Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
The critical role of stored energy in metamorphism
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The mechanical behaviour of the Earth is widely assumed to change with increasing timescale as rocks progressively relax imposed stresses [1]. On short timescales, elasticity dominates and its release drives earthquakes [2]; at intermediate timescales, viscoelastic relaxation facilitates processes such as glacial rebound [3]; whereas over geological timescales viscous deformation dominates, [...]
Three gaps for foundation models to address in satellite remote sensing of inland waters
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Long-term Earth observation of inland waters depends on continuity between satellite missions, adequate combinations of spectral, spatial and temporal resolution, and representative calibration and validation datasets. Discontinuities and trade-offs in these components constrain the records available for studying inland waters and their change. We examine three gaps affecting inland water remote [...]
“Grand” petit-spot volcanism off the Japan Trench
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Petit-spot volcanoes are a recently discovered type of small intraplate volcanoes that erupt on the outer rise of subducting plates. At petit-spot regions on the outer rise of the Japan Trench, an anomalously shallow acoustic basement reflector is widely distributed, leading to the hypothesis that it corresponds to sills or sheet-like lava flows and is associated with petit-spot magmatism. Here [...]
Idealized Earth system model analysis of the primary controls on shallow seafloor oxygenation
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Key components of the Earth system, including climate, atmospheric oxygen, the strength of the biological pump, and continental configuration, have varied substantially through time. How these factors might have interacted to shape the evolution of marine life—particularly the availability of viable animal habitat—remains unclear. Here, we apply an Earth system model to investigate how tectonic [...]
The Spatial Journey: A Visual Narrative of the Keffi to Makurdi Field Trip
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Outdoor Education, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Background: Field-based education is a critical academic component in geographical studies, designed to bridge theoretical knowledge with empirical observation. This paper reports on the development of a visual and interactive geospatial narrative based on a five-day geography educational field trip from Keffi to Makurdi, Nigeria, from the 26th to the 30th of August 2024. Objective: The primary [...]
A rheology for temperate ice in glaciers (RTIG) based on borehole deformation experiments
Published: 2026-10-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The rheology of temperate glacier ice, which contains small amounts of liquid water, largely controls the fast dynamics of glaciers and polar ice streams. Recent laboratory experiments suggest a constant-viscosity ice rheology when the water content between ice grains exceeds 0.6%. Such a linear flow law, where the deformation rate is proportional to the applied stress, is in contrast to the [...]
Temporal Synchronization Determines the Accuracy of Sentinel-2 Turbidity Retrieval: Evidence from Community-Based Monitoring of the Buriganga River, Dhaka
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Community-based environmental organizations require continuous water quality data but are constrained by the cost and labor of physical sampling. Satellite remote sensing offers a free alternative, yet validation studies of inland waters frequently report weak agreement between satellite indices and ground measurements, and the cause of that disagreement is rarely isolated. This study analyzed 28 [...]
Segmenting submarine boulders with Random Forest and nnU-Net: from bathymetric rasters to survey-scale size distributions
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences
In the soft-bottom-dominated southern Baltic Sea, geogenic hard substrates are biodiversity hotspots. The lack of open-source, pixel-level segmentation approaches for boulders in MBES data has made it difficult to advance the ecological understanding of boulder fields in the Baltic Sea. This study developed and evaluated two segmentation approaches. A deep learning model (nnU-Net) and a classical [...]
A vertical vegetation structure model of the Earth
Published: 2026-10-06
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Wood Science and Pulp, Paper Technology
Knowing the global distribution of vegetation structure is an essential prerequisite to better quantify, model, and manage carbon, water, energy, and biodiversity in the Earth system. Despite its recognized importance, vertical structure measurements remain sparse at global scales, limiting our understanding of the links between structure and ecosystem functions and resilience. Here we present [...]
Bulk iron-sulfur ratio (Fe/S) conditional proxy for sulfurized, TOC-rich sediments: insights and comparison of compositional model with real data utilizing the Pyrite-TOC-Fe-S compositional space
Published: 2026-10-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Bulk iron-sulfur (Fe/S) ratio can be a proxy for sulfurized organic matter in organic-rich shales, particularly those prone to be siliceous or carbonate. First part uses a theoretical model of a compositional system consisting solely of iron, sulfur, TOC, and pyrite to demonstrate how the Fe/S ratio can indicate the presence of sulfurized organic matter using the model’s assumption of sulfur [...]
Rapid satellite assessment of the 2026 High Fens fire
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Climate change is altering fire regimes across Europe, contributing to longer periods of favorable fire weather. In August 2026, the High Fens nature reserve experienced one of Belgium's largest recorded wildfires. This event is ecologically significant as it affected carbon-dense peatlands vulnerable to smouldering combustion and carbon (C) release. This study provides a satellite-based [...]
Understanding Earthquake Physics with On-Fault Observatories
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earthquakes often strike without warning. Current fault monitoring infrastructure is not sensitive enough to detect signals such as accelerating fault creep or dilation, which laboratory experiments and numerical models predict may precede large earthquakes. Here we argue that a paradigm shift is needed and technically achievable: from inferring faulting processes from a distance with surface [...]
Assessment of adjacency effect correction methods for Sentinel-2 MSI observations over mid-latitude lakes
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate retrieval of remote-sensing reflectance (Rrs) from lakes requires separating water-leaving radiance from atmospheric, surface and adjacency contributions. We assessed adjacency effect correction (AEC) methods for Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) imagery using 329 satellite--insitu matchups from four mid-latitude lakes: Greifensee, Lake Geneva, Lake Garda and Lake Trasimeno. The [...]
MUSE: virtual tide gauge reference estimates and error budgets for coastal index validation at ungauged coastlines
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography
Multi-dimensional coastal indices such as mangrove health indices aggregate tidal-range, mean higher-high water (MHHW), and tidal-anomaly sub-scores. Validating these sub-scores requires in situ tide gauges that low-data coastlines lack within 100 km. Global tide models such as EOT20 give accurate coastal tidal constituents but no tidal-anomaly metrics or per-source error terms for a [...]
Training-Free Monitoring of Kenya with Pre-computed Satellite Embeddings: Lake Expansion, Construction Dating and Crop Retrieval with TESSERA
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pre-computed embeddings from geospatial foundation models turn the most expensive step of satellite analysis into shared data. We test how much analysis this enables for one country, using TESSERA, which publishes a 128-dimensional embedding for every 10 m pixel and year. An audit of Kenya shows that all 4,766 tiles centred in the country carry all nine years (2017–2025), but that the landmask [...]