Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
South Atlantic Anomaly Influence on Jet‑Stream Dynamics and Surface Climate
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physics
This work proposes a novel causal framework for recent climate change, departing fundamentally from greenhouse-gas-centric models. The central hypothesis is that the primary driver of global warming and biospheric stress is the degradation of Earth’s magnetic shielding—most clearly manifested in the progressive enlargement of the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), expanding ~5% per two decades within [...]
Multi-proxy approach in tracking circulation change in the western North Atlantic during the Little Ice Age
Published: 2025-09-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Little Ice Age (LIA), a period from ~1400 CE to 1900 CE, was characterized by colder winter and more frequent extreme weather event, particularly in the Northern hemisphere. While the exact causes of the Little Ice Age remain a topic of ongoing research, evidence suggests that changes in ocean circulation patterns likely played a role in the observed global cooling, although the specific [...]
Strategic crop relocation could substantially mitigate nuclear winter yield losses
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science
Nuclear war could inject millions of tonnes of soot into the stratosphere, cooling the Earth and devastating crop yields. We assess crop relocation—switching which crops are grown where—as an adaptation strategy. Using the Mink crop model, we simulate six major crops under three nuclear winter scenarios (16, 47, and 150 Tg of soot). Without adaptation, global caloric production falls 23%, 53%, [...]
Unraveling Southern Ocean Diatom Diversity Across the Eocene/Oligocene Transition
Published: 2025-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology
The Eocene-Oligocene transition (EOT) was a critical interval of global cooling and circulation change that reshaped marine ecosystems. However, current knowledge of diatom diversity and community dynamics during this interval relies mainly on biostratigraphic compilations, which largely document common species and thus likely underestimate true diversity. This study provides a more complete [...]
The Largest Crop Production Shocks: Magnitude, Causes and Frequency
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Risk Analysis
Food is the foundation of our society. We often take it for granted, but stocks are rarely available for longer than a year, and food production can be disrupted by catastrophic events, both locally and globally. To highlight such major risks to the food system, we analyzed FAO crop production data from 1961 to 2023 to find the largest crop production shock for every country and identify its [...]
The role of thermal pressurization in driving deep fault slip during the 2021 Mw 8.2 Chignik, Alaska megathrust earthquake
Published: 2025-09-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The 2021 Mw 8.2 Chignik earthquake ruptured a weakly coupled portion of the deep slab in the eastern Aleutian-Alaska subduction zone, with no significant shallow slip. The underlying physics driving such large earthquakes nucleating at large depth and their impact on seismic and tsunami hazards remain poorly understood. We perform 3D dynamic rupture simulations that couple thermal [...]
Some new Models of Earth’s Temperature Anomaly across various Epochs Predicting Present Warming with Ice Age Validity Testing and a Data set Bias examination.
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The need for methods to assess earth’s temperature anomaly are briefly discussed together with shortcomings of existing climate models. The geomagnetic or Pole shift method of climate sensitivity is briefly reviewed. The hypothesis that the previous two warm periods shared a common driver is tested and proven. Granger causality tests have been made and indicate that Pole Shift is the driver of [...]
The impacts of volcanism on hydrocarbon-bearing sedimentary basins - Examples from the world-class Neuquén Basin case study, Argentina
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The last two decades of research have highlighted that volcanism occurring in sedimentary basins can have substantial effects on sedimentary formations. In particular, igneous intrusions can trigger the generation of large amounts of greenhouse gases in organic-rich host rocks, leading to dramatic climate change and mass extinctions. Volcanism can also have significant impacts on [...]
Using X-ray Fluorescence to Detect Automobile Heavy Metal Pollution in Los Angeles Soils with Copper and Palladium as Indicators
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This project evaluates the effectiveness of using portable X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) to detect soil composition matrices that show patterns of anthropogenic influence. We explore 26 areas within Los Angeles County, California, that have various amounts of traffic; classifying each locale as Urban or Recreational. The main elements of interest are copper and palladium. These indicators are largely [...]
3D surface displacement estimation over the Groningen gas field, the Netherlands
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geophysics and Seismology, Mining Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Since 1964, the Groningen gas field in the Netherlands has experienced significant subsidence due to gas extraction. Although InSAR has been widely used to estimate the vertical displacements of the field, capturing the full three-dimensional deformation, including omnidirectional horizontal components, remained a challenge and has only been achieved from spatially sparse GNSS observations. The [...]
Using ruptures from an earthquake cycle simulator to test geodetic early warning system performance
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
New Zealand's vulnerability to seismic hazards highlights the need for systems capable of providing earthquake early warning (EEW) or rapid notice of strong shaking. Large offshore earthquakes along the subduction zone east of the North Island could also trigger catastrophic tsunamis, inundating coastal communities in under an hour. While New Zealand operates a robust seismic and geodetic network [...]
Undrainable pore spaces comprise half of US groundwater storage
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is vital to global freshwater access, streamflow generation, and biogeochemical cycling, but not all groundwater can be drained due to adhesive and capillary forces. Quantifying the proportion of groundwater that can be drained—and is, thus, theoretically recoverable—is critical for characterising groundwater’s role in earth system processes. Unfortunately, estimates of theoretically [...]
Surface Expression of Low Basal Friction Upstream of Antarctic Grounding Lines
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ice sheets leave contact with the bed at grounding lines, beyond which floating ice shelves experience no friction at their base. In places where basal friction begins to decrease upstream of the grounding line, ice sheets respond more strongly to climate forcing. However, the spatial extent of zones of low grounding line friction is poorly constrained by observations. Here, we use a steady-state [...]
Earthquake body-wave extraction using sparsity-promoting polarization filtering in the time–frequency domain
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Seismic waves generated by earthquakes consist of multiple phases that carry critical information about Earth’s internal structure as they propagate through heterogeneous media. Each seismic phase follows its own propagation path and sampling depth, bringing constraints from different regions of the Earth such as the crust, mantle, or even the outer and inner cores. The choice of phase for [...]
Parasequences and Bedsets : Examples from the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau of Eastern Utah
Published: 2025-08-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The Late Cretaceous strata that crop-out in east central Utah (USA) have been central to the development and testing of the sequence stratigraphic paradigm for almost 40 years. Large continuous cliff sections in the Books Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau are composed of shallow marine and coastal plain strata arranged in to cycles that show an upward shallowing of facies interpreted as parasequence. [...]