Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Using X-ray Fluorescence to Detect Automobile Heavy Metal Pollution in Los Angeles Soils with Copper and Palladium as Indicators
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This project evaluates the effectiveness of using portable X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) to detect soil composition matrices that show patterns of anthropogenic influence. We explore 26 areas within Los Angeles County, California, that have various amounts of traffic; classifying each locale as Urban or Recreational. The main elements of interest are copper and palladium. These indicators are largely [...]
3D surface displacement estimation over the Groningen gas field, the Netherlands
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geophysics and Seismology, Mining Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Since 1964, the Groningen gas field in the Netherlands has experienced significant subsidence due to gas extraction. Although InSAR has been widely used to estimate the vertical displacements of the field, capturing the full three-dimensional deformation, including omnidirectional horizontal components, remained a challenge and has only been achieved from spatially sparse GNSS observations. The [...]
Using ruptures from an earthquake cycle simulator to test geodetic early warning system performance
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
New Zealand's vulnerability to seismic hazards highlights the need for systems capable of providing earthquake early warning (EEW) or rapid notice of strong shaking. Large offshore earthquakes along the subduction zone east of the North Island could also trigger catastrophic tsunamis, inundating coastal communities in under an hour. While New Zealand operates a robust seismic and geodetic network [...]
Undrainable pore spaces comprise half of US groundwater storage
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is vital to global freshwater access, streamflow generation, and biogeochemical cycling, but not all groundwater can be drained due to adhesive and capillary forces. Quantifying the proportion of groundwater that can be drained—and is, thus, theoretically recoverable—is critical for characterising groundwater’s role in earth system processes. Unfortunately, estimates of theoretically [...]
Surface Expression of Low Basal Friction Upstream of Antarctic Grounding Lines
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ice sheets leave contact with the bed at grounding lines, beyond which floating ice shelves experience no friction at their base. In places where basal friction begins to decrease upstream of the grounding line, ice sheets respond more strongly to climate forcing. However, the spatial extent of zones of low grounding line friction is poorly constrained by observations. Here, we use a steady-state [...]
Earthquake body-wave extraction using sparsity-promoting polarization filtering in the time–frequency domain
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Seismic waves generated by earthquakes consist of multiple phases that carry critical information about Earth’s internal structure as they propagate through heterogeneous media. Each seismic phase follows its own propagation path and sampling depth, bringing constraints from different regions of the Earth such as the crust, mantle, or even the outer and inner cores. The choice of phase for [...]
Parasequences and Bedsets : Examples from the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau of Eastern Utah
Published: 2025-08-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The Late Cretaceous strata that crop-out in east central Utah (USA) have been central to the development and testing of the sequence stratigraphic paradigm for almost 40 years. Large continuous cliff sections in the Books Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau are composed of shallow marine and coastal plain strata arranged in to cycles that show an upward shallowing of facies interpreted as parasequence. [...]
Creep behaviours of omphacite and amphibole-plagioclase symplectite: The role of heterogeneous hydration in the Tso Morari eclogite during retrogression
Published: 2025-08-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Replacement reactions progress to varying degrees depending on the P-T conditions, exhumation rates, and fluid availability. The collective preservation of the reactants and partly to completely retrogressed products allows reconstruction of the microstructural and mineralogical progression, which we investigated using electron backscattered diffraction and microprobe analyses on the omphacite, [...]
Updated Trajectory and Spectral Insights into 3I/ATLAS: A Definitive Case for Natural Astrogeological Origins
Published: 2025-08-25
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Geology, Other Astrophysics and Astronomy, Other Earth Sciences, Planetary Geology, Planetary Sciences, Planetary Sedimentology, The Sun and the Solar System
As seen in the most recent August 2025 Hubble imagery, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS makes a strong case for its natural astrogeological origins, which is consistent with my previously published hypothesis that it is a lithified clastic fragment from an exoplanetary sedimentary basin. With an eccentricity of ~1.2 and an inclination of ~44°, refined trajectory data confirms a gravitational [...]
Strike-slip restraining screwed fault geometry reconstructed from the 2025 Myanmar earthquake
Published: 2025-08-24
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a fault surface model of the 2025 Mw 7.7 Myanmar earthquake based on the potency density tensor inversion (PDTI) of teleseismic P-waves combined with surface reconstruction from distributed potency tensor solutions. Our source model demonstrates that the earthquake fault is twisted, varying the dip angle along strike. Inferred fault twists are prominent near fault-segment junctions, [...]
Environmental and ecological changes across the Permian–Triassic transition in Türkiye: integrating virtual outcrop models and new fieldwork data
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences
The Permian–Triassic transition is characterized by major environmental changes (e.g., hyperthermals, perturbations in carbon cycle) and the largest known mass extinction event in the Phanerozoic. However, successions with a relatively complete sedimentological and paleontological record across the Permian–Triassic are limited to a few well-known sections in Europe and South China. Here, we [...]
Modeling urban traffic heat flux in the Community Earth System Model
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Traffic is a major contributor to anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) in urban areas, amplifying urban heat island effects. However, few Earth system models explicitly represent traffic conditions and their associated heat emissions. This study introduces a new urban traffic module into the Community Earth System Model (CESM), enabling interactive simulation of traffic-related heat in urban areas. The [...]
Megadyke propagation down dynamic topography
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Magmatic dykes that align vertically and extend laterally for hundreds to thousands of kilometres are known as megadykes. Observations of solidified swarms of megadykes suggest the dykes propagate away from a common source. We hypothesize that megadyke propagation is driven by dynamic topography above a buoyant mantle plume. We develop a model describing lateral dyke propagation from a [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
An Ice Core Snapshot of Past Atmospheric Chemistry in Mt. Everest’s 'Death Zone'
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Glaciology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a unique atmospheric chemistry record from the highest ice core ever recovered (8020 m, South Col Glacier (SCG), Mt. Everest), that captures ~400 years of deposition during the latter half of the first millennium BCE. Due to recent glacier thinning, the upper ~2000 years of accumulation have been lost, however, this is the only ice core record ever recovered from the “Death Zone [...]