framework addresses two fundamental bottlenecks in 3D probabilistic inversion: the [...]