Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geophysics and Seismology
Gutenberg-Richter-type earthquake size distributions: maximum likelihood estimation, unbiased estimation, and Bayesian forecasting
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Characterizing earthquake size distributions using the Gutenberg-Richter (GR) law is ubiquitous in seismology. According to the GR law, earthquake magnitudes follow an exponential distribution, with a rate parameter commonly represented by the b-value. For many applications, including seismic hazard and risk assessment, estimating the b-value is therefore a common procedure. However, the [...]
Large-scale rotational extension triggered basin formation in interior East Antarctica
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Tectonics and Structure
Recent sub-ice topography investigations have imaged with greatly improved detail a set of enigmatic low-elevation V-shaped basins hidden beneath a very large sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Here we show that these basins form a semi-continental sized fan shaped physiographic unit which radiates from a pin point near the South Pole and name it the East Antarctic Fan-shaped Basin Province. [...]
Joint Rock Physics Inversion and Basin Modeling for Comprehensive Source Rock Characterization
Published: 2025-12-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
This study presents an integrated workflow that combines statistical rock physics inversion with Monte Carlo basin modeling to comprehensively quantify source rock properties and their uncertainties. First, well-log and seismically-derived elastic properties are used in a statistical rock physics inversion to estimate porosity, kerogen content, and mineral fractions. These posterior distributions [...]
Tandem: An Open-Source High-Performance Computing Volumetric Software to Model Sequences of Earthquakes and Aseismic Slip Across Complex Fault Systems
Published: 2025-12-11
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Simulating sequences of earthquakes and aseismic slip (SEAS) on realistic fault systems provides a physical framework to understand the evolution of the seismic cycle, but remains computationally expensive. Volumetric approaches offer the physical flexibility to handle complex geometries and heterogeneous off-fault media but may incur prohibitively high computational costs when applied to the [...]
Multi-Planar Hierarchy in Pan-American Seismic Fractality: A Bayesian Resolution to the Projection Paradox
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
Earthquake catalogs worldwide exhibit an enduring paradox: seismicity appears confined to planar faults (correlation dimension D2≈ 2.0), yet operates within volumetric lithospheric deformation. We resolve this paradox through Bayesian fractal analysis of 50,010 earthquakes across seven Pan-American tectonic regimes (2010–2025), revealing that apparent planarity reflects instrumental projection [...]
The role of the Hikurangi subduction interface in enabling Kaikōura-like earthquakes: Insights from synthetic earthquake catalogues
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
A well-known problem in seismic hazard is the short duration of the historical record relative to the time between large earthquakes. This short record means that not all possible earthquakes have been observed, and that the statistics of earthquake recurrence intervals and magnitudes are poorly constrained. These issues are particularly acute for earthquakes involving multiple faults, such as [...]
Sequential Efficacy of Information for Optimized Geophysical and Drilling Strategies in Mineral Exploration
Published: 2025-12-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Geophysics and Seismology, Mining Engineering
The global energy transition has created an urgent need for expanded critical mineral supply. Projected production from existing deposits and current discovery rates remains insufficient to meet this demand. More efficient exploration strategies are therefore required, particularly in optimizing costly and low-success data acquisition campaigns. To address this challenge, we introduce the concept [...]
Source effects in higher-order ambient seismic field correlations
Published: 2025-12-05
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Seismic interferometry of the ambient seismic field is widely used for surface wave imaging. It typically requires synchronous station recordings and assumes uniform noise source distributions. Higher-order correlations, such as the re-correlation of direct waves (C2), have been suggested to facilitate imaging with asynchronous data and to improve an incomplete source distribution. Using field [...]
Exacerbation of levee failure with climate change: Insights from ERT monitoring
Published: 2025-12-03
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Climate change is bringing hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters, intensifying winter floods and causing larger seasonal variations in soil moisture. These shifts place increasing stress on levees – many of which were constructed decades or centuries ago – making their current performance challenging to assess. Levee performance depends on limiting water ingress, as increased seepage [...]
Hybrid Neural PDE and Conditional GAN Framework for Sparse Co₂ Plume Prediction.
Published: 2025-12-02
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Digital twin architectures for geological carbon storage demand uncertainty-aware surrogates capable of rapid plume forecasting under extreme data scarcity. Traditional physics-based simulators are computationally expensive; pure data-driven models lack principled uncertainty quantification. This work presents a hybrid Neural Posterior Density Estimation–Conditional GAN (NPDE-CCGAN) framework [...]
Foreshock Behaviors and Mainshock Rupture Properties Associated with the 2025 Mw 8.8 Kamchatka Earthquake Sequence
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The July 29 2025 Mw 8.8 Kamchatka earthquake ruptured the plate interface off the east coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula along the Kuril-Kamchatka subduction zone. Following the mainshock, tsunamis were recorded in multiple countries along the Pacific Ocean boundary and its islands, along with the eruption of several volcanoes in Kamchatka. The mainshock was preceded by a strong foreshock sequence [...]
The Impact of GIA Corrections on Gravimetric Basin-Scale Ocean Mass Budgets
Published: 2025-11-22
Subjects: Climate, Geophysics and Seismology
Closing the sea-level budget is crucial for validating our understanding of climate change and sea-level rise. Satellite gravimetry (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, GRACE) and altimetry are primary tools for measuring the ocean mass. Still, both datasets must be corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), the ongoing viscoelastic response of the Earth to past deglaciation. [...]
Model of Cortical Mosaics (MMC): An Auto-Organized Evolutionary Trajectory from the Primitive Crust to Proto-Plates
Published: 2025-11-22
Subjects: Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
The structure and dynamics of Earth’s crust during the Hadean–Eoarchean remain one of the central challenges in geodynamics. Traditional models describe early states in terms of discrete regimes—stagnant lid, heat-pipe, episodic tectonics, or proto-plates—but none provides a continuous framework linking primitive fragmentation with the late emergence of plate tectonics. This work proposes the [...]
The slip distributions of the 1952 and 2025 Kamchatka earthquakes from tsunami waveforms recorded around the Pacific Ocean
Published: 2025-11-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The July 2025 Kamchatka earthquake (Mw 8.8) generated Pacific-wide tsunamis. Inversion of 40 DART bottom pressure records around the Pacific Ocean revealed a large (~ 9 m) slip at 200 – 400 km southwest of the epicenter, closely matching the USGS finite fault model based on teleseismic data. In this region, a similarly large megathrust earthquake (M ~ 9) occurred in 1952. The tsunami waveforms [...]
Practical guide for volcano observatories on paleomagnetic sampling of pyroclastic deposits from active volcanoes
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Volcanology
This brief guide is designed to teach workers at observatories of volcanoes exhibiting explosive activity how to take samples of pyroclastic deposits for paleomagnetic studies. Paleomagnetism is a powerful tool for studying volcanoes, both dormant and currently active. Studies of the rock magnetic and paleomagnetic characteristics of volcanic rocks can provide important information about volcanic [...]