Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
Deglacial Mass-Movement Floods as a Potential Source of Catastrophic Flood Traditions: A Testable Geomythological Hypothesis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology
Catastrophic flood traditions occur in many geographically separated cultures, but their possible geological substrates need not be uniform. Existing explanations include river floods, earthquake and volcanic tsunamis, glacial-lake outburst floods, postglacial sea-level rise, and cultural transmission. This paper proposes a complementary, explicitly testable hypothesis: during the terminal [...]
ECOCIDE: Quantifying War-Time Environmental Damage: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Kakhovka Dam Destruction
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Abstract: International law organisations are actively looking into declaring "ecocide" -- mass environmental destruction -- as a prosecutable international crime and in September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a proposed amendment to Rome Statute. No consistent, statistically sound method yet has been developed to document such a claim of harm, however, because prior environmental [...]
Independent Verification of the European Climate Law's Effect on Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution: A Satellite-Derived, Difference-in-Differences Analysis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Testing the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) against a deliberately constructed external control group of nine non-EU countries (the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia), using a two-group Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model with country-clustered standard errors on a 36-country panel, produces [...]
The Vulnerability Spiral: Compound Climate Risk Across Five Islands
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
sea level rise stacked on top of degrading natural coastal defenses. That assumption is rarely tested againstindependent, multi temporal evidence, and rarely broken down by ecosystem type, so I tested it directly,across 5 islands spanning 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, [...]
Stolen Strata: Quantifying the Anthropogenic Erasure of Kashmir's Karewa Terraces and Its Threat to the Saffron Economy
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa terraces are elevated, flat-topped deposits of intermontane lake-basin age (Pleistocene/Pliocene), and they underlie one of Kashmir's most economically significant agricultural systems — the saffron-growing belt at Pampore. Everyone who follows agriculture in Kashmir already knows these terraces are vanishing under unregulated soil mining and uncontrolled urban expansion; there's ample [...]
Ghost Infrastructure: Historical Industrial Geography and the Persistence of Path-Dependent Accessibility in Bochum, Germany
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
The complete 69,393 pedestrian street node network from Bochum was used for a Welch's t-test, which revealed as a surprise that street nodes with low accessibility are actually significantly farther from historical industrial sites than street nodes with high accessibility (t=42.887, p<0.00001, Cohen's d=0.589 - medium-to-large effect), which is the opposite of what the original hypothesis [...]
Magnitude-order improvements to the measurement precision of Antarctic grounding zone dynamics using SAR satellite constellations
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology
Glacier loss in Antarctica is strongly influenced by melt in the grounding zone, the transition between grounded and floating ice. Thwaites Glacier is a critical region, with 65 cm of sea-level-equivalent ice. A recent dataset tracks grounding line retreat for Thwaites and other Antarctic ice streams over 30 years. Despite this long-term record, significant uncertainty remains in predictions of [...]
The Cotton Line: Testing the Institutional Persistence of an Erased Colonial Land-Tenure Boundary Across Vidarbha's Agrarian and Vegetation Geography
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, International and Area Studies, Statistics and Probability
Are there 150-year-old institutional legacies measurable in the 21st century as a spatial signature, in patterns of vegetation phenology (cotton signatures), agrarian labor structure, land use and land surface temperature? That is the core question this paper addresses and the design is not a 'before'-'after', it's a 'spatial discontinuity' test to see if there is still a measurable gap across an [...]
Asthenosphere rheology and the continental-scale interseismic deformation driven by repeated megathrust earthquakes: Insights from the South American plate
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology
This study presents a framework for quantifying large-scale interseismic deformation of a tectonic plate overlying a viscoelastic asthenosphere. We explain and compare four common methods for modelling upper-plate surface deformation induced by time-dependent slip on the subduction interface. One method is a widely used, purely elastic model. The other three are viscoelastic models, in which slip [...]
Isochrone overturning in steady glacier flow
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ancient ice recovered at Allan Hills extends into the Miocene, but steep layers, age reversals and folds complicate its interpretation. Whether steady glacier flow can overturn initially ordered layers remains uncertain. Here, we track the horizontal order of particles deposited sequentially at the surface. This order is measured by a signed Jacobian that is equivalent to the inverse [...]
Multi-Sensor Satellite-Based Retrospective Early-Warning Assessment of the 26 August 2026 Flood Event in the Langtang Region of Nepal
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Rapid-onset floods in high-mountain environments can be difficult to anticipate because their triggering mechanisms may involve interactions among precipitation, glacierized terrain, surface-water dynamics, and sudden geomorphological disturbances. This study presents a retrospective multi-sensor satellite assessment of the flood event reported in the Langtang region of Nepal on 26 August 2026. [...]
The Elastic Stiffness C13 in Transversely Isotropic Shales
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Shales are often anisotropic due to fine-scale layering and preferred alignment of clay particles with bedding. They may be approximated as transversely isotropic (TI) media with symmetry axis (x3) perpendicular to bedding. TI media have five independent elastic stiffnesses C11, C33, C55, C66 and C13, with C12 = C11−2C66. While C11, C33, C55 and C66 may be estimated from velocities measured [...]
Sea-Level Change in Asia since the Last Glacial Maximum
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
As a ‘far-field’ area, distal from former ice sheets, Asia is minimally influenced by the glacial isostatic adjustment process. Therefore, Relative sea-level (RSL) data from Asia, recorded by various geological proxies, provide essential constraints on the history of ice-equavilent sea-level changes. The global mean sea-level has risen over 130 m on average since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), [...]
Seismoacoustic recovery of the SpaceX CRS-32 Dragon re-entry with a proof-of-concept for automated detection
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Atmospheric re-entries of human-made objects are increasing in frequency, yet detailed information on their trajectory, fragmentation, and debris footprint is rarely made publicly available. This creates an information asymmetry in which regulators, independent agencies, and the scientific community lack the means to verify that re-entries occurred as reported or to characterize their physical [...]