Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Role of Reforestation in Reducing Landslide Risk in Galyat, Pakistan: A Remote Sensing and GIS-Based Temporal Analysis (2011–2025)
Published: 2026-11-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Landslides are among the most common natural hazards in mountainous regions, often resulting in loss of life, damage to infrastructure, and destruction of agricultural land. Forest cover plays an important role in slope stabilization, soil erosion control, and landslide-risk reduction; however, empirical evidence regarding this relationship in specific mountainous landscapes remains limited. This [...]
A domain-specific atomistic model for Earth’s core materials
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Mineral Physics
Understanding Earth’s core requires accurate descriptions of multicomponent iron alloys under extreme conditions. Here, we develop the Earth’s Core Atomistic Model (ECAM) for Fe–Ni–S–Si–O–C–H alloys through sampling with a foundational atomistic model, targeted ab initio simulations, and iterative exploration. A compact dataset selected from nearly half a million configurations is consistently [...]
The width beyond a static arrest point predicts which static arrests span the fault
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Population models treat a static arrest as the end of the rupture, although some of those arrests span the fault in a fully dynamic calculation. This paper tests whether the static crack itself shows which ones. A static stress-intensity criterion and a fully dynamic rupture were compared on 180 new random stress fields on one 120 km antiplane fault with linear slip weakening. The predictor is [...]
New Scalar Measures of Geodetic Strain and Moment Rate from Kinematic Mode Decomposition: Application to the Southwestern United States
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Scalar representations of geodetic strain rate tensors are widely used to characterize crustal deformation and, in seismic hazard assessment, to convert strain rate to expected seismic moment rate. Existing scalar definitions of shear strain rate, total strain rate and deformation style are not defined consistently and, because they depend on eigenvalues that carry both dilatation and shear, [...]
Fertile or Barren: an open benchmark for testing geochemical fertility indices on mineralized and barren mafic-ultramafic intrusions.
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology
Magmatic Ni-Cu-PGE sulfide deposits form through a sequence of processes (e.g., magma generation, transport, crustal interaction, sulfur saturation, and sulfide accumulation). These processes can modify whole-rock compositions in different ways, making it challenging to evaluate the geochemical fertility of mafic-ultramafic magmatic intrusions. Several whole-rock fertility indices have been [...]
Predictive modeling of microbial biomineralization across scales
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Microorganisms influence mineral formation and transformation in natural and engineered environments, with consequences for element cycling, contaminant mobility, and mineral records. Predicting these processes remains difficult because microbial activity, local aqueous chemistry, interfacial reactions, and mineral formation operate across different spatial and temporal scales. Here, we review [...]
Residue alkalinity limits microbial leaching of rare earth elements from industrial wastes
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Microorganisms that make acids can recover rare earth elements from industrial residues such as red mud, coal fly ash, phosphogypsum and electronic waste. Most published studies test one organism on one residue, so their results are hard to transfer. Here we compiled 17 bioleaching studies, covering 10 residues, 5 groups of organisms and 217 runs. We described them all with one physical model, [...]
Lithologic Period Predicts Yttrium Enrichment in Western United States Stream Sediments
Published: 2026-11-01
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Screening ground for heavy rare earth prospecting potential at regional scale depends upon archived geochemistry, because favorable intrusive terrain in the western U.S. greatly exceeds what any drilling program could evaluate directly. This research examined whether the lithologic period of intrusive igneous terrain can reliably predict acid-leachable yttrium using only the stream sediment [...]
A sixth-century groundwater manual tested against India's well network: plant indicators and depth claims in Varāhamihira's Bṛhatsaṃhitā
Published: 2026-11-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Dakārgala chapter of Varāhamihira's Bṛhatsaṃhitā (sixth century CE) is one of the oldest detailed manuals for finding groundwater. It names trees, often together with anthills, as signs of water and gives the depth at which water will be found. It is often cited as early hydrological knowledge, but its claims have not been tested systematically. We coded the chapter's plant indicators and 48 [...]
Climate Risk Intelligence Index (CRII): An AI-Augmented Satellite-Based Climate Vulnerability Assessment Framework for India
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring
Climate change has emerged as a major global challenge affecting environmental sustainability, hydrological stability, urban resilience, and ecosystem health. Conventional climate vulnerability assessment systems primarily rely on static rule-based frameworks and isolated environmental indicators, limiting contextual interpretability and adaptive reasoning across geographically diverse regions. [...]
High-resolution 14C stratigraphy reveals decadal periodicity in stromatolite lamination
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Stromatolites constitute amongst the oldest evidence for life on Earth and preserve laminated records throughout most of geological time. However, the timescales represented by their lamination remain poorly constrained. Here, we report the first high-resolution 14C dating combined with Bayesian age-depth modelling for three Holocene stromatolites from contrasting depositional environments. The [...]
Brazil’s climate targets impaired by the potential cessation of the Amazon carbon sink
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Sustainability
In accordance with the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), countries utilize the "managed land" proxy for their national greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories. This implies deducting “passive” carbon removals from countrywide gross GHG emissions. Long-term forest plots indicate that the carbon sink in structurally intact Amazon forest has weakened by [...]
Prospectivity model for magmatic Nickel, Copper, Cobalt, and Platinum-Group Elements in the Midcontinent Rift
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Volcanology
Much of the Midcontinent Rift is concealed beneath glacial sediment, which limits direct geological observation and makes it difficult to evaluate the potential for undiscovered magmatic Ni–Cu–PGE deposits with publicly available data. The 1.1 Ga rift hosts the Eagle Ni–Cu–PGE deposit of northern Michigan, one of the few domestic sources of nickel, a critical mineral of the United States. We [...]
Dehydration of Serpentinized Ultramafic Rocks as a Candidate Deep Crustal Source of Natural Hydrogen and Hydrocarbons: Experimental Evidence from the Lesser Caucasus
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology
Natural hydrogen generated by serpentinization — the hydration of ultramafic rocks, in which ferrous iron is oxidised and molecular hydrogen is liberated from water — has recently been shown to proceed at rates of only 0.1 to 0.5 tonnes H₂ yr⁻¹ km⁻³ of reactive rock, implying that economically significant accumulations would require 10³ to 10⁴ years to develop [1]. A complementary process [...]
Late Paleocene leaf macroflora from a destroyed outcrop of the Marcelina Formation, Paso Diablo Mine, Venezuela: a rescue record
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Other Plant Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
In 2016, a production blast at a mining face of the Paso Diablo Mine (Guasare Basin, northwestern Venezuela) exposed a level rich in fossil leaves of the Marcelina Formation (late Paleocene), located between coal seams 4O and 4M. The material was removed as overburden by a mining shovel a few hours after it was documented. We present the first published record of leaf macroflora from this [...]