Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Arctic summer cloud optical properties and annual sea-ice retreat
Published: 2026-03-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Changes in Arctic sea-ice areal coverage have major ecological, climate, and economic implications and are driven by diverse natural and anthropogenic forcings acting over a wide range of time scales. Cloud-related variability in atmospheric radiative budgets is suspected to be particularly important in year-to-year changes in ice melt. Here, we describe a decade of pan-Arctic satellite light [...]
Validation of ICESat-2 ATL13 Version 7 Water Surface Elevation on Small High-Latitude Rivers: A Case Study of the River Dee and River Don, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Published: 2026-03-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Satellite Laser Altimetry represents an attractive opportunity to supplement the sparsely distributed in situ gauge network used to monitor rivers. The performance of satellite laser altimetry on small, high latitude streams has however been characterized as being poor. This research will be validating ICESat-2 ATL13 version 7 measured water surface elevations (WSE) for the River Dee (average [...]
Time-dependent forecast of large earthquakes from physics-informed probabilistic approach
Published: 2026-03-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The elastic energy that fuels large earthquakes accumulates heterogeneously along faults, resulting in complex earthquake occurrence patterns. Although earthquake cycle simulations help capture such complexity in seismic hazard models, their high computational cost prevents widespread use and uncertainty quantification. Here, we propose a physics-based probabilistic method to forecast the timing [...]
Characterization of the Kinematics of the Cordillera Blanca Normal Fault from InSAR
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
The Cordillera Blanca Normal fault (CBNF), located along the western margin of the Cordillera Blanca batholith in northern Peru, is a major extensional structure of the central Andes. Geological and geomorphological evidence indicates sustained slip over the past ~4 Ma, yet its present-day kinematics have not been quantified geodetically. Here, we use Sentinel-1 InSAR (Interferometric [...]
Carbon mineralization in CO2-seawater-basalt systems: Reactive transport dynamics and vesicular pore architecture controls
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Carbon mineralization in basaltic rocks offers a promising pathway for rapid, permanent CO2 storage, yet the fundamental controls on reactive transport, precipitation patterns, and permeability evolution under seawater conditions remain poorly constrained. This study integrates flow-through column experiments at 80°C with CO2-acidified seawater, geochemical modeling, and multi-scale pore imaging [...]
An analysis of landslides in Great Britain using soil texture, rainfall, and topography reveals contrasting failure conditions between organic and mineral soils
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Rainfall-induced landslides cause millions of pounds in damage to infrastructure in Great Britain (GB) annually and occasionally result in human fatalities. However, there are limited guidelines or policies aimed at reducing landslide risk in GB and few studies have broadly characterized landslide incidence across the region. Furthermore, peat landslides, which are a phenomenon that occur almost [...]
Connectivity between primary and secondary subglacial drainage systems beneath a land-terminating outlet glacier of the Greenland Ice Sheet
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The evolution and connectivity of subglacial drainage systems controls basal sliding and therefore modulates ice flow, yet direct observations of these systems remain limited. Here, we investigate hydraulic connectivity and its influence on ice motion at Isunnguata Sermia - a large land-terminating outlet glacier of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We use ‘Cryoegg’ wireless sensors to obtain moulin [...]
vathra.xyz — Crowdsourced Monitoring of Greece's Geodetic Heritage: Architecture, Empirical Results, and Legal Framework
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Other Earth Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Greece's national trigonometric network comprises 25,258 geodetic survey points established by the Hellenic Military Geographical Service (HMGS/GYS). This paper presents vathra.xyz, an open-source web platform for crowdsourced condition monitoring of these points using Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) methods. We describe the system architecture (React, PostGIS, Leaflet, browser-based AR [...]
Stable isotopic composition, paleoecology, and habitat of the ammonite Sphenodiscus lobatus in the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Western Interior Seaway
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Sedimentology
Despite their abundance as fossils, the life histories of ammonites are still poorly understood. We analyzed the oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) isotopic composition of well-preserved shell material taken from different growth stages of the streamlined oxyconic ammonite species Sphenodiscus lobatus from the Upper Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Pierre Shale and Fox Hills Formation of South Dakota. [...]
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo applied to inverse petrological problems
Published: 2026-03-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Mineral Physics, Probability
Inversion is inherent in petrology and is used to investigate both experimental and natural field data. When field observations, petrography, geochronology and geochemistry are combined with numerical models, inversion is used to quantify important parameters that provide insights into natural processes involved in the petrogenesis of rocks. Additionally, with the current advances in the field of [...]
Water-efficient Indian rice cultivation boosts exports despite high carbon footprints
Published: 2026-03-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences
Most agricultural sustainability efforts adopt a national-scale view, masking regional trade-offs between crop yields and environmental footprints. To measure trade-offs, satellite remote sensing based life cycle assessment of rice agroecosystems across India from 2004 to 2021 was conducted revealing pivotal shifts of four cultivation typologies, termed as unsustainable, conventional, productive, [...]
Evaluation of high-resolution gridded climate products in reproducing spatial and temporal variation in precipitation in central Panama
Published: 2026-02-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Tropical forests vary widely in their precipitation regimes and seasonal water availability, but high-quality in-situ (ground-based) meteorological data are rare, and few studies have evaluated the performance of global gridded climate products in the tropics. We compared the performance of eleven high-resolution gridded climate products against in-situ datasets spanning high rainfall variation [...]
Declining Snowpack in the Presence of Stable Precipitation May Not Negatively Impact Baseflow or Floodplain Vegetation in the Middle Fork Rock Creek Watershed, Montana, USA
Published: 2026-02-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation
In the age of snow droughts and megafires, water availability and changes in precipitation, snowpack, and baseflows are active areas of research. Headwater streams are where all large rivers begin, but their seasonal water availability is difficult to measure because they are so abundant and remote. Remote sensing can help monitor small streams semi-arid areas if there is an appropriate proxy for [...]
Paleo- and Neo-Tethyan subducted slabs below the Eastern Mediterranean region
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The late Paleozoic to recent Alpine-Himalayan orogen contains the geological remnants of subducted lithosphere of the Paleotethys and Neotethys oceans and of microcontinents within these. This orogenic belt is segmented by abrupt along-strike changes that according to plate reconstructions coincide with paleo-transform faults across which oceanic opening and subduction histories changed. Here, we [...]
A Scalable Borehole Thermometry Framework for Process-Based Monitoring of Near-Surface Thermal Dynamics Across Polar and High-Mountain Cryosphere Systems
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Rapid climate warming is fundamentally altering the thermal structure and stability of glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves across polar and high-mountain environments. While satellite remote sensing and surface meteorological networks provide essential observations of atmospheric forcing and surface conditions, the near-surface subsurface layer (approximately 0–3 m depth)—where energy is [...]