Preprints
There are 7183 Preprints listed.
Direct Dating of Lithic Cuts Using Cosmogenic Nuclides: A Methodological Proposal to Establish the Construction Chronology of Megalithic Megastructures
Published: 2026-06-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
ABSTRACT The chronology of megalithic megastructures is currently established through the analysis of organic matter — charcoal, bone, fibers — found in proximity to the constructions. This method dates the most recently documented human presence in the vicinity of a structure. It does not date the act of construction. If a temporal gap existed between the moment of construction and the moment of [...]
Microbial growth inhibition by compacted bentonite after an 8.5-year in-situ incubation
Published: 2026-06-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Compacted bentonite in future deep geological repositories for the disposal of nuclear waste will create an extreme, energy-limited environment for microorganisms, yet the long-term implications for microbial community structure and the potential emergence of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) remain uncertain. Here, we use an 8.5-year in-situ incubation experiment in an anoxic Opalinus Clay [...]
SegFormer and SegFormer-UNet for anthropogenic geomorphic feature extraction from land surface parameters
Published: 2026-06-28
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, [...]
Large-scale evidence of behavioral responses and adaptation to wildfire smoke
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Using 371 million bikeshare trips across 12 US cities from 2010 to 2024, we find that wildfire smoke reduces urban cycling substantially and nonlinearly, and that populations with more prior smoke exposures avoid cycling more, not less - a pattern consistent with adaptation rather than habituation. Leveraging day-to-day variation in smoke in a distributed lag nonlinear model with high-dimensional [...]
Denoising teleseismic data for deep Earth studies using a supervised deep-learning auto-encoder: a case study of diffracted waves from ULVZs
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seismic noise, particularly the microseism generated by the oceans, is a fundamental limitation on using short period (1 - 10 s) teleseismic data to study the deep Earth. Deep learning auto-encoders have proven effective at denoising seismic data in other applications. Here, we provide a demonstration of their potential for improving the quality of deep Earth seismic data, using Sdiff [...]
Quantifying Trail-Induced Fragmentation in Protected Natural Areas Using Large-Scale GPS Trajectory Analysis
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography
Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation, but recreational activities can fragment habitats through trail networks. This study quantifies trail-induced fragmentation across all protected area types in Switzerland using a novel computational pipeline combining fastgeotoolkit for GPS trajectory processing and GeoPandas for spatial analysis. 3,136 hiking GPS tracks (29,563 km [...]
Improving Atmospheric River Forecast Over Himalayas using Convolutional Neural Network
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Engineering
Extreme precipitation over the Himalayas is often linked to Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) interacting with its unique and complex topography. The topographic complexity and sparse observational data constitute a challenging problem for numerical weather prediction models. We find that the widely used Global Forecast System (GFS) exhibits systematic errors for high magnitude Integrated Vapor Transport [...]
Flexocompression Beam Analogy Applied to the Calculation of Seismogenic Thickness and Cortical Rupture Prediction
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Education, Engineering
This paper presents a deterministic geomechanical model to parameterize the spatial variability of seismogenic thickness (h) in basement thrust faults under flat-slab subduction regimes. We develop a physico-mathematical analogy by transforming the elemental elastic approximation into a variable cross-section Timoshenko beam model subjected to tectonic flexocompression. The governing differential [...]
Quantifying the probability of committed AMOC collapse
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation AMOC would have catastrophic consequences for societies. We quantify the risk of committed AMOC collapse using large ensembles of Earth system model simulations. Under conservative assumptions of Greenland ice sheet melt, the probability that collapse is already committed is 10%, rising to 80% by 2100 under worst case emissions. [...]
Translation and commentary on Carl Eduard Ney’s (1893/1894) Ueber die Messung des an den Schäften der Bäume herabfliessenden Regenwassers
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Stemflow is now recognized as a hydrologically consequential pathway, yet much of twentieth-century forest hydrology treated it as negligible. This paper revisits a counterpoint, a formal exchange regarding stemflow between Government and Forestry Councilor C.E. Ney and Imperial-Royal Trainee Dr. E. Hoppe at the first Congress of the International Union of Forestry Research Stations (Mariabrunn, [...]
Analytical prediction of active-layer thaw and subsidence under seasonal thermal forcing: application to Svalbard permafrost
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seasonal thaw of the active layer and the resulting ground subsidence strongly influence Arctic hydrology, soil-carbon release, and the stability of northern infrastructure. Lunardini (1987) derived an exact similarity solution for one-dimensional thaw in frozen soil that consolidates as it thaws. Although physically elegant, the solution has remained difficult to use in practice: usable limiting [...]
Automated landslide detection in SAR wrapped interferograms using a geomorphology-constrained YOLO CNN
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Slow-moving landslides pose significant hazards in mountain environments, requiring improved detection and monitoring capabilities. Traditional mapping is accurate but time-consuming, while multitemporal InSAR approaches are limited by data complexity and velocity constraints. Wrapped dual-pass DInSAR interferograms offer an alternative by preserving deformation signals without phase unwrapping, [...]
Dynamic Line Rating and Residual Congestion: Implications for Storage Sizing and Availability
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Engineering
Measurement and Tracking of Blowing and Falling Snow Particles Using an Automotive 1550 nm LiDAR
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Glaciology, Hydrology, Meteorology
The prevalence and affordability of fast-scanning commercially available LiDARs are increasing due to the rapid expansion of the autonomous vehicle industry. These LiDAR units can provide >1 Hz measurements of millions of laser reflections at ranges of hundreds of meters with high precision. In this study we investigate the often overlooked 1550 nm wavelength LiDAR for measurements of airborne [...]
Model Construction and Retrospective Validation of Large Earthquake Prediction
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Based on the hypothesis that gravity-driven crustal displacement generates earthquakes and facilitates crustal material migration, and following the general law that the velocity of generalized flow in a steady-state system is proportional to the driving force and inversely proportional to the system’s internal resistance, a relationship between the frequency of large earthquakes and crustal [...]