Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A regional assessment of methane emissions from natural gas production in the Transylvanian Basin, Romania
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Romania hosts one of the largest and oldest natural gas production sectors in Europe, yet direct measurements of methane emissions from its principal gas-producing region, the Transylvanian Basin, remain limited. Here, we present the first basin-scale, measurement-based assessment of methane emissions from natural gas production facilities in the Transylvanian Basin based on 160 methane emission [...]
Fitful but sustained rupture of the 2026 Mw 7.6 Venezuela earthquake
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The devastating 2026 Venezuela earthquake was cataloged as a doublet of \Mw~7.2 and 7.5 events. Combining NISAR and ALOS-2 Synthetic Aperture Radar data, teleseismic source imaging, and ensemble Kalman inversion of multiple moment tensors and dynamic rupture simulations, we show that the 2026 Venezuela earthquake was instead a single \Mw~7.6 event with variable rupture speed and seismic moment [...]
Ecosystem community structure shapes carbon dynamics in the ocean
Published: 2026-10-19
Subjects: Climate, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding how marine ecosystems influence air–sea CO2 flux under climate change remains a major uncertainty in ocean carbon-cycle projections. Progress is hampered by insufficient representation of ecosystem complexity in climate models and insufficient observations for developing and calibrating complex marine ecosystem models. We present a novel three-branch ensemble of the PlankTOM12 [...]
The Ill-Posed Question of Global Mean Temperature
Published: 2026-10-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The question "Does a global temperature exist?" was answered in the negative by C. Essex, R. McKitrick, and B. Andresen (EMA), who showed that different choices of mean yield different signs of the global temperature trend. We take EMA’s result as our point of departure and argue that its root cause is more fundamental than the particular data set or averaging formula employed: the very notion of [...]
Synergistic Use of Multitemporal SAR and Optical Data with Random Forest Approach for Rice Mapping in Bangladesh
Published: 2026-10-18
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate in-season crop mapping is vital for national food security, yet traditional ground-based estimation methods in Bangladesh often lack precision. This study develops a robust machine-learning framework to map Boro rice in the Manikganj district by integrating Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Sentinel-2 optical imagery. To overcome the challenge of seasonal cloud cover, [...]
Long-term increases in station-derived drought near Apalachicola National Forest, Florida
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Long local weather records can reveal changes in drought exposure, but a drought index calculated at one station must be distinguished from soil-water measurements across a forest. We updated daily temperature and precipitation observations at Tallahassee airport and recomputed the Keetch-Byram Drought Index (KBDI) with explicit quality control, rainfall interception, and missing-data rules. [...]
Paragliders as probes of the Alpine boundary layer: sink polars from 86 000 flight logs and the flow field of a valley
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Paraglider flight logs are a dense, free and continuous record of the air over mountains: every thermal day, hundreds of pilots fly for hours along the slopes and across the valleys and record their vertical speed once per second. The obstacle is that a vario measures the air plus the sink of the glider, and the sink polars of paragliders are unknown. We obtain them from the logs themselves. [...]
Linking Hemispheric Warming Asymmetry to Anthropogenic Waste Heat
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
This paper proposes a potential link between the observed hemispheric warming asymmetry and the distribution of population and per capita energy consumption. Nearly 87% of the world’s population resides in the northern hemisphere, where per capita energy consumption has also been substantially higher than in the southern hemisphere. Consequently, anthropogenic waste heat discharged into the [...]
GeONet: Geometry-Encoded Operator Network for Predicting Flow in Heterogeneous Porous Media
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rapid prediction of pressure-driven flow in microfluidic porous-media analogs is important for experimental design, tracer-test interpretation, and real-time digital-twin development for subsurface energy and critical mineral science applications. High-fidelity numerical simulators resolve geometry-controlled flow in heterogeneous pore networks, but their computational cost limits repeated [...]
A survey of transverse drainages in the Susquehanna River basin, Pennsylvania
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
While large-scale transverse drainages (TDs) such as those of the Susquehanna River above Harrisburg, PA, have been recognized since the nineteenth century, no systematic surveys have been done of TDs since Ver Steeg (1930). A topographic and statistical analysis of TDs in the Susquehanna River basin using Google Earth® and associated overlays identified 653 TDs in the study area, 95% of which [...]
Insights into magmatic processes at Shishaldin Volcano based on satellite and airborne volcanic gas measurements and magma degassing models
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Shishaldin Volcano is a remote and frequently active basaltic volcano with eruptions in 2019–2020 and 2023 that exhibited notable variations in monitoring signals and explosivity. Here we combine complementary ultraviolet (TROPOMI) and infrared (IASI) satellite SO2 observations with airborne gas measurements, petrologic constraints, and degassing models to investigate magma degassing processes [...]
Time-mean Tropical Circulation in an Idealized Moist GCM: Dependence on Zonally Asymmetric Forcings
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study investigates how the time-mean tropical circulation is affected by zonally varying surface boundary conditions in an idealized moist aquaplanet model. We compare a zonally symmetric control with two perturbation cases driven by prescribed zonal wavenumber-1 heating and cooling patterns of varying intensities, creating tropical warm and cold pools. The forcings substantially slow the [...]
Erosion sensitivity of rock organic carbon oxidation reinforces CO2 release at high erosion rates
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Oxidation of rock organic carbon (OCpetro) can exert a substantial control on atmospheric CO2 over geological timescales, yet the erosion sensitivity of this reaction has proved challenging to isolate and quantify due to the covariation of erosion with other environmental variables in many existing datasets. Here we apply the rhenium (Re) proxy to quantify OCpetro oxidation across a three [...]
Structural Geothermal Plays in the Lower Carboniferous Limestone, East Midlands, UK: Insights from Legacy Geophysical Data
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Lower Carboniferous Limestone (LCL) is a promising geothermal target in Britain, but uncertainty in subsurface structure and permeability limits resource assessment. Here, we use the Welton area of the East Midlands, where legacy hydrocarbon exploration data provide detailed subsurface coverage, to investigate the controls on LCL geothermal prospectivity. We integrate 3D seismic reflection, well, [...]
Lixa v0.1.2: an open-source, image-informed framework for closed-loop design of leaching processes for domestic critical-mineral recovery, from the pore to the plant scale
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Mining Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Leaching takes a metal out of a rock and into a solution. In the United States, rare earth elements, lithium and scandium occur mostly in rocks where the metal is thinly spread through a porous matrix: weathered clays, coal ash, lithium claystones and bauxite residue. For such rocks the leaching recipe (reagent, concentration, temperature, particle size, liquid-to-solid ratio and contact time) [...]