Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Earth Sciences
Impact of climate change on volcanic processes: current understanding and future challenges
Published: 2021-10-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The impacts of volcanic eruptions on climate are increasingly well understood, but the mirror question of how climate changes affect volcanic systems and processes, which we term “climate-volcano impacts”, remains understudied. Accelerating research on this topic is critical in view of rapid climate change driven by anthropogenic activities. Over the last two decades, we have improved our [...]
A Review of Open Educational Resources in the Geosciences: Guidelines and Criteria
Published: 2021-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Science and Mathematics Education
Open Educational Resources (OER) offer a link between new trends in learning and instruction, and the promise of transparency and inclusion offered by open science practices. Open textbooks, virtual field and laboratory experiences, interactive computational environments, and openly licensed media are among the many types of OER in use today. Adoption of subject-specific OER has the potential to [...]
Foraminiferal Analysis of Holocene Sea Level Rise within the Trinity River Incised Paleo-Valley, Offshore Galveston Bay, Texas
Published: 2021-10-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Paleontology
Sea-level is expected to continue to rise in the next century, and as society prepares to deal with this hazard it is critically important to understand how coastal systems will respond, especially in regions with rapid rates of coastal erosion and relative sea-level rise like the Gulf of Mexico Texas coast. Tide gauge records in Galveston Bay, Texas, indicate that local sea level rise rates are [...]
A Mixed, Unified Forward/Inverse Framework for Earthquake Problems: Fault Implementation and Coseismic Slip Estimate
Published: 2021-10-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
We introduce a new finite-element (FE) based computational framework to solve forward and inverse elastic deformation problems for earthquake faulting via the adjoint method. Based on two advanced computational libraries, FEniCS and hIPPYlib for the forward and inverse problems, respectively, this framework is flexible, transparent, and easily extensible. We represent a fault discontinuity [...]
Fluid-driven Cyclic Reorganisation in Shallow Basaltic Fault Zones
Published: 2021-10-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Tectonics and Structure
Faults represent a critical heterogeneity in basaltic sequences, yet few studies have focused on their architectural and hydromechanical evolution. We present a detailed multi-scale characterisation of passively exhumed fault zones from the layered basalts of the Faroe Islands, which reveals cyclic stages of fault evolution. Outcrop-scale structures and fault rock distribution within the fault [...]
New insight on tide-dominated estuary and delta in the Eocene-Miocene Mrayt Group, North-Western Rif, Morocco
Published: 2021-10-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The sedimentary deposits of Eocene-Miocene Mrayt Group, North-Western Rif, Morocco has been the subject of controversy by previous worksregarding their depositional environments. Detailed sedimentological study based on petrographic study, and sedimentary facies and paleocurrent measurements analysis, leads to several results and new insights. Petrographic study provided the first evidence of [...]
An experimental combination of IGS repro3 campaign’s orbit products using a variance component estimation strategy
Published: 2021-10-05
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics, Other Earth Sciences, Other Mathematics
Over the past years, the International GNSS Service (IGS) has put efforts into reprocessing campaigns reanalyzing the full data collected by the IGS network since 1994. The goal is to provide a consistent set of orbits, station coordinates, and earth rotation parameters using state-of-the-art models. Different from the previous campaigns - namely: repro1 and repro2 - the repro3 includes not only [...]
Fire-weather interaction fed the 2020 western USA gigafire
Published: 2021-10-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Wildfires threaten human lives, destroy infrastructure, disrupt economic activity, and damage ecosystem services. A record-breaking gigafire event ravaged the western United States (USA) in mid-September 2020, burning 1.2 million acres (4,900 km2) in Oregon and California, and resulting in severe smoke pollution with daily fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations over 300 µg/m3 for multiple [...]
Oblique convergence causes both thrust and strike-slip ruptures during the 2021 M 7.2 Haiti earthquake
Published: 2021-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A devastating magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Southern Haiti on 14 August 2021. The earthquake caused severe damage and over 2000 casualties. Resolving the earthquake rupture process can provide critical insights into hazard mitigation. Here we use integrated seismological analyses to obtain the rupture history of the 2021 earthquake. We find the earthquake first broke a blind thrust fault and [...]
The Effect of Formation Processes on The Frequency of Palaeolithic Cave Sites in Semi-Arid Zones: Insights From Kazakhstan
Published: 2021-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Speleology, Stratigraphy
Central Asian caves with Palaeolithic deposits are few but they provide a rich record of human fossils and cultural assemblages that has been used to model Late Pleistocene hominin dispersals. However, previous research has not yet systematically evaluated the formation processes that influence the frequency of Palaeolithic cave sites in the region. To address this deficiency, we combined field [...]
Rapid characterisation of the extremely large landslide threatening the Rules Reservoir (Southern Spain)
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology
When an active landslide is first identified in an artificial reservoir, a comprehensive study has to be quickly conducted to analyse the possible hazard that it may represent to such a critical infrastructure. This paper presents the case of the El Arrecife Landslide, located in a slope of the Rules Reservoir (Southern Spain), as an example of geological and motion data integration for [...]
Pangeo Forge: Crowdsourcing Analysis-Ready, Cloud Optimized Data Production
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Pangeo Forge is a new community-driven platform that accelerates science by providing high-level recipe frameworks alongside cloud compute infrastructure for extracting data from provider archives, transforming it into analysis-ready, cloud-optimized (ARCO) data stores, and providing a human- and machine-readable catalog for browsing and loading. In abstracting the scientific domain logic of data [...]
Spacing and Strain During Multiphase Boudinage in 3D
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
Most models of brittle boudinage predict a dependency of fracture spacing on thickness of the boudinaged layer. This basic relationship can be distorted in the case of multiphase boudinage, where structural inheritance, possibly combined with time evolution of rheology affects boudin geometries, but is not recognized in 2D outcrops. Here we present analyses from a metre-scale, serially sectioned [...]
Discontinuity in Equilibrium Wave-Current Ripple Size and Shape Caused by a Winnowing Threshold in Cohesive Sand-Clay Beds
Published: 2021-09-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Sedimentology
Sediments composed of mixed cohesive clay and non-cohesive sand are widespread in a range of aquatic environments. The dynamics of ripples in mixed sand–clay substrates have been studied under pure current and pure wave conditions. However, the effect of cohesive clay on ripple development under combined currents and waves has not been examined, even though combined flows are common in estuaries, [...]
Early Pliocene Marine Transgression into the Lower Colorado River Valley, Southwestern USA, by Re-Flooding of a Former Tidal Strait
Published: 2021-09-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Tectonics and Structure
Marine straits and seaways are known to host a wide range of sedimentary processes and products, but the role of marine connections in the development of large river systems remains little studied. This study explores a hypothesis that shallow marine waters flooded the lower Colorado River valley at ~ 5 Ma along a fault-controlled former tidal straight, soon after the river was first integrated [...]