Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Erosion-driven changes in soil cation exchange capacity quantified using barium isotopes
Published: 2026-04-23
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Human activities have perturbed the balance between rates of soil erosion and formation, driving declines in soil quality. However, quantifying these soil imbalances remains challenging, especially at large scales. Here we present a novel isotope mass balance approach that can be used to quantify river catchment wide rates of change in cation exchange capacity (CEC), a key soil quality metric, in [...]
Late Holocene tsunami hydrodynamics, sediment provenance and chronology from Dury Voe, Shetland Islands (UK)
Published: 2026-04-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Sedimentology
The Shetland Islands are one of the key sites in the Atlantic Ocean to study tsunami deposits, with three major events identified during the Holocene so far. Here, we aim to (i) reconstruct hydrodynamics of the late Holocene Dury Voe tsunami, (ii) constrain the sediment source area, and (iii) refine its age estimate. Onshore sandy deposits bracketed by thick dystrophic peat as well as marine [...]
Spaceborne imaging spectrometry of methane plumes: Quantifying the benefit of aerosol lidar
Published: 2026-04-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physics
Column averaged mixing ratios of trace gases, such as methane (XCH4), from spaceborne pushbroom spectrometers can be used to detect corresponding plumes and retrieve enhancements (ΔXCH4), i.e., the difference between plume and background XCH4. Over the global dust belt, however, significant scattering by dust aerosols may cause biased XCH4 that may propagate into biased ΔXCH4. To correct this, a [...]
Before the Threshold: Deceptive Stability, Buffer Slack, and Earth System Transitions
Published: 2026-04-21
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Other Environmental Sciences
Earth history includes episodes in which persistent biological or geophysical byproduct loads are absorbed by finite environmental sinks and buffers, preserving apparent stability while the capacity to absorb further stress declines. This paper synthesizes literatures on Earth system revolutions, redox transitions, mass extinctions, and Anthropocene change into a comparative framework termed [...]
PDCD-DAT – A global database of pyroclastic density current deposit field data
Published: 2026-04-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Pyroclastic density currents represent one of the deadliest hazards posed by active volcanoes. Analysis of their deposits provides valuable insights into their internal dynamics and informs numerical simulations of pyroclastic density currents which underpin many volcanic hazard assessments. We present PDCD-DAT, a global database of pyroclastic density current deposit characteristics compiled [...]
Dueling dynamics of low-angle normal fault rupture with splay faulting and off-fault damage
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology
Despite a lack of modern large earthquakes on shallowly dipping normal faults, Holocene Mw>7 low-angle normal fault (LANF; dip<30°) ruptures are preserved paleoseismically and inferred from historical earthquake and tsunami accounts. Even in well-recorded megathrust earthquakes, the effects of non-linear off-fault plasticity and dynamically reactivated splay faults on shallow deformation [...]
Terrestrial formation of calcium sulfate and carbonate assemblages in Atacama CO chondrites: Implications for Martian evaporitic environments
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Cosmochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Planetary Geochemistry, Planetary Geology, Planetary Mineral Physics, Planetary Sciences
Evaporites are frequently reported in carbonaceous chondrites from hot and cold deserts, yet their origin remains debated between formation on the parent body or by post-fall terrestrial alteration. Here, we present a systematic characterization of Ca sulfate and Ca carbonate assemblages in four CO carbonaceous chondrites from different dense collection areas of the Atacama Desert (Los Vientos [...]
How Would You Like Your SAR Flood Model? A Full-Stack, AI-Enabled Perspective on Operational Flood Mapping
Published: 2026-04-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology
Flood mapping with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has long been framed primarily as a problem of improving inundation detection algorithms. That framing has produced major advances, but it increasingly understates what operational flood monitoring actually requires. In practice, useful flood products depend on the coordinated performance of data access, preprocessing, ancillary information, model [...]
Estimating the ice thickness and water depth of a frozen lake using flexural waves recorded by distributed acoustic sensing
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Information about frozen lakes, including ice rigidity, ice thickness, and water depth, is essential for both environmental studies and practical applications. Although these properties can be measured in the field, such measurements are labor-intensive and spatially limited, motivating the development of alternative observation methods. Seismic waves offer an alternative approach to studying [...]
Agent-based Modelling of Microbialite Formation through Sedimentation and Precipitation Dynamics
Published: 2026-04-13
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Other Earth Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Fossil microbialites resulting from the interplay of sedimentation and microbially induced precipitation are among the oldest evidence of life on Earth and help geobiologists interpret many sedimentary environments. However, the factors governing their internal structure and external morphology are still poorly understood. Additionally, abiotic processes can mimic the morphology of some [...]
Beyond the 100-kyr and 41-kyr dichotomy: ~76- and ~52-kyr signals and forbidden periodicities in Quaternary glacial cycles
Published: 2026-04-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
While the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) is often termed a shift from 41-kyr to ∼100-kyr glacial cycles, this binary perspective fails to capture the nuanced spectral evolution of Quaternary climate. Using weighted wavelet spectral analysis of benthic δ18O records, we identified previously underappreciated signals—∼52 kyr before 1.2 Ma and ∼76 kyr thereafter—marking the MPT's onset. These [...]
Fractal Tomography and the Fisher Information Barrier of Seismicity: Addressing the Origin of Dual Paradoxes via Precision-Calibrated Bayesian Inference
Published: 2026-04-11
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Non-linear Dynamics, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Methodology, Statistics and Probability, Tectonics and Structure
The spatial organization of seismicity presents dual multi-decade paradoxes: (1) earthquake catalogs exhibit quasi-planar correlation dimensions (D2 ≈ 2.0–2.6) despite volumetric lithospheric deformation (geometric projection paradox), and (2) Bayesian inference systematically yields D3 ≈ 3.0 contradicting structural geology (Bayesian saturation paradox). We address both through the Fractal [...]
Persistent Geochemical Zonation (“Striping”) within the Galápagos Mantle Plume
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Some hotspot tracks, such as those formed by the Hawai’i and Galápagos mantle plumes, exhibit long-lived cross-track isotopic zonation, thought to reflect the streaking out of heterogeneous material in the plume conduit during upwelling. In lavas associated with the Galápagos mantle plume, three geochemical domains, present for at least 15 Myr, have been identified: northern, southern and [...]
HydroScholar AI: A Collaborative Agent for End-to-End Automated Hydrological Research Lifecycle
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Hydrological research relies on multi-stage computational workflows that are often slow, fragmented across disparate tools, and inconsistently documented, limiting reproducibility. This study presents HydroScholar AI, an agentic, human-in-the-loop platform that consolidates the plan-to-paper research lifecycle into a single interactive automated framework. From a natural-language prompt, the [...]
From geochemical to biogeochemical cycles: an organizational view of how (and why) life shaped its conditions of existence
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences
Since the seminal work of Maturana and Varela, the Organizational Approach (OA) has defended an organism-centered view of life. This paper argues that the OA must be extended to include the historical, ecological and geochemical processes that sustain biological systems across scales. We develop a multiscale account of closure of constraints (CoC) in which localized closures can emerge and [...]