Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A Reproducible and Reusable Pipeline for Segmentation of Geoscientific Imagery
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Segmentation of Earth science imagery is an increasingly common task. Among modern techniques that use Deep Learning, the UNet architecture has been shown to be a reliable for segmenting a range of imagery. We developed software - Segmentation Gym - to implement a data-model pipeline for segmentation of scientific imagery using a family of UNet models. With an existing set of imagery and labels, [...]
Variational inference of ice shelf rheology with physics-informed machine learning
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Other Mathematics, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Floating ice shelves that fringe the coast of Antarctica resist the flow of grounded ice into the ocean. One of the key factors governing the amount of flow-resistance provided by an ice shelf is the rigidity of the ice that constitutes it. Ice rigidity is highly heterogeneous and must be calibrated from spatially-continuous surface observations assimilated into an ice flow model. Moreover, [...]
Source location and wavefield characterization of river-induced seismic tremor
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
River-induced seismic signal (tremor) recorded by deploying seismic stations close to the river can be used to obtain the flow characteristics of rivers indirectly. This task becomes challenging when the tremor is contaminated by strong cultural noise. We conducted an experiment next to Avoca River, County Wicklow, Ireland. We locate and characterize the river-induced tremor by combining the [...]
Locating Flowing Conduits in Karst Using Amplitude-based Passive Seismic Location Method
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The aim of this study is to develop methods for directly detecting energetic groundwater flow in sub-surface conduits through passive seismic applications, by detecting the small ground vibrations (seismic microtremor) that flowing water in the sub-surface may generate. This is in contrast to the current ‘traditional’ approach of attempting to actively image the conduits using geophysical and [...]
A mass budget and box model of global plastics cycling, degradation and dispersal in the land-ocean-atmosphere system
Published: 2022-09-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Since 1950 humans have introduced 8300 teragrams (Tg, 1012 grams, millions of metric tons) of plastic polymers into the Earth’s surface environment. Accounting for the dispersal and fate of produced plastics and fragmented microplastics in the environment has been challenging. Recent studies have fueled debate of the global river budget for plastic transport to oceans, the sinking and beaching of [...]
A 1.2 Billion Pixel Human-Labeled Dataset for Data-Driven Classification of Coastal Environments
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The world’s coastlines are spatially highly variable, coupled-human-natural systems that comprise a nested hierarchy of component landforms, ecosystems, and human interventions, each interacting over a range of space and time scales. Understanding and predicting coastline dynamics necessitates frequent observation from imaging sensors on remote sensing platforms. Machine Learning models that [...]
Accumulation of radiocarbon in ancient terrestrial landscapes: A small but significant input of unknown origin
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The persistence of soil organic carbon (C) in soil, defined as the mean residence time of organic C compounds in soils, is a critical measure for understanding the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to regulate biogeochemical cycles. The persistence of organic carbon in soil is most often considered at timescales ranging from tens to thousands of years, but the study of organic C in paleosols [...]
Sulfur_X: A model of sulfur degassing during magma ascent
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The degassing of CO2 and S from arc volcanoes is fundamentally important to global climate, eruption forecasting, and cycling of volatiles through subduction zones. However, all existing thermodynamic/empirical models have difficulties reproducing CO2-H2O-S trends observed in melt inclusions and provide widely conflicting results regarding the relationships between pressure and CO2/SO2 in the [...]
Down-delta hydraulic geometry and its application to the rock record
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Paleodischarge estimation is largely undertaken within fluvial settings, and there are limited paleodischarge estimates specifically from delta deposits, despite their significance globally. Making water paleodischarge estimates for deltas using catchment-based approaches developed using data from fluvial settings requires estimation of parameters from the rock record (e.g. paleotemperature, [...]
Practical sampling criteria for using delta channel width to estimate paleodischarge in the rock record
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Quantifying paleodischarge from geological field observations have been for decades, and remains, a key research challenge. Several paleodischarge scaling relationships have been developed for fluvial environments, such as BQART, Fulcrum and regional hydraulic geometry or for river deltas by precluding the role of wave and tide. In deltas where marine (wave, tide) energy causes bidirectional [...]
Autonomous Passage Planning for a Polar Vessel
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
We introduce a method for long-distance maritime route planning in polar regions, taking into account complex changing environmental conditions. The method allows the construction of optimised routes, describing the three main stages of the process: discrete modelling of the environmental conditions using a non-uniform mesh, the construction of mesh-optimal paths, and path smoothing. In order to [...]
A review of coarse mineral dust in the Earth system
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mineral dust particles suspended in the atmosphere span more than three orders of magnitude in diameter, from less than 0.1 µm to more than 100 µm. This wide size range makes dust a unique aerosol species with the ability to interact with many aspects of the Earth system, including radiation, clouds, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, and biogeochemistry. This review focuses on coarse and [...]
Fingerprinting construction sand supply-networks for traceable sourcing
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Globally increasing demand for construction sand needs to be met with transparent and responsible supply-networks. Currently, there are no scalable methods for tracing construction sand distribution without direct observation. We examined sand “fingerprinting” as a potential tool to trace construction sand supply-networks from “source to sink” in a case study from Texas, USA. Both natural bulk [...]
Subglacial hydrology modeling predicts high winter water pressure and spatially variable transmissivity at Helheim Glacier, Greenland
Published: 2022-08-26
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Sliding velocity of glaciers is influenced by water pressure at the bed. Subglacial hydrology models are helpful for gaining insight into basal conditions, but models depend on several unconstrained physical parameters, and reproducing elevated water pressures in winter has been a challenge. We eliminate terms in the SHAKTI model that rely on uncertain parameters and apply this model to Helheim [...]
Fusing physics-based and data-driven models to forecast and mitigate landslide collapse
Published: 2022-08-26
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Deep-seated landslides represent one of the most devastating natural hazards on earth, typically creeping at inappreciable velocities over several years be- fore suddenly collapsing with catastrophic speeds. They can have detrimental consequences to society, causing fatalities and prone to affect transportation infrastructures. In this study, we validate that monitoring the basal temperature of a [...]