Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Desert pavements stabilise arid vegetation patterns
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
Some vegetation patterns have aridity-dependent morphology. On low-angle arid hillslopes, vegetation organises into bands which follow topographic contours. Terraces emerge with these bands due to vegetation’s drag on sediment-laden runoff, creating a topographic signature of life diagnostic of precipitation rate. Another widespread feature of arid environments is desert pavement, surficial [...]
Data Test of a Hydro-Kinematic State Graph for Landslide Forecasting
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Statistics and Probability
A graph model can make landslide-monitoring relationships explicit, but a graph is not automatically more informative than a well-regularized time-series model. This study tests that distinction on the publicly released Lamosano landslide record from northeastern Italy. The processed dataset contains 161 observations of 11-day horizontal InSAR differential displacement and rainfall from 10 April [...]
Numerical modeling and hazard analysis of Kuwait dust storm events using WRF Chemistry model
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Dust storms have a negative impact on socio-economic events in Kuwait, including traffic accidents, seaport closures, airport shutdowns, and flight delays, and agriculture degradation. From the diurnal analysis of weather parameters, it was noticed that dust storms were more severe from noon to late evening hours and gradually slowed down during the night hours. Sometimes, these strong dust [...]
ALPAKAS: Alpine hydrographs and catchment attributes for karst springs
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology
Approximately 40 % of the European Alps consist of karstifiable rock. Due to their distinct recharge, storage, and discharge properties, karst aquifers are key components of the hydrological cycle and water supply in the Alpine region. However, large-sample datasets enabling comparative and data-driven analyses of karst spring discharge are currently lacking. Here, we present ALPAKAS (ALPine [...]
Silicate Weathering Dynamics in the Kasaï Basin and Implications for Enhanced Rock Weathering Applications in the Tropics
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Silicate weathering is one of the ultimate geologic sinks of atmospheric CO2. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW), aiming at accelerating this natural process to mitigate anthropogenic warming, has received significant attention due to high projected CO2 removal potential and possible agricultural co-benefits applications in the tropics. Yet, the natural baseline of chemical weathering in low-relief, [...]
Early warning signals of tipping points: A deep learning approach to direction and timing
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The crossing of climate tipping points poses serious risk to life on Earth due to the impacts they cause, and their irreversibility. These systems generally exhibit critical slowing down on their approach to tipping point, or bifurcation, which can be detected by looking for changes in statistical properties of a time series from the system, such as an increasing lag-1 autocorrelation or [...]
Global temperature calibrations based on 3-hydroxy fatty acids in lacustrine settings
Published: 2026-08-22
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences
Lakes are important archives of palaeoclimate records on the continent and decoding them could improve the parameterization of climate models to better predict the future. However, the limited temperature proxies currently applicable in lake environments make high-resolution climate records scarce. 3-hydroxy fatty acids (3-OH FAs) are bacterial lipids which have recently been proposed as [...]
Flood Susceptibility Mapping and Engineering Exposure Assessment of Zhob District, Balochistan, Using Sentinel-1 SARValidated AHP and Frequency Ratio Modeling
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology
Zhob District in northern Balochistan was substantially affected by the 2022 Pakistan monsoon floods, yet, unlike comparable districts mapped in the immediate aftermath of the same event (Larkana, Nowshera, Pishin, Quetta), it has lacked a dedicated, district-specific flood susceptibility assessment. This study addresses that gap using a hybrid Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Frequency Ratio [...]
State-Dependent Biophysical Processes Prevented a Late Paleozoic Snowball Earth
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Terrestrial vegetation modulates Earth’s climate through two distinct pathways—biogeochemically drawing down CO2 through enhanced organic carbon burial [1, 2] and silicate weathering [3, 4], and biophysically altering surface energy and water balances through potentially competing albedo and evapotranspiration changes [5, 6]. Although the biogeochemical pathway is widely invoked to explain the [...]
On the quieting of glaciohydraulic tremor
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The subglacial hydraulic system strongly modulates glacier motion, yet the links between subglacial water flow, basal pressure, and short-lived drainage reorganization remain difficult to observe directly. Seismology can track seismic power generated by turbulent subglacial water flow, known as glaciohydraulic tremor (GHT). At Rhône Glacier, Switzerland, previous observations documented periods [...]
Adalar at the Eastern Marmara Seismic Gap: The August 2026 Earthquake Cluster and Its Implications for Seismic Hazard near Istanbul
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering Science and Materials, Environmental Sciences, Geotechnical Engineering, Higher Education, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Engineering, Risk Analysis, Science and Mathematics Education, Structural Engineering
The eastern Marmara Sea and Adalar sector lie close to İstanbul and the western North Anatolian Fault, where earthquake-source processes interact with strong basin and site effects. This study integrates a reconciled earthquake catalog, waveform-quality measures, spatial statistics, trial hypocentral relocation, reconnaissance focal mechanisms, point-source Coulomb stress screening, and published [...]
A logical and reproducible geological-analogy model for diagnosing evaluability and prioritizing geochemical investigation of rare earth elements in data-incomplete territories Application to Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Territories with uneven geoscientific coverage pose a central problem for mineral investigation because missing information may be mistaken for negative evidence, while the accumulation of proxies may produce high classifications even when necessary geological requirements remain unknown. This study presents PAG ETR as a logical, categorical, multiscale, and reproducible framework for diagnosing [...]
Mineral stability and porosity dynamics in Halite- and Kainite-bearing rocks after hydrogen batch reaction test: a case study of Realmonte mine, Sicily (Italy)
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Mineral Physics, Mining Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Risk Analysis, Stratigraphy, Sustainability
Underground hydrogen storage in salt caverns is among the most mature geological storage options, yet the behaviour of potash-salt lithologies under hydrogen exposure remains entirely uncharacterised. This study presents a multi-technique characterisation, performed on selected representative samples, of Messinian halite and kainite-bearing evaporites from the Realmonte mine (Sicily) subjected to [...]
Tsunami wavefront backprojection to locate sources of dispersive waves imaged by SWOT during the 2025 M8.8 Kamchatka Earthquake
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The 29 July 2025 M8.8 Kamchatka earthquake generated a Pacific-wide tsunami that the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission imaged about 70 minutes later, about 600 km from the source, as a leading crest trailed by a train of short-wavelength dispersive waves. Rather than matching an assumed source forward to the observations, as prior studies of this wavefield have done, we [...]
Spatiotemporal variations in trawling intensity in the German Baltic Sea Basins based on bathymetric data
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Bottom trawling is the largest source of anthropogenic seafloor disturbance globally, yet spatiotemporal variations are poorly constrained in most regions due to non-reporting or low-resolution fishing effort data. To overcome this gap in knowledge, we use a U-Net convolutional neural network to segment trawl marks across approximately 1,069 square kilometers of seafloor in the German sector of [...]