Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Questioning the Ferromanganese Nodule Dark Oxygen Production Hypothesis
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Quantifying causal effects of green–blue–gray landscape change on urban thermal outcomes: A spatiotemporal causal machine learning analysis across city scales
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Optimizing urban green–blue–gray (UGBG) landscapes has become increasingly important for mitigating surface urban heat island (SUHI) intensity under rapid urbanization. However, the causal effects of landscape pattern changes on SUHI remain poorly quantified, particularly regarding their heterogeneity among spatial configuration, urban scales, and temporal periods. This knowledge gap limits the [...]
Joint Inversion of Seismic and Geoelectrical Data Targeting Geological Faults
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
Near-surface geological faults play a crucial role in subsurface systems because they influence fluid flow and transport and can cause geotechnical failure. Topography can sometimes indicate the presence of fault zones, particularly in active tectonic settings where geomorphic features such as triangular facets are preserved. However, particularly for older inactive faults, characteristic surface [...]
Fourier Neural Operator Surrogates for Hysteretic Multiphase Flow in Heterogeneous Geological CO2 Storage Reservoirs
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Modeling hysteresis in heterogeneous field-scale reservoirs is essential for estimating residual CO2 trapping capacity and assessing the security of geological storage. This requires accounting for both relative permeability hysteresis and capillary pressure hysteresis, which control path-dependent multiphase flow and the spatial distribution of trapped gas. Because maximum residual gas [...]
A Deep Learning-based Workflow for the Automated Focal Mechanism Determination in Italy
Published: 2026-08-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The determination of earthquake focal mechanisms is crucial for understanding tectonic processes and assessing seismic hazard. While traditional methods based on manual polarity picking have proven effective, they are time-consuming and potentially subject to analyst’s bias, particularly for small to moderate earthquakes. This study presents a machine learning-based approach for automating focal [...]
A community data commons for equitable Earth Science
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Earth observation data are abundant but rarely analysis-ready, and the burden of preparation limits who can participate in science. For the last six years, the Google Earth Engine Community Catalog has closed that gap via community-curated, cloud-hosted, FAIR datasets built without formal funding, advancing discovery and equity worldwide.
MUONITH v1.0 — A Fast Simulation Tool for Multi-directional Muography Observation Design
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Multi-directional muography is a non-destructive technique for imaging the three-dimensional density structure of large objects such as volcanoes. Recent developments in detector technology—miniaturization, low-power operation, and weight reduction—are rapidly expanding the range of feasible observation sites, and detector deployment by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is also being studied; in [...]
Effective Microbial Kinetics under Pore-Scale Transport Limitation: A Biofilm Effectiveness-Factor Theory
Published: 2026-07-27
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Reactive-transport models of porous media usually evaluate microbial reactions with Monod kinetics and rate constants measured on well-mixed laboratory cultures, in which every cell is exposed to the same substrate concentration. In natural sediments and aquifers this assumption fails at the pore scale, because the cells are not suspended but reside in biofilms and aggregates attached to the [...]
Connectivity effects on fluid age and residence time distributions in two- and three-dimensional pore networks
Published: 2026-07-27
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pore-scale simulations are often run on a single plane cut from a three-dimensional image, because resolving the whole pore space is expensive. This study asks what that shortcut costs. What is at stake is the distribution of fluid ages, and above all its long tail, because that tail is what slow reactions respond to. We computed the distribution directly from the flow field, by labeling the [...]
Rapid SRO aluminosilicate formation in a narrow pH interval fractionates silicon isotopes
Published: 2026-07-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Soil Science
Short-range ordered (SRO) hydrous aluminosilicates (HAS) are among the earliest secondary phases formed during incongruent silicate weathering, yet the timescales and silicon isotope (δ30Si) fractionation associated with their initial formation remains poorly constrained. We use stepwise room temperature NaOH titration to resolve pH buffering, Si–Al removal, and dissolved δ30Si evolution in two [...]
Reconstructing age and reactivity distributions from the moments carried by central-moment transport models
Published: 2026-07-26
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A central-moment transport model follows a property that varies across a population, such as the age of water parcels or the decay rate of organic-matter particles. Instead of storing the whole distribution of that property, it keeps only a few summary numbers, the moments, and moves those through the model. But the distribution itself is usually what a scientist wants, so it has to be rebuilt [...]
Open at the interface, closed at the core: neutrality claims in AI‑enabled geoscience infrastructure focusing on Africa – The case of Deep‑Time Digital Earth and GeoGPT
Published: 2026-07-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology
Geological data has become strategic infrastructure for resource assessment, investment negotiation, and economic sovereignty. Remotely hosted big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms are increasingly promoted for geoscience in the Global South, particularly Africa. Whether such platforms are genuinely geopolitically unaligned, and how this can be verified, has direct implications for [...]
Machine-learning-based classification of shear-band particles in a discrete-element reverse-fault model
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering
Discrete element method (DEM) simulations provide time-resolved particle-scale information on particle motion, contact forces, rotation, and local deformation. However, these outputs are high-dimensional, making it difficult to directly interpret which particle-level descriptors characterize localized deformation. This study develops a machine-learning workflow for classifying shear-band [...]
Authorship and contribution recognition in infrastructure-scale Earth science collaborations
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Community-driven collaborative initiatives across palaeoclimate, oceanography, and Earth system science have transformed how scientific knowledge is generated, integrated, and interpreted. Proxy synthesis efforts, climate model intercomparison projects, and scientific drilling programmes increasingly function as collaborative scientific infrastructures sustained by distributed intellectual labour [...]
Feedback-Controlled Linear Actuator System to Simulate Laboratory Analogs of Landslides
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
This study describes a scientific apparatus that induces granular flow by tilting an acrylic sample container under user-prescribed constant angular velocity and acceleration profiles. The system consists of a transparent sample container mounted within a motorized frame driven by a linear actuator that we control using pulse-width modulation with feed-forward compensation. Additional components [...]