Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
The explosive engine of the 2022 Hunga submarine eruption
Published: 2026-09-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Volcanology
The 2022 submarine eruption of Hunga volcano, Tonga, was among the largest volcanic eruptions in the modern era, yet the processes controlling its explosive sequence remain poorly understood. Here we present the first detailed insight into the internal mechanics of an explosive cycle from teleseismic waveforms. Four eruptive episodes repeat an implosion-explosion cycle, separated by a 3-minute [...]
Calibrated detection limits in routine Sentinel-1 products 50.6 hours before the Langtang Lirung rock–ice avalanche, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
On 26 August 2026 a rock–ice avalanche detached from Langtang Lirung, Nepal, and released a debris flood that crossed the Nepal–China border. Deformation preceding the failure has since been reported from a multi-month Sentinel-1 stack, and pre-event indications have been identified in commercial optical imagery. Both analyses began from a known failure location. This paper asks a different [...]
Revisiting the felsőbányaite-basaluminite question : nomenclatural synonymy and unresolved structural issues
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Mineral Physics, Soil Science
Felsőbányaite (1853) and basaluminite (1948) share the formula Al4(SO4)(OH)10·4H2O, and were shown to be crystallographically identical in 1997, leading the IMA to discredit basaluminite in 2006 in favor of the older name. This nomenclatural choice is not an issue. Instead, this opinion article explores a more focused contemporary question: is the poorly crystalline material that geochemists [...]
Lab-based X-ray imaging for accurate seismic velocity measurements at high pressure
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Mineral Physics
A novel approach for accurately measuring the compressional (P) and shear-wave (S) velocities of materials at high pressure is demonstrated up to ~6 GPa using a Paris-Edinburgh press. Typically, accurate ultrasonic velocity measurements at high pressure require synchrotron facilities to image the sample length in-situ and to determine the internal cell pressure using X-ray diffraction from an [...]
Dendrochronology and the date of the Thera volcanic eruption
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Volcanology
The main disciplines that contribute to our understanding of the chronology of the ancient Near East are history, archaeology, and various scientific dating techniques including dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, and ice-core analysis. Beginning in the 1980s, a major rift began to develop between the historical-archaeological chronology and that based on dendrochronology-calibrated radiocarbon [...]
A rock-ice avalanche and the 2026 Bhote Koshi-Trishuli flood, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences
On 26 August 2026 a rock-ice avalanche in the Langtang Himal produced a debris flow and flood that destroyed the Rasuwagadhi-Gyirong border crossing within minutes and reached Devghat about six hours later. We reconstruct the cascade with a depth-averaged mixture-flow model constrained by the seismic origin time, a CCTV frame, gauge outages in the gorge and downstream stage records. The model [...]
No detectable precursor in Sentinel-1 backscatter before the 26 August 2026 Langtang Lirung rock–ice avalanche, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
On 26 August 2026 a rock–ice avalanche on the west flank of Langtang Lirung, Nepal, initiated a debris flow and flood that ran roughly 100 km down the Lhende Khola, Bhote Koshi and Trishuli. Several contemporaneous reports asserted that satellite radar had tracked a month of accelerating slope movement before failure. This note tests that claim in the amplitude record. Using Copernicus Sentinel-1 [...]
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
Deglacial Mass-Movement Floods as a Potential Source of Catastrophic Flood Traditions: A Testable Geomythological Hypothesis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology
Catastrophic flood traditions occur in many geographically separated cultures, but their possible geological substrates need not be uniform. Existing explanations include river floods, earthquake and volcanic tsunamis, glacial-lake outburst floods, postglacial sea-level rise, and cultural transmission. This paper proposes a complementary, explicitly testable hypothesis: during the terminal [...]
ECOCIDE: Quantifying War-Time Environmental Damage: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Kakhovka Dam Destruction
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Abstract: International law organisations are actively looking into declaring "ecocide" -- mass environmental destruction -- as a prosecutable international crime and in September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a proposed amendment to Rome Statute. No consistent, statistically sound method yet has been developed to document such a claim of harm, however, because prior environmental [...]
Independent Verification of the European Climate Law's Effect on Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution: A Satellite-Derived, Difference-in-Differences Analysis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Testing the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) against a deliberately constructed external control group of nine non-EU countries (the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia), using a two-group Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model with country-clustered standard errors on a 36-country panel, produces [...]
The Vulnerability Spiral: Compound Climate Risk Across Five Islands
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
Small islands are widely assumed to face a compounding climate risk: high physical exposure to sea-level rise, layered on top of degrading natural coastal defenses. That assumption is rarely tested against independent, multi-temporal evidence, and rarely broken down by ecosystem type — so I tested it directly, across five islands spanning three ocean basins: Maldives, Lakshadweep, Seychelles, [...]
Ghost Infrastructure: Historical Industrial Geography and the Persistence of Path-Dependent Accessibility in Bochum, Germany
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
The complete 69,393 pedestrian street node network from Bochum was used for a Welch's t-test, which revealed as a surprise that street nodes with low accessibility are actually significantly farther from historical industrial sites than street nodes with high accessibility (t=42.887, p<0.00001, Cohen's d=0.589 - medium-to-large effect), which is the opposite of what the original hypothesis [...]
Stolen Strata: Quantifying the Anthropogenic Erasure of Kashmir's Karewa Terraces and Its Threat to the Saffron Economy
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa terraces are elevated, flat-topped deposits of intermontane lake-basin age (Pleistocene/Pliocene), and they underlie one of Kashmir's most economically significant agricultural systems — the saffron-growing belt at Pampore. Everyone who follows agriculture in Kashmir already knows these terraces are vanishing under unregulated soil mining and uncontrolled urban expansion; there's ample [...]
Magnitude-order improvements to the measurement precision of Antarctic grounding zone dynamics using SAR satellite constellations
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology
Glacier loss in Antarctica is strongly influenced by melt in the grounding zone, the transition between grounded and floating ice. Thwaites Glacier is a critical region, with 65 cm of sea-level-equivalent ice. A recent dataset tracks grounding line retreat for Thwaites and other Antarctic ice streams over 30 years. Despite this long-term record, significant uncertainty remains in predictions of [...]