Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geomorphology
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 [...]
Inverse computational morphology of debris and alluvial fans
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
In mountain areas, debris flows and fluvial transport often build up conical deposits at the confluence between steep tributaries and trunk rivers. The resulting debris and alluvial fans typically exhibit a well-defined relationship between slope or elevation and the distance from the fan apex. This relationship, however, becomes more difficult to characterize when fans are constrained by the [...]
Injecting vegetation-based spatialization in the hydrogeological framework for erosion modelling
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Erosion processes and landslide are widespread across Italy and frequently cause significant damage to people, infrastructure, and ecosystems. These processes are primarily triggered by rainfall events, whose impact depends on multiple interacting factors, including geomorphology, soil properties, land use, and vegetation. Among these, vegetation plays an essential role in regulating hillslope [...]
Dataset of DInSAR wrapped phase signals for AI-based automated detection and classification of mass movements
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
With the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in remote sensing of mass movements, available datasets for model training and validation are increasingly needed. Although Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) is a widely used technique for studying mass movements, wrapped interferograms remain less exploited, and the importance of geomorphological expertise in their [...]
Comprehensive Inventory of Coseismic Landslides Triggered by the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes, Türkiye
Published: 2026-03-19
Subjects: Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology
We provide two geospatial inventories covering ~80,000 km² in southern Türkiye for the 6 February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake sequence: (i) a coseismic landslide polygon inventory including 20,270 landslides and (ii) a pre-earthquake geomorphic inventory of pre-existing slope instability including 4,495 landslide polygons. Coseismic landslides were mapped by systematic expert visual [...]
Frictional weakening in the highly mobile 2025 Blatten (Switzerland) rock–ice avalanche
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Dynamics and Dynamical Systems, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Multivariate Analysis, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Risk Analysis
Cascading slope failures in alpine environments are intensifying as glaciers retreat and slope stability adjusts to a warming climate. Yet, the mechanisms governing such large, rapidly evolving events remain poorly understood. The 28 May 2025 rock–ice avalanche from Birch Glacier, Switzerland ($\approx9.3\times10^{6}~\mathrm{m^3}$), which devastated part of the village of Blatten, provides a [...]
Slope-dependent riverbed strengthening and the evolution of the threshold for motion in gravel-bed rivers
Published: 2026-03-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology
The threshold for motion exerts a fundamental control on sediment transport, channel morphology, and fluvial erosion. While channel slope and flow history are known to influence entrainment thresholds in gravel-bed rivers, their interaction has not been explored. We investigate how channel slope modulates riverbed strengthening during low-flow periods. Flume experiments were conducted across [...]
Implications of impact-energy dependent erosional efficiency on bedrock river sediment dynamics and form: 1. Reach-scale dynamics and the effective flood
Published: 2026-03-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
Bedrock river incision reflects the cumulative geomorphic work performed across a distribution of flood magnitudes and frequencies. Mechanistic models of bedrock incision by bedload impacts typically assume that bedrock resistance to erosion is constant with respect to particle impact energy. However, recent impact experiments demonstrate that rock resistance to erosion decreases systematically [...]
An analysis of landslides in Great Britain using soil texture, rainfall, and topography reveals contrasting failure conditions between organic and mineral soils
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Rainfall-induced landslides cause millions of pounds in damage to infrastructure in Great Britain (GB) annually and occasionally result in human fatalities. However, there are limited guidelines or policies aimed at reducing landslide risk in GB and few studies have broadly characterized landslide incidence across the region. Furthermore, peat landslides, which are a phenomenon that occur almost [...]