Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Transport and Fate of All-Time Released Plastics in the Global Ocean
Published: 2021-08-14
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
Mismanaged plastics accumulate in oceans and threaten marine life. About 40 million tonnes of plastics have reached the oceans, where their fate remains unclear. To track the sources, sinks, sizes, and age of all-time released plastics, we developed a new mechanistic model and synthesized decades of measurements. We find that Asian plastics are the largest contributor (76%) to marine plastics by [...]
Creating a climate changed future with the sea level rise interactive- fiction game ‘Lagos2199’
Published: 2021-07-26
Subjects: Climate, Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Instructional Media Design, International and Area Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Science and Mathematics Education, Sustainability
Story-based futures serve an important role in climate change scenario development. Stories are particularly useful in exploring sea level rise possibilities, since we know many coastal areas are specifically vulnerable to accelerating rises in sea level. This discrete change in coastline is different from most other climate change impacts, and offers a clear basis for scientifically-informed, [...]
De-risking the energy transition by quantifying the uncertainties in fault stability
Published: 2021-07-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Engineering, Risk Analysis
The operations needed to decarbonise our energy systems increasingly involve faulted rocks in the subsurface. To manage the technical challenges presented by these rocks and the justifiable public concern over induced seismicity, we need to assess the risks. Widely used measures for fault stability, including slip and dilation tendency and fracture susceptibility, can be combined with Response [...]
Mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet until the year 3000 under a sustained late-21st-century climate
Published: 2021-07-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
We conduct extended versions of the ISMIP6 future climate experiments for the Greenland ice sheet until the year 3000 with the model SICOPOLIS. Beyond 2100, the climate forcing is kept fixed at late-21st-century conditions. For the unabated warming pathway RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, the ice sheet suffers a severe mass loss, which amounts to ~ 1.8 m SLE (sea-level equivalent) for the twelve-experiment mean, [...]
C:N:P stoichiometry in six distinct habitats of a glacier terminus in the Yangtze River Source Area
Published: 2021-07-01
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Glaciology, Life Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Glaciers are among the least explored environments on Earth, especially from a perspective of nutrient stoichiometry. In this study, we documented and compared the nutrient availabilities (concentrations) and composition (stoichiometric ratios) of nutrients (C, N, and P) in six distinct habitats of a glacier terminus in the Yangtze River Source area, including surface ice (SI), basal ice (BI), [...]
Old-growth forest loss and secondary forest recovery across Amazonian countries
Published: 2021-06-25
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
There is growing recognition of the potential of large-scale restoration in the Amazon as a “nature-based solution” to climate change. However, our knowledge of forest loss and recovery beyond Brazil is limited, and carbon emissions and accumulation have not been estimated for the whole biome. Combining a 33-year land cover dataset with estimates of above-ground biomass and carbon sequestration [...]
On the Efficacy of Compact Radar Transponders for InSAR Geodesy: Results of Multi-year Field Tests
Published: 2021-06-25
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Compact and low-cost radar transponders are an attractive alternative to corner reflectors (CR) for SAR interferometric (InSAR) deformation monitoring, datum connection, and geodetic data integration. Recently, such transponders have become commercially available for C-band sensors, which poses relevant questions on their characteristics in terms of radiometric, geometric, and phase stability. [...]
Projecting armed conflict risk in Africa towards 2050 along the Shared Socio-economic Pathways: a machine learning approach
Published: 2021-06-22
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
In the past decade, several efforts have been made to project armed conflict risk into the future. One arising technique is the use of machine-learning (ML) models. In this study we explore its opportunities to project sub-national armed conflict risk for three shared socio-economic pathway (SSP) scenarios and three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) by 2040-2050 in Africa, using the [...]
Environment, absolute? The quality infrastructure of the planetary boundaries
Published: 2021-06-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Quality infrastructure plays a key role in sustainable development. Achieving a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature requires better measurement, monitoring and management of environmental processes, from local to global scales. Human-caused climate change, biodiversity loss, perturbation of Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, and chemical pollution are global environmental processes [...]
Canadian emissions and unconventional oil production exceed the 2°C global warming scenario
Published: 2021-06-01
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Canada could highly impact the climate, as it possesses the world’s third largest resources of unconventional oil. This paper evaluates in three ways whether Canada is respecting a scenario of fossil fuel production and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions limiting warming to 2.0 °C by 2100. Firstly, McGlade and Ekins (2015) proposed a model providing production budgets for each fossil fuel producing [...]
Novel sensor array helps to understand submarine cable faults off West Africa
Published: 2021-05-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seabed telecommunication cables can be damaged or broken by powerful seafloor flows of sediment (called turbidity currents), which may runout for hundreds of kilometres into the deep ocean. These flows have the potential to affect multiple cables near-simultaneously over very large areas, so it is more challenging to reroute traffic or repair the cables. However, cable-breaking turbidity currents [...]
Non-deterministic effects in modelling the tidal currents in a high-energy coastal site
Published: 2021-05-27
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography
Numerical models are commonly employed for predicting tidal stream resource, since harmonic analysis is typically insufficient for representing tidal currents. This is particularly true in regions of high-energy flow and complex bathymetric and coastline features, resulting in highly nonlinear dynamics. Within this work, we demonstrate that non-deterministic effects pose a further barrier to [...]
Satellites unveil easily-fixable super-emissions in one of the world's largest methane hotspot regions
Published: 2021-05-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Reduction of fossil fuel-related methane emissions has been identified as an essential means for climate change mitigation, but emission source identification remains elusive. We combine three complementary satellite data sets to survey single methane emission sources on the west coast of Turkmenistan, one of the largest methane hotspots in the world. We found 29 different super-emitters active [...]
Defining a Sustainable Development Target Space for 2030 and 2050
Published: 2021-05-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resource Economics, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
By adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), countries worldwide agreed to an agenda for achieving a prosperous, socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable future for all1. This ambition, however, also exposes a critical knowledge gap since science-based insights on how to achieve the 17 SDGs simultaneously are lacking. Quantitative goal-seeking scenario studies could enable [...]
The carbon cycle of southeast Australia during 2019-2020: Drought, fires and subsequent recovery
Published: 2021-05-13
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
2019 was the hottest and driest year on record for southeast Australia leading to bushfires of unprecedented extent. Ecosystem carbon losses due to drought and fire are believed to have been substantial, but have not been well quantified. Here, we utilize space-based measurements of trace gases (TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument XCO, Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 XCO2) and up-scaled GPP (FluxSat [...]