Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Glacier algae phenology on the Qaanaaq Ice Cap (Northwest Greenland)
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Glacier algae are relevant factors in the darkening phenomenon of glaciers, especially at the margins of the ice sheets. This study focuses on glacier algae variation during summer seasons in the 2016-2023 period at Qaanaaq Ice Cap, NW Greenland. Based on ice samples and field spectroscopy measurements, an empirical model is proposed to estimate glacier algae abundance from a reflectance ratio [...]
Assessing the plausibility of direct constraints on ancient atmospheric pCO2 from fluid inclusions in halite: A theoretical and experimental approach
Published: 2025-07-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fluid inclusions in halite formed in surficial environments have recently gained attention for their ability to capture and preserve samples of ancient air, and by mechanical decrepitation, these inclusion gases can be quantified via mass spectrometry. However, it has yet to be demonstrated that the CO2 content measured on halite accurately represents the overlying air at various CO2 [...]
Glacier or Not? The Importance of Nuance in Definitions of Vanishing Glaciers
Published: 2025-07-07
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Glaciers provide critical ecosystem services, including water resources, biodiversity, cultural value, and climate signals. But what makes a glacier a glacier? Different definitions of what characterizes a glacier can conflict with each other. While a common scientific definition emphasizes "past or present flow," practical applications involve various criteria like minimum area, relative size, [...]
Could seismo-volcanic catalogues be improved or created using weakly supervised approaches with pre-trained systems?
Published: 2025-07-04
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Real-time monitoring of volcano-seismic signals is complex. Typically, automatic systems are built by learning from large seismic catalogs, where each instance has a label indicating its source mechanism. However, building complete catalogs is difficult owing to the high cost of data-labelling. Current machine learning techniques have achieved great success in constructing predictive monitoring [...]
Aquascan: Graph-Based Learning for Distributed Marine Sensing
Published: 2025-07-04
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Marine monitoring faces unprecedented challenges as climate change and human activities reshape ocean ecosystems. Traditional tracking methods struggle with the scale and complexity of modern marine sensing needs. This paper proposes distributed networks of low-cost drifting sensors and presents a comparative study of heterogeneous graph neural networks (GNNs) versus Kalman filters for predicting [...]
Spatial Analysis of Lead (Pb) Contamination in Soils of the Savar Industrial Zone, Bangladesh Using QGIS-Based Interpolation
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Lead (Pb) contamination poses significant environmental and public health risks in industrial regions. This study employs Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to assess the spatial distribution of Pb in soils across the Savar industrial zone, Bangladesh—an area characterized by dense industrial activity, including tanneries, textile mills, and metal-processing plants. Using point data from ten [...]
Spatial Analysis and Heatmap Visualization of Groundwater Arsenic Contamination in Dhaka and Mymensingh Divisions, Bangladesh
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physiology
Arsenic contamination in groundwater poses a critical public health threat in Bangladesh, particularly in its central and northern regions. This study investigates the spatial distribution of arsenic concentrations across the Dhaka and Mymensingh divisions using geospatial clustering and interpolation techniques. A total of 1,124 groundwater samples were analyzed using Python-based spatial [...]
Crevasse locations and meltwater delivery to the bed in Pakitsoq, Greenland: Results from MimiNet, a new deep-learning model for crevasse detection
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
If surface crevasse fields deliver meltwater to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet, it would affect seasonal ice flow speeds and total mass balance. Whether they do is not currently known; some evidence suggests so, while specific field data suggest not. To address this gap, we develop MimiNet, a neural-network-based tool that identifies surface crevasse fields. We train MimiNet on Sentinel-1 [...]
River Network HyperGraphs and Transportation Network HyperGraphs: A Graph-Theoretic Approach for Geoscientific and Civil Applications
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Civil Engineering, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Other Life Sciences, Other Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
River Network Graphs and Transportation Network Graphs are classical models that represent river systems and transportation infrastructures as vertices and edges, respectively, and underpin applications in hydrological simulation, watershed management, shortest-path computation, and urban traffic analysis. In this paper, we extend these graph-based models into the hypergraph and superhypergraph [...]
Simultaneous spectral induced polarization and X-ray µCT imaging to investigate pore-scale dynamics and geoelectrical responses in porous media
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding the interplay between pore-scale fluid distribution and bulk electrical properties is critical to improving petrophysical models of partially saturated porous media. This study introduces and evaluates a novel experimental setup that enables synchronized spectral induced polarization (SIP) and X-ray micro-computed tomography (µCT) measurements under dynamic saturation conditions. A [...]
On the demise of Whistler, Horstman and Blackcomb Glaciers, southwest British Columbia, Canada: historical use, recent change and future prospects within a mountain resort
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Atmospheric warming is causing glaciers worldwide to retreat and disappear, with repercussions for nearby communities. Effects of glacier retreat have been especially consequential for mountain resorts such as Whistler Blackcomb, Canada, where almost 60 years of summer glacier use has been terminated due to the ongoing demise of Whistler, Horstman and Blackcomb Glaciers. Over the past five [...]
The case for continuing VIPER - a critical milestone on the journey back to the Moon
Published: 2025-07-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences
NASA's VIPER mission was designed to explore the Moon's south pole, with a primary objective of identifying and characterising volatile compounds such as water ice. Despite having been fully built and having passed all preflight environmental testing, the mission was cancelled by NASA in July 2024, and the rover remains in storage. In this paper, we outline why it remains crucial that a route to [...]
Machine Learning Insights into the Geochemical Life Cycle of the Columbia River Flood Basalts
Published: 2025-07-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Stratigraphy, Volcanology
Flood basalts are challenging to characterize in detail, despite enormous their erupted volumes, due to their age and chemical homogeneity. Here we explore machine learning (ML) approaches for classification and pattern identification in whole rock geochemical data of the Columbia River Flood Basalts (CRFB), which provide key constraints on magma generation, transport, and emplacement. We utilize [...]
Chapter 2.4: Volcanic gas impacts
Published: 2025-07-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Volcanic gases can pose a long-term hazard as they may be released during eruptive and non-eruptive periods. Acidic plumes, diffuse degassing, limnic eruptions and release of gases into the troposphere and stratosphere can affect natural and human environments, scaled to eruption size. The components of volcanic emissions that cause the most impact are CO2, SO2, H2S, 222Rn, HCl, HF, and PM. The [...]
Are All Tipping Points Predictable? A Test of Early Warning Signal Theory on Three Distinct Holocene Climate Events
Published: 2025-07-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The detection of Early Warning Signals (EWS) in noisy paleoclimate time series is a significant analytical challenge. Previous studies have often focused on individual events or single metrics, leaving the broader robustness and universality of the EWS framework unresolved. In this study, we apply a comprehensive analytical pipeline to a δ¹⁸O proxy record from the NGRIP ice core, testing for EWS [...]