Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Seasonal flow types of glaciers in Sermilik Fjord, Greenland, over 2016–2021
Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Greenland glaciers have three primary seasonal ice flow patterns, or “types”: terminus driven, runoff driven, and runoff adapting. To date, glacier types have been identified by analyzing flow at a single location near the terminus; information at all other locations is discarded. Here, we use principal component (PC) / empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis to decompose multi-year time [...]
Formation of authigenic grey monazite: a marker of palaeo-thermal anomaly in very-low grade metamorphic rocks?
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The reassessment of the rare earth element (REE) potential of France led us to investigate REE behaviour in black-shales belonging to the Middle Ordovician Angers-Traveusot formation from central Britany (France), with an emphasis on the formation of nodular grey monazite during the diagenetic and low-grade metamorphic evolution. Temperatures conditions and mass transfer underwent in the black [...]
PubDAS: a PUBlic Distributed Acoustic Sensing datasets repository for geosciences
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
During the past few years, Distributing Acoustic Sensing (DAS) has become an invaluable tool for recording high-fidelity seismic wavefields with great spatiotemporal resolutions. However, the considerable amount of data generated during DAS experiments limits their distribution with the broader scientific community. Such a bottleneck inherently slows down the pursuit of new scientific discoveries [...]
Multi-fold increase in rainforests tipping risk beyond 1.5-2⁰C warming
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Tropical rainforests invest in their root systems to store soil moisture from water-rich periods for use in water-scarce periods. An inadequate root-zone soil moisture storage predisposes or forces these forest ecosystems to transition to a savanna-like state, devoid of their native structure and functions. Yet changes in soil moisture storage and its influence on the rainforest ecosystems under [...]
Variational inference of ice shelf rheology with physics-informed machine learning
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Other Mathematics, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Floating ice shelves that fringe the coast of Antarctica resist the flow of grounded ice into the ocean. One of the key factors governing the amount of flow-resistance provided by an ice shelf is the rigidity of the ice that constitutes it. Ice rigidity is highly heterogeneous and must be calibrated from spatially-continuous surface observations assimilated into an ice flow model. Moreover, [...]
Source location and wavefield characterization of river-induced seismic tremor
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
River-induced seismic signal (tremor) recorded by deploying seismic stations close to the river can be used to obtain the flow characteristics of rivers indirectly. This task becomes challenging when the tremor is contaminated by strong cultural noise. We conducted an experiment next to Avoca River, County Wicklow, Ireland. We locate and characterize the river-induced tremor by combining the [...]
Locating Flowing Conduits in Karst Using Amplitude-based Passive Seismic Location Method
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The aim of this study is to develop methods for directly detecting energetic groundwater flow in sub-surface conduits through passive seismic applications, by detecting the small ground vibrations (seismic microtremor) that flowing water in the sub-surface may generate. This is in contrast to the current ‘traditional’ approach of attempting to actively image the conduits using geophysical and [...]
Rapid fault healing after seismic slip
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
Fault strength recovery (healing) following an earthquake is a key process in controlling the recurrence of future events; however, the rates and mechanisms of fault healing are poorly constrained. Here, by performing high-velocity friction experiments at seismic slip rates (0.57 m/s), we show that granite and gabbro fault gouges recover their strength rapidly after experiencing dynamic [...]
Down-delta hydraulic geometry and its application to the rock record
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Paleodischarge estimation is largely undertaken within fluvial settings, and there are limited paleodischarge estimates specifically from delta deposits, despite their significance globally. Making water paleodischarge estimates for deltas using catchment-based approaches developed using data from fluvial settings requires estimation of parameters from the rock record (e.g. paleotemperature, [...]
Practical sampling criteria for using delta channel width to estimate paleodischarge in the rock record
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Quantifying paleodischarge from geological field observations have been for decades, and remains, a key research challenge. Several paleodischarge scaling relationships have been developed for fluvial environments, such as BQART, Fulcrum and regional hydraulic geometry or for river deltas by precluding the role of wave and tide. In deltas where marine (wave, tide) energy causes bidirectional [...]
Autonomous Passage Planning for a Polar Vessel
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
We introduce a method for long-distance maritime route planning in polar regions, taking into account complex changing environmental conditions. The method allows the construction of optimised routes, describing the three main stages of the process: discrete modelling of the environmental conditions using a non-uniform mesh, the construction of mesh-optimal paths, and path smoothing. In order to [...]
A review of coarse mineral dust in the Earth system
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mineral dust particles suspended in the atmosphere span more than three orders of magnitude in diameter, from less than 0.1 µm to more than 100 µm. This wide size range makes dust a unique aerosol species with the ability to interact with many aspects of the Earth system, including radiation, clouds, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, and biogeochemistry. This review focuses on coarse and [...]
Fingerprinting construction sand supply-networks for traceable sourcing
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Globally increasing demand for construction sand needs to be met with transparent and responsible supply-networks. Currently, there are no scalable methods for tracing construction sand distribution without direct observation. We examined sand “fingerprinting” as a potential tool to trace construction sand supply-networks from “source to sink” in a case study from Texas, USA. Both natural bulk [...]
Ocean Surface Gravity Wave Excitation of Flexural Gravity and Extensional Lamb Waves in Ice Shelves
Published: 2022-08-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Flexure and extension of ice shelves in response to incident ocean surface gravity waves have been linked to iceberg calving, rift growth, and even disintegration of ice shelves. Most modeling studies utilize a plate bending model for the ice, focusing exclusively on flexural gravity waves. Ross Ice shelf seismic data shows not only flexural gravity waves, with dominantly vertical displacements, [...]
A genetic model of the magnetite-apatite deposits on El Laco volcano by extrusion of iron-rich melt
Published: 2022-08-25
Subjects: Dynamical Systems, Earth Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Geochemistry, Geology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology
Magnetite-apatite deposits are important sources of iron and other metals. A prominent exam- ple are the magnetite lavas at the El Laco volcano, Northern Chile. Their formation processes remain debated. Here, we test the genetic hypothesis that an Fe-rich melt separated from silicate magma and ascended along collapse-related fractures. We complement recent analy- ses with thermodynamic modelling [...]