Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
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: 2026-08-21
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: 2026-08-21
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: 2026-08-21
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: 2026-08-21
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 [...]
Reconstructing the P-T-t evolution recorded in garnet through growth and multicomponent diffusion modelling
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology
Interpreting the P –T evolution of a region recorded in garnet requires understanding of how the major elements in garnet (Fe, Mg, Mn and Ca) are modified by diffusion. We present an integrated approach that combines thermodynamic modelling with MAGEMin and multicomponent diffusion modelling using UWDiffusion, built on underworld3, to constrain the P–T–t evolution of a garnet pyroxenite from the [...]
Satellite-Based Assessment of Terrestrial Water Storage Change and Groundwater Stress in Zhob District, Balochistan
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Groundwater underpins domestic supply and irrigated agriculture across much of Balochistan, Pakistan, and satellite-based subsidence studies have documented severe groundwater-related stress around Quetta, Gulistan, Pishin, Mastung, and Kalat districts. Zhob District, in northern Balochistan, is comparably dependent on tubewell and karez irrigation but has not been covered by any published [...]
ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Precipitation Outlook and Hydrological-Hydrogeological Assessment for the Middle East: August 2026-January 2027
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Higher Education, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
This preprint presents a regional hydrological and hydrogeological interpretation of the ECMWF SEAS5 System 51 ensemble-mean precipitation forecast initialized on 1 August 2026 for the Middle East and adjacent portions of the analysis domain. The supplied NetCDF field is time-mean total precipitation rate (tprate; m s^-1), converted to monthly precipitation depth (mm/month) using the actual [...]
PyRiverShift: A Gaussian Transect Decomposition Framework for Quantifying Sub-Pixel Lateral Channel Mobility
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Along many rivers, lateral channel mobility is a key process, yet quantification from freely available multi-decadal 30 m Landsat imagery is constrained by low pixel resolution relative to channel width. We introduce PyRiverShift, a sensor-agnostic spectral decomposition framework. PyRiverShift fits a 1-D Gaussian to NDWI profiles along valley-perpendicular transects, recovering sub-pixel channel [...]
Predicting the reactivity of trawl-disturbed sediment carbon from measurable seabed properties
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Mobile bottom-contact fishing gear disturbs a large area of the continental shelf each year. How much carbon that releases depends on how fast the disturbed material is mineralised. Assessments represent that with a first-order rate constant, and because its value is unmeasured they sample it across five orders of magnitude, which makes it their dominant uncertainty. Here the constant is derived [...]
Source-composition sensitivity in historical marine wind observations: a CLIWOC case study, 1750--1855
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Applied Mathematics, Other Computer Sciences
Recovering Climate’s History with Artificial Intelligence used the CLIWOC ship-logbook database to argue that sailors’ wind observations reveal a previously undetected shift in global atmospheric circulation between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We reproduce the article's principal annual aggregate from CLIWOC release 2.1 and find that this unstandardized, record-weighted [...]
A satellite blind spot masks crop residue burning across northern India
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Postmonsoon crop residue burning in the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana is a major source of air pollution and air quality degradation across the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP). Recent satellite observations have revealed an apparent inconsistency between declining fire detections and persistent or increasing atmospheric pollution. Here we combine eight years (2018-2025) of fire observations from [...]
Mineral association drives divergent chemical trajectories of organic sulfur during dryland soil development
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Soil Science
Sulfur (S) deficiency is becoming more widespread as atmospheric S deposition declines, increasing ecosystem reliance on mineralization of soil organic S as a source of plant-available sulfate. Yet how organic S chemistry evolves during soil development, and how this evolution is mediated by microbial processing and mineral association, remains poorly understood, particularly in drylands. Here, [...]
Locating the Anthropogenic Drivers of Urban Flooding from Centimetre-Resolution Aerial Imagery: A Reproducible Open-Data Pipeline for the Odaw Basin, Accra
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Recurrent inundation in metropolitan Accra is, on the preponderance of the evidence, an anthropogenic rather than a climatological phenomenon: its proximate determinants are the obstruction of drainage by solid waste and the encroachment of structures onto watercourses. These determinants are metre-scale and therefore invisible to the moderate-resolution satellite imagery on which prior work has [...]
IPOC-Deep: a new seismicity catalog for Northern Chile with >2 million events
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a novel seismicity catalog for Northern Chile, which covers 17 years (2007--2023) of data and contains more than 2.2 million events. Raw waveform data from nearly 200 stations including a range of temporary deployments were processed with state-of-the-art algorithms for phase picking (EQTransformer) and association (PyOcto), after which we performed absolute event relocation in a 2.5D [...]
ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Precipitation Outlook and Preliminary Rainfall-Based Flood Screening for Iraq: October 2026–January 2027
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
This preprint provides a hydrological and hydrogeological interpretation of ECMWF SEAS5 monthly precipitation forecasts for Iraq from October 2026 through January 2027. The analysis uses the ECMWF System 51 ensemble mean initialized on 1 August 2026. The downloaded time-mean total precipitation rate was converted from metres per second to monthly precipitation depth in millimetres using the [...]