Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
A rheology for temperate ice in glaciers (RTIG) based on borehole deformation experiments
Published: 2026-10-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The rheology of temperate glacier ice, which contains small amounts of liquid water, largely controls the fast dynamics of glaciers and polar ice streams. Recent laboratory experiments suggest a constant-viscosity ice rheology when the water content between ice grains exceeds 0.6%. Such a linear flow law, where the deformation rate is proportional to the applied stress, is in contrast to the [...]
Temporal Synchronization Determines the Accuracy of Sentinel-2 Turbidity Retrieval: Evidence from Community-Based Monitoring of the Buriganga River, Dhaka
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Community-based environmental organizations require continuous water quality data but are constrained by the cost and labor of physical sampling. Satellite remote sensing offers a free alternative, yet validation studies of inland waters frequently report weak agreement between satellite indices and ground measurements, and the cause of that disagreement is rarely isolated. This study analyzed 28 [...]
Segmenting submarine boulders with Random Forest and nnU-Net: from bathymetric rasters to survey-scale size distributions
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences
In the soft-bottom-dominated southern Baltic Sea, geogenic hard substrates are biodiversity hotspots. The lack of open-source, pixel-level segmentation approaches for boulders in MBES data has made it difficult to advance the ecological understanding of boulder fields in the Baltic Sea. This study developed and evaluated two segmentation approaches. A deep learning model (nnU-Net) and a classical [...]
A vertical vegetation structure model of the Earth
Published: 2026-10-06
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Wood Science and Pulp, Paper Technology
Knowing the global distribution of vegetation structure is an essential prerequisite to better quantify, model, and manage carbon, water, energy, and biodiversity in the Earth system. Despite its recognized importance, vertical structure measurements remain sparse at global scales, limiting our understanding of the links between structure and ecosystem functions and resilience. Here we present [...]
Bulk iron-sulfur ratio (Fe/S) conditional proxy for sulfurized, TOC-rich sediments: insights and comparison of compositional model with real data utilizing the Pyrite-TOC-Fe-S compositional space
Published: 2026-10-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Bulk iron-sulfur (Fe/S) ratio can be a proxy for sulfurized organic matter in organic-rich shales, particularly those prone to be siliceous or carbonate. First part uses a theoretical model of a compositional system consisting solely of iron, sulfur, TOC, and pyrite to demonstrate how the Fe/S ratio can indicate the presence of sulfurized organic matter using the model’s assumption of sulfur [...]
Rapid satellite assessment of the 2026 High Fens fire
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Climate change is altering fire regimes across Europe, contributing to longer periods of favorable fire weather. In August 2026, the High Fens nature reserve experienced one of the largest wildfires in Belgium's recorded history. This event is ecologically and biogeochemically significant because the fire affected a landscape dominated by carbon-dense peatlands, where prolonged smouldering can [...]
Understanding Earthquake Physics with On-Fault Observatories
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earthquakes often strike without warning. Current fault monitoring infrastructure is not sensitive enough to detect signals such as accelerating fault creep or dilation, which laboratory experiments and numerical models predict may precede large earthquakes. Here we argue that a paradigm shift is needed and technically achievable: from inferring faulting processes from a distance with surface [...]
Assessment of adjacency effect correction methods for Sentinel-2 MSI observations over mid-latitude lakes
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate retrieval of remote-sensing reflectance (Rrs) from lakes requires separating water-leaving radiance from atmospheric, surface and adjacency contributions. We assessed adjacency effect correction (AEC) methods for Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) imagery using 329 satellite--insitu matchups from four mid-latitude lakes: Greifensee, Lake Geneva, Lake Garda and Lake Trasimeno. The [...]
MUSE: virtual tide gauge reference estimates and error budgets for coastal index validation at ungauged coastlines
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography
Multi-dimensional coastal indices such as mangrove health indices aggregate tidal-range, mean higher-high water (MHHW), and tidal-anomaly sub-scores. Validating these sub-scores requires in situ tide gauges that low-data coastlines lack within 100 km. Global tide models such as EOT20 give accurate coastal tidal constituents but no tidal-anomaly metrics or per-source error terms for a [...]
Training-Free Monitoring of Kenya with Pre-computed Satellite Embeddings: Lake Expansion, Construction Dating and Crop Retrieval with TESSERA
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pre-computed embeddings from geospatial foundation models turn the most expensive step of satellite analysis into shared data. We test how much analysis this enables for one country, using TESSERA, which publishes a 128-dimensional embedding for every 10 m pixel and year. An audit of Kenya shows that all 4,766 tiles centred in the country carry all nine years (2017–2025), but that the landmask [...]
Multi-site evaluation of an improved SIF-based model for estimating canopy GPP
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences
Sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) offers a promising path to quantify gross primary productivity (GPP) across spatiotemporal scales. Recent studies have demonstrated the applicability of the SIF-based mechanistic light response (qMLR-SIF) model for estimating canopy GPP. However, the inadequate simulation of the key parameter qL (the fraction of open photosystem II reaction centers) [...]
Earthquake damage mapping from Sentinel-1 modeling against coherence damage proxy
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper tests whether a supervised model that uses the same Sentinel-1 signal as the coherence damage proxy can rank earthquake damage better than the proxy itself. Damage grades from Copernicus EMS for four earthquakes are joined to 783 635 OpenStreet- Map footprints over 28 assessed areas, and the coherence drop is aggregated to buildings, morphological blocks and cells of 50 m to 400 m. A [...]
Light- and CO2-dependent carbon isotope fractionation in the β-cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences
Carbon isotope fractionation during photosynthetic carbon fixation by phytoplankton (εₚ) underpins proxies for reconstructing past atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. The interpretation of εₚ is commonly based on steady-state flux-balance models that link isotopic fractionation to the balance between cellular carbon demand and supply, with Rubisco carboxylation providing the primary fractionating [...]
From Pixels to Mobile Pastoral Households: Scale Mismatch, Exposure Measurement, and Inference in Mongolian Rangeland Research
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Spatially explicit Earth-observation products and machine-learning models increasingly support detailed monitoring of vegetation productivity and land-surface dynamics across Mongolia. Yet the spatial unit observed by a satellite, the area actually grazed by a mobile herd, the administrative unit used in official statistics, and the household unit used in socioeconomic surveys are rarely [...]
Propagation of the Storegga tsunami in the southeastern North Sea
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Numerical simulations of the 8150 BP Storegga slide event in the Norwegian Sea are necessary for understanding both landslide dynamics and tsunami propagation. Here we focus on the southern North Sea, South East of Dogger Bank, and the shores of Denmark and Germany where there have been reports of Storegga tsunami deposits. We simulate the slide using a recently developed cohesive landslide model [...]