Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Normal fault interactions in seismic cycles and the impact of fault network geometry
Published: 2024-09-25
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding the mechanisms behind the characteristics of earthquake cycles on normal faults is challenging due to their long recurrence times. Despite their moderate magnitude, normal faulting earthquakes can produce considerable damage. We investigate the effects of fault network geometry and spacing on the seismic cycle of a system of two normal faults modelled with rate-and-state friction [...]
VolFe: an open-source tool for calculating melt-vapor equilibria including silicate melt, carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, and noble gases
Published: 2024-09-25
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
VolFe is an open-source flexible and adaptable thermodynamic framework in Python for calculating the equilibrium composition of melt and vapor. VolFe considers basaltic through rhyolitic melts including the volatiles carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, and noble gases. VolFe models both reduced and oxidised systems due to the range of melt and vapor species included. Hence, VolFe is applicable to [...]
How Should Multiple Temperature Time Series be Compared on Graphs?
Published: 2024-09-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
How temperature biases in both climate models and observations are adjusted in order to make comparisons of climate change signals has been seldom discussed, yet the choice of adjustment method has a large impact on the resulting conclusions. When the primary interest is how global warming evolves through time, how the models’ diagnosed equilibrium climate sensitivities (ECS) correlate with [...]
Al Hawi, a 4-km-wide impact structure in northern Saudi Arabia
Published: 2024-09-23
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Planetary Geology, Planetary Sciences, The Sun and the Solar System
The northern region of Saudi Arabia hosts several impact craters and structures. This paper describes the discovery of a 4-km-wide complex impact structure located in the paleozoic sedimentary rocks of northern Saudi Arabia 210 kilometers north east of the city of Tabuk. The impact structure is composed of a central peak displaying intense folding and shock metamorphism surrounded by an inner [...]
Sunken micro continents of the North Atlantic: Is the sub-basaltic Faroe Islands basement similar to the basement of the Rockall Plateau?
Published: 2024-09-23
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seafloor extension/stretching and associated rifting in the North Atlantic Area, which started in Early Paleogene times (From ~62 Ma), were rather complex affairs in their entireties. The pre-rift North Atlantic area was a patchwork of continental geological terrains being ‘wreckages’ from the closure of the ancient Iapetus Ocean. Current offshore areas in the North Atlantic known to harbour such [...]
Very high fire danger in UK in 2022 at least 6 times more likely due to human-caused climate change
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The UK experienced an unprecedented heatwave in 2022, with temperatures reaching 40°C for the first time in recorded history. This extreme heat was accompanied by widespread fires across London and elsewhere in England, which destroyed houses and prompted evacuations. While attribution studies have identified a strong human fingerprint contributing to the heatwave, no studies have attributed the [...]
Atlantic will tear us apart: sand provenance correlation of Early Cretaceous aeolian strata from the conjugate margins of Africa and South America
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Twyfelfountein Formation in Namibia and the Botucatu Formation in East South America represent a single dune-field separated through rifting of Gondwana during the Cretaceous. The Early Cretaceous Botucatu desert was the last depositional system operating in the Gondwanan heartland prior to continental drift initiated by the Paraná-Etendeka large igneous province. The dry-aeolian dunes, [...]
Xdas: a Python Framework for Distributed Acoustic Sensing
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Xdas is a Python library designed to manipulate Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) data. It is capable of handling any dataset consisting of dense N-dimensional arrays. The software has the ability to read any DAS file format into a unified Python object abstraction, and to aggregate multi-file datasets produced by any number and kind of instruments, with any different acquisition parametrization [...]
Comparative Analysis of Earthquake Detection Methods Using Deep Learning: Reproducibility and Uncertainty Assessment in EQTransformer
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study evaluates the performance and reliability of earthquake detection using the EQTransformer, a novel AI program that is widely used in seismological observatories and research for enhancing earthquake catalogs. We test the EQTransformer capabilities and uncertainties using seismic data from the Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Costa Rica and compare two detection options: [...]
Guidelines for Sensitivity Analyses in Process Simulations for Solid Earth Geosciences
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Education, Partial Differential Equations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Science and Mathematics Education, Tectonics and Structure
Numerical simulations are widely used as tools to understand processes or to make predictions about states and their evolution in time. However, in the process of a simulation setup, a multitude of choices and simplifications have to be made - beginning from the definition of the implemented physical laws, over model discretization and spatial parameterisation, to the definition of initial and [...]
The fate of nitrogen in deep magma oceans
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Nitrogen is important in planetary evolution because it is essential to life and the most abundant element in Earth’s atmosphere. Here, we investigate how core formation affects the distribution of N within accreting terrestrial planets. We conducted laser-heated diamond anvil cell experiments (LH-DAC) over a wide range of high pressure-temperature-compositional (PTX) conditions (38-103 GPa, [...]
Half of anthropogenic warming now caused by fossil fuels
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Many human activities influence the climate, such as burning fossil fuels, clearing land, growing food, and using refrigerants. Among these, fossil fuels have long been considered the primary driver of global warming. Here, the impact of fossil fuels on historical warming is reassessed using a climate emulator ensemble that accounts for key uncertainties. This reveals that, until the 2020s, [...]
Symmetry in mesoscale circulations explains weak impact of trade cumulus self-organisation on the radiation budget in large-eddy simulations
Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We investigate if mesoscale self-organisation of trade cumuli in 150 km-domain large-eddy simulations modifies the top-of-atmosphere radiation budget relative to 10 km-domain simulations, across 77 characteristic, idealised environments. In large domains, self-generated mesoscale circulations produce fewer, larger and deeper clouds, raising the cloud albedo. Yet they also precipitate more than [...]
Enhanced Blocking Frequencies in Very-high Resolution Idealized Climate Model Simulations
Published: 2024-09-05
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Atmospheric blocking is a key dynamical phenomenon in the mid- and high latitudes, able to drive day-to-day weather changes and meteorological extremes such as heatwaves, droughts and cold waves. Current global circulation models struggle to fully capture observed blocking frequencies, likely because of their coarse horizontal resolution. Here we use convection permitting, nested idealized model [...]
Slow true polar wander around varying equatorial axes since 320 Ma
Published: 2024-09-05
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
True polar wander (TPW), the rotation of the solid Earth relative to the spin axis, is driven by changes in the Earth's moment of inertia induced by mantle convection and may have influenced past climate and life. Long-term TPW is typically inferred from large polar shifts in paleomagnetic apparent polar wander paths or computed directly by rotating them in a mantle reference frame. However, most [...]