Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Effective Microbial Kinetics under Pore-Scale Transport Limitation: A Biofilm Effectiveness-Factor Theory
Published: 2026-07-27
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Reactive-transport models of porous media usually evaluate microbial reactions with Monod kinetics and rate constants measured on well-mixed laboratory cultures, in which every cell is exposed to the same substrate concentration. In natural sediments and aquifers this assumption fails at the pore scale, because the cells are not suspended but reside in biofilms and aggregates attached to the [...]
Connectivity effects on fluid age and residence time distributions in two- and three-dimensional pore networks
Published: 2026-07-27
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pore-scale simulations are often run on a single plane cut from a three-dimensional image, because resolving the whole pore space is expensive. This study asks what that shortcut costs. What is at stake is the distribution of fluid ages, and above all its long tail, because that tail is what slow reactions respond to. We computed the distribution directly from the flow field, by labeling the [...]
Reconstructing age and reactivity distributions from the moments carried by central-moment transport models
Published: 2026-07-26
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A central-moment transport model follows a property that varies across a population, such as the age of water parcels or the decay rate of organic-matter particles. Instead of storing the whole distribution of that property, it keeps only a few summary numbers, the moments, and moves those through the model. But the distribution itself is usually what a scientist wants, so it has to be rebuilt [...]
Microseismic Detection in Borehole DAS as a Spatial Localization Problem: Cross-System Validation at the 2024 Utah FORGE Stimulation
Published: 2026-07-25
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) turns borehole fibers into dense seismic arrays, but converting terabytes of continuous strain-rate data into reliable real-time detections remains a bottleneck for induced-seismicity monitoring. We argue that the limiting question for DAS microseismic monitoring has been posed incorrectly. Existing detectors ask whether an event is present in a record; on a [...]
Reconstructing Satellite-Era Southern Ocean Temperature and Salinity Trends within Observational Uncertainty
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Southern Ocean (SO) sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have exhibited large-scale cooling over the satellite era (1979-present). Several potential drivers of this cooling have been proposed -- including changes in winds, freshwater fluxes, and natural variability -- but their relative contributions have been challenging to identify because climate models largely fail to simulate the observed trend. [...]
Authorship and contribution recognition in infrastructure-scale Earth science collaborations
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Community-driven collaborative initiatives across palaeoclimate, oceanography, and Earth system science have transformed how scientific knowledge is generated, integrated, and interpreted. Proxy synthesis efforts, climate model intercomparison projects, and scientific drilling programmes increasingly function as collaborative scientific infrastructures sustained by distributed intellectual labour [...]
Feedback-Controlled Linear Actuator System to Simulate Laboratory Analogs of Landslides
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
This study describes a scientific apparatus that induces granular flow by tilting an acrylic sample container under user-prescribed constant angular velocity and acceleration profiles. The system consists of a transparent sample container mounted within a motorized frame driven by a linear actuator that we control using pulse-width modulation with feed-forward compensation. Additional components [...]
A Generalizable Lie Autoencoder for Emulating Barotropic Turbulence
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Numerical ocean models rely on the discretization of primitive equations to simulate ocean dynamics, but their computational cost increases drastically with resolution. As an alternative, recent advances in neural networks (NN) have demonstrated promising applications in climate science, offering orders-of-magnitude faster simulations than traditional models through data-driven algorithms that [...]
A Late Miocene Reduction in the Spatial Breadth of Marine Tephra Occurrence: A Five-Basin Test of the Volcanic-Pulse Hypothesis
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Stratigraphy, Volcanology
Episodic "pulses" of explosive volcanism have been widely invoked to explain climatic and biotic events across the Phanerozoic, but rarely tested against a high-resolution, multi-basin occurrence record. I tested for non-random temporal clustering of explosive volcanism using VOLCORE, a compilation of 34,696 visible tephra layers recovered by ocean drilling from across the world’s ocean basins. [...]
History-free spectral modelling of fractional seismic1 attenuation on fixed self-adjoint operators
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fractional wave models represent power-law attenuation and dispersion, but direct Caputo5 time stepping retains an increasingly long memory. We isolate the fixed-operator case in6 which a prescribed positive self-adjoint semidiscrete spatial operator is queried repeatedly at7 selected output times, receiver locations, or dense-basis source weights. Its fractional tem-8 poral evolution is [...]
Branch-resolved fixed-band near-constant-Q criteria for variable-order fractional seismic attenuation
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We establish a closed-corridor near-constant-Q criterion for variable-order fractional wave operators. In one-dimensional graded media, and in a conditional multidimensional weak-attenuation corridor assuming a standard caustic-free real geometric-optics phase, the branch-normalized local quality factor satisfies \(Q(x,\omega)=Q_0(x)+R(x,\omega)\), [...]
Multiscale land-atmospheric feedbacks intensify hot droughts over global river-basins
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
When drought and heatwave coincide as hot drought, its impacts exceed the sum of individual hazards. The understanding that hot drought intensifies through soil drying is incomplete. We instead find amplification and suppression of hot droughts over both dry and wet soils, with wet (dry) soil-associated amplification (suppression) being the secondary pathway. Moreover, soil-moisture control on [...]
Local thermal externalities of hyperscale datacenters: causal satellite evidence and implied cooling costs
Published: 2026-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Hyperscale datacenter construction converts agricultural or greenfield land into continuous heat rejection campuses, yet no causal estimate of the resulting local thermal effect exists. This paper applies a Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) staggered difference-in-differences estimator to spatially differenced Landsat satellite thermal imagery across 59 datacenter sites in the United States, with [...]
An assessment of surface versus underground vault installations of broadband seismometers in the hard-rock terrain of the Deccan Volcanic Province, India
Published: 2026-07-21
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Surface or ground-level installations of broadband seismic stations are routinely used in temporary seismic networks deployed in the Deccan Volcanic Province (DVP) of peninsular India. In this study, we assess the feasibility and utility of a shallow vault installation in this region, by installing a broadband station in an urban environment, with the sensor placed $\sim 1$ m below ground level. [...]
Magmatic Fertility Indicators of the Chagai Arc: A Systematic Review of Published Whole-Rock Geochemistry and Implications for Porphyry Cu–Au Prospectivity
Published: 2026-07-18
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The porphyry copper–gold (Cu–Au) deposits of the world are the primary source for copper and are significant producers of gold and molybdenum, and the genesis is always linked to the geochemical characteristics of the arc magmas from which the deposits crystallised. The Chagai Arc of western Pakistan is a Neotethyan subduction-related magmatic belt with several significant porphyry prospects, [...]