Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geomorphology
On the retreat of lagoon-terminating glaciers: sometimes fresh, sometimes salty
Published: 2026-07-12
Subjects: Geomorphology, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Coastal lagoon-terminating glaciers flow into water bodies of variable salinity and temperature, shaped by mixing meltwater, ocean water, and ice. They remain understudied yet increasingly important as coastal glacier margins retreat globally. Lagoon salinity influences circulation through interactions with buoyant subglacial discharge. Water temperature, modulated by ocean connectivity and [...]
The Rise of Diamond Open Access Journals in Earth Sciences: Past Developments, Present Tensions, and Future Pathways
Published: 2026-07-08
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Cosmochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Library and Information Science, Paleontology, Planetary Sciences, Sedimentology, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology
Over roughly the last decade, a visible, community-led Diamond Open Access (OA) ecosystem has emerged in the Earth sciences, not as a departure from tradition, but as the latest expression of a long-standing culture of open, society-supported scholarly communication. While free-to-read, fee-free publishing initiatives have deep roots in the field, predating the Diamond terminology by decades and [...]
Wrack as a Roughness Element: Nonlinear Controls on Wind Reduction and Sediment Deposition in a Coastal Dune System
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Geomorphology
Coastal dunes are shaped by interactions among wind, sediment supply, and surface roughness elements. While vegetation is widely recognized as a driver of aeolian sediment dynamics, beach wrack remains understudied despite its frequent occurrence on sandy coastlines. This study investigated how wrack modifies airflow and influences sediment deposition. Paired 2D anemometers positioned upwind and [...]
SegFormer and SegFormer-UNet for anthropogenic geomorphic feature extraction from land surface parameters
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing
Accurate, scalable mapping of anthropogenic geomorphic features from high spatial resolution terrain data remains challenging. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel at characterizing local texture and patterns, their limited receptive fields may fail to capture broader spatial context. Transformer-based architectures, such as SegFormer, support stronger long-range dependency modelling, [...]
Where to Watch the Water: Multi-Sensor Network Design Optimization for Inland Flood Detection
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Inland flood detection is often constrained less by sensor availability than by where sensors are placed along branching river networks, especially in ungauged headwaters where floods often initiate. We present a three-phase, decisionfocused framework for designing basin-by-basin multi-sensor flood detection networks that coordinate water-level, discharge, and camera sensors while explicitly [...]
Coseismic uplift as strandplain-building mechanism: morphodynamic and stratigraphic evidence from the 2010 Maule earthquake, south-central Chile
Published: 2026-06-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Tectonics and Structure
Coseismic uplift along convergent margins drives rapid coastal progradation, yet its short-term morpho-stratigraphic response remains poorly documented at human timescales. Here we integrate four complementary high-resolution proxies: satellite-derived shorelines, multi-temporal mapping of the seaward dune vegetation line (SVDL), ground-penetrating radar stratigraphy, and UAV–LiDAR topographic [...]
Downstream patterns in bedrock valley morphology encode climatic and tectonic forcing
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
Fluvially-carved bedrock valleys are ubiquitous landscape features. Vertical incision into underlying bedrock generates valley relief, whereas lateral migration of the river channel widens the valley floor as the river erodes the valley walls. The relative efficacy of these processes, which can be modulated by precipitation and water discharge, sediment supply, lithology, and uplift rates is [...]
Trapped Lee-Wave Resonance Determines Antarctic Megadune Wavelength
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Categorical Data Analysis, Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys, Earth Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Mineral Physics, Other Earth Sciences, Paleontology, Physics, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Planetary Glaciology, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Mineral Physics, Planetary Sciences, Planetary Sedimentology, Sedimentology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Stratigraphy
Snow megadunes cover 5×105 km2 of the East Antarctic plateau, biasing surface mass balance estimates and overprinting ice-core signals—yet their 2–5 km wavelength has lacked a quantitative selection mechanism for two decades. We first falsify the standard formula λ∗ = 2πU0/N through a calibration-free spatial test: eight REMA 2 m tiles across two independent locations at 81.5–82.0°S show no [...]
CryoSentinel: A Multimodal Foundation-Model Segmenter for Glacial Lakes in High Mountain Asia from Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 Optical, and Copernicus DEM Imagery
Published: 2026-05-16
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology
Glacial-lake outburst floods (GLOFs) are the dominant climate-driven hazard in High Mountain Asia, and reliable lake-extent segmentation is the prerequisite for every downstream early-warning workflow. We present CryoSentinel, a multimodal foundation-model semantic segmenter built on the IBM/ESA TerraMind 1.0 Large encoder (1.1 B parameters) with a UperNet decoder, fine-tuned on 5,614 [...]
Geodynamic Model Description for Ptolemy’s Germania Magna
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Analysis, Astrophysics and Astronomy, Dynamical Systems, Dynamic Systems, Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Mathematics, Other Applied Mathematics, Other Astrophysics and Astronomy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Planetary Sciences, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Stratigraphy, Tectonics and Structure, The Sun and the Solar System, Volcanology
This model proposes that the well-documented geodynamic and climatic disruption of the 6th century AD involved a reactivation of the ancient Caledonian Deformation Front (CDF) and the Trans-European Suture Zone (TESZ), most likely triggered by cosmic events in the form of impacts or airbursts. Large-scale inversion tectonics, driven by Alpine compressive forces, are argued to have caused [...]
EGMSpy: an open-source Python toolkit for scalable data handling, classification, clustering, and visualisation of Copernicus EGMS InSAR data
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology
The Copernicus European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) provides millimetre-accuracy line-of-sight displacement measurements for over five billion coherent scatterers across Europe, derived from Sentinel-1 SAR interferometry over the period 2015--2023. Despite the unprecedented spatial coverage and measurement density of this dataset, no open-source integrated toolchain exists for processing, [...]
River intermittency and Eocene climate change in the Castissent and Montllobat formations of the southern Pyrenean Foreland
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Geology, Geomorphology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Patterns of river water and sediment transport through time, or river intermittency factors, are generally considered to be highly sensitive to climate and tectonics. Determining the intermittency of rivers in ancient hothouse climates could provide a unique lens through which to investigate Earth’s response to climate change. However, this requires strong constraints on both mean and bankfull [...]
Control of natural hazard events through emergency landscaping
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Humans reshape the surface of the Earth through efforts to protect people and places from natural hazards. While some hazard defences, such as river levees, are permanent infrastructure, other measures, such as wildfire fighting, are responsive: they occur while a hazard event is in progress, actively intervening in its behaviour to mitigate its impact. Deliberate, concurrent, mitigating [...]
Why the Cap-Ferret sand spit is collapsing
Published: 2026-04-27
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology, Oceanography, Sedimentology
The Cap-Ferret sand spit (SW France) exhibits a pattern of coastal instability that combines chronic shoreline retreat (8.7 m·yr⁻¹ at the tip, Robinet et al. 2025), sudden vertical collapses of emplaced structures (WW2 blockhaus 2024, 2026; oyster-farm sector 1936, 1977; Hortense promenade 1999, 2000, 2014, 2019), and progressive deepening of submarine pits (Hortense-Pointe depression volume [...]
Erosion-driven changes in soil cation exchange capacity quantified using barium isotopes
Published: 2026-04-22
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 [...]