Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
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 [...]
The Ill-Posed Question of Global Mean Temperature
Published: 2026-10-20
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 [...]
Same computation, different scenes: a single-site comparison of Sentinel-2 L2A composites from Google Earth Engine and Microsoft Planetary Computer
Published: 2026-10-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Microsoft Planetary Computer (MPC) distribute Sentinel-2 Level-2A surface reflectance, and their outputs can be combined in one time series. Over a 73 ha cattle farm in northern Colombia, we tested whether the two platforms yield the same parcel-scale vegetation and water indices and, where they differ, whether the difference originates in the product (the L2A [...]
Leveraging satellite data and machine learning to quantify rooftop rainwater harvesting reliability and tank requirements for schools and health care facilities in Uganda
Published: 2026-10-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Many schools and health facilities in Uganda lack a reliable water supply, yet most have roofs that could collect rain. For 41,592 facilities (32,881 schools and 8,711 health facilities), we estimated how much water their roofs can supply, how large a tank each one needs, and how often that supply fails. Roof areas came from AI-derived building footprints (Google Open Buildings v3) and daily [...]
Earth's Bad Decades: A Sedimentary Record of the Chicxulub Aftermath from the New Jersey Coastal Plain and Offshore
Published: 2026-10-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
The New Jersey Coastal Plain (NJCP) preserves records of the Chicxulub impact approximately 2,500 km from the crater, providing a unique archive of ejecta fallout, sediment reworking, ecological disruption, and recovery following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Preservation of impact deposits varies with depositional setting. Offshore sections beneath the NJ continental shelf and slope [...]
Characteristics and consequences of H2O undersaturation and low melt fertility in mountain belt interiors
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Tectonics and Structure
Continental deformation and crustal magmatism in orogenic settings are fundamentally linked to fluid availability and melting processes. Critical rheological transitions occur at approximately 7% melt volume, whereby melt-film connectivity reduces rock strength by as much as c. 90%, and at 20%, marking an onset of solid-to-liquid behaviour. The Mesoproterozoic Grenville orogen in Canada provides [...]
A steadily flowing glacier and no detectable precursor before the 11 October 2026 Budhi Gandaki rock–ice avalanche and flood, Nepal
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
On 11 October 2026 at about 04:20 local time, a rock–ice avalanche at the head of the Ungilung Khola, on the southern slopes of Chamar (7,165 m) in Gorkha District, Nepal, became a debris flow and flood that travelled down the Syar Khola and the Budhi Gandaki. I reconstruct the event from free satellite data (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Landsat 8/9, ITS_LIVE and NISAR), official records and my own [...]
Near-term climate impacts are roughly linear in cumulative CO2 emissions
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Understanding the relationship between CO2 emissions and human well-being is central to informing climate policy. While global temperature change is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, many human outcomes respond nonlinearly to climate variation. As a result, the magnitude of the effect of a quantum of CO2 on these outcomes is ambiguous. Here we demonstrate that the impact of climate change [...]
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 [...]
Active hazardous slow faults drive drainage evolution in the Atacama Desert
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Tectonics and Structure
The Atacama Desert of the Central Andean forearc is the driest non-polar region on Earth, where extremely low erosion rates preserve geomorphic markers over Myr timescales. Between 19°S and 20°S, subtle Quaternary east-vergent reverse faults deform the west-sloping landscape and disrupt drainage development. This setting provides a unique opportunity to investigate fault evolution, uplift [...]
Structural Geothermal Plays in the Lower Carboniferous Limestone, East Midlands, UK: Insights from Legacy Geophysical Data
Published: 2026-10-15
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: 2026-10-15
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) [...]
Worldwide water gaps: Using relative elevation modelling to identify transverse drainages
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Transverse drainages are stream reaches that flow through, rather than around, topographic high grounds. The development of transverse drainage is intimately tied to the tectonic history of an area, but the identification of transverse reaches has historically been a matter of subjective opinion. Here, a GIS-based method is presented that uses relative elevation modelling to identify and quantify [...]