Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Multi-fold increase in rainforest tipping risk beyond 1.5–2 °C warming
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Tropical rainforests rely on their root systems to access moisture stored in soil during wet periods for use during dry periods. When this root zone soil moisture is inadequate to sustain a forest ecosystem, they transition to a savanna-like state, losing their native structure and functions. Yet the influence of climate change on ecosystem's root zone soil moisture storage and the impact on [...]
Isotopically labeled ozone: a new approach to elucidate the formation of ozonation products
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
As ozonation becomes a widespread treatment for removal of chemicals of emerging concern in wastewater treatment plant effluents, there are increasing concerns regarding the formation of ozonation products (OPs), and their possible impacts on the aquatic environment and eventually human health. In this study, a novel method was developed that utilizes heavy oxygen (18O2) for the production of [...]
Source location and wavefield characterization of river-induced seismic tremor
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
River-induced seismic signal (tremor) recorded by deploying seismic stations close to the river can be used to obtain the flow characteristics of rivers indirectly. This task becomes challenging when the tremor is contaminated by strong cultural noise. We conducted an experiment next to Avoca River, County Wicklow, Ireland. We locate and characterize the river-induced tremor by combining the [...]
Locating Flowing Conduits in Karst Using Amplitude-based Passive Seismic Location Method
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The aim of this study is to develop methods for directly detecting energetic groundwater flow in sub-surface conduits through passive seismic applications, by detecting the small ground vibrations (seismic microtremor) that flowing water in the sub-surface may generate. This is in contrast to the current ‘traditional’ approach of attempting to actively image the conduits using geophysical and [...]
Autonomous Passage Planning for a Polar Vessel
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
We introduce a method for long-distance maritime route planning in polar regions, taking into account complex changing environmental conditions. The method allows the construction of optimised routes, describing the three main stages of the process: discrete modelling of the environmental conditions using a non-uniform mesh, the construction of mesh-optimal paths, and path smoothing. In order to [...]
Fingerprinting construction sand supply-networks for traceable sourcing
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Globally increasing demand for construction sand needs to be met with transparent and responsible supply-networks. Currently, there are no scalable methods for tracing construction sand distribution without direct observation. We examined sand “fingerprinting” as a potential tool to trace construction sand supply-networks from “source to sink” in a case study from Texas, USA. Both natural bulk [...]
Generation of Reproducible Model Freshwater Particulate Matter Analogues to Study the Interaction with Particulate Contaminants.
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies
Aquatic fate models and risk assessment require experimental information on the potential of contaminants to interact with riverine suspended particulate matter (SPM). While for dissolved contaminants partition or sorption coefficients are used, the underlying assumption of chemical equilibrium is invalid for particulate contaminants, such as engineered nanomaterials, incidental nanoparticles, [...]
Much of Zero Emissions Commitment Occurs Before Reaching Net Zero Emissions
Published: 2022-08-25
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
We explore the response of the Earth’s climate and carbon system to an idealized sequential addition and removal of CO2 to the atmosphere, following a symmetric and continuous emissions pathway, in contrast to the discontinuous emissions pathways that have largely informed our understanding of the climate response to net-zero and net-negative emissions to date. We find, using both an Earth [...]
A Machine Learning Approach to Finding Factors that Lead to Environmental Friendliness
Published: 2022-08-21
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Sciences, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
To maintain a sustainable society, environmental friendliness is necessary, an effort that all countries must take part in. The effort must be pioneered by developed nations with the resources to enact sustainable policies, reduce emissions and conserve energy, from which developing nations will follow the eroded path. Recognizing the factors that promote environmental friendliness is necessary [...]
Fighting symptom or root cause? - The need for shifting the focus in climate politics from greenhouse gases to environmental protection
Published: 2022-08-16
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
Addressing the environmental crisis requires a substantial change of our current lifestyle. Yet, in media coverage and political communication, climate change has taken the lead over other aspects such as biodiversity loss and one may sometimes get the impression that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is fighting the root cause itself. The atmosphere, however, does not respond linearly to our [...]
Sampling across large-scale geological gradients to study geosphere-biosphere interactions
Published: 2022-07-25
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Despite being one of the largest microbial ecosystems on Earth, with >1029 microbial cells, many basic open questions remain about how life exists and thrives in the deep subsurface biosphere, inside Earth’s crust. Much of this ambiguity is due to the fact that it is exceedingly difficult and (often prohibitively expensive) to directly sample the deep subsurface, requiring elaborate drilling [...]
Evaluation of preservation protocols for oxygen-sensitive minerals within laminated aquatic sediments
Published: 2022-07-25
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Sedimentology
Laminated sediments can record seasonal changes in sedimentation of material from anoxic waters, including minerals of the redox-sensitive elements Fe, Mn, and S that form under varying oxygen levels, mineral saturation conditions, and from microbial metabolism. However, preserving both the oxygen-sensitive minerals for identification is challenging when preservation of the spatial arrangement of [...]
Unraveling the role of polysaccharide-goethite associations on glyphosate’ adsorption-desorption dynamics and binding mechanisms
Published: 2022-07-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Analytical Chemistry, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Organic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, Soil Science
Hypothesis Glyphosate retention at environmental interfaces is strongly governed by adsorption and desorption processes. In particular, glyphosate can react with organo-mineral associations (OMAs) in soils, sediments, and aquatic environments. We hypothesize mineral-adsorbed biomacromolecules modulate the extent and rate of glyphosate adsorption and desorption where electrostatic and noncovalent [...]
A Technical Overview of the North Carolina ECONet
Published: 2022-07-20
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Plant Sciences
Regional weather networks–also referred to as mesonets–are imperative for filling in the spatial and temporal data gaps between nationally supported weather stations. The North Carolina Environment and Climate Observing Network (ECONet) fills this regional role; it is a mesoscale network of 44 (as of 2023) automated stations collecting 12 environmental variables every minute across North [...]
Scaling the primary production of lakes
Published: 2022-07-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Kleiber’s ¾-scaling Law for metabolism with mass is one of the most striking regularities in the biological sciences. We demonstrate that whole-lake primary production scales to the ¾-power of lake volume, consistent with Kleiber’s Law but not explicable by analogy to theories developed for individual organisms. Instead, dimensional analysis offers a simple explanation. Because Earth's topography [...]