Preprints
There are 7827 Preprints listed.
Lixa v0.1.2: an open-source, image-informed framework for closed-loop design of leaching processes for domestic critical-mineral recovery, from the pore to the plant scale
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Mining Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Leaching takes a metal out of a rock and into a solution. In the United States, rare earth elements, lithium and scandium occur mostly in rocks where the metal is thinly spread through a porous matrix: weathered clays, coal ash, lithium claystones and bauxite residue. For such rocks the leaching recipe (reagent, concentration, temperature, particle size, liquid-to-solid ratio and contact time) [...]
Deteriorating climate conditions for Australian wheat production
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Climate
Wheat yields are highly sensitive to climate extremes, but previous studies risk underestimating their influence due to a reliance on highly aggregated agricultural data. Here we combine nationwide farm-level agricultural data with machine learning to identify the key drivers of Australian wheat yield and assess how climate conditions for wheat production have changed over recent decades. We find [...]
Worldwide water gaps: Using relative elevation modelling to identify transverse drainages
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Transverse drainages are stream reaches that flow through, rather than around, topographic high grounds. The development of transverse drainage is intimately tied to the tectonic history of an area, but the identification of transverse reaches has historically been a matter of subjective opinion. Here, a GIS-based method is presented that uses relative elevation modelling to identify and [...]
Modelling the connections between internally and externally drained basins using GIS, Google Earth©, and remote sensing
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The development of internal drainage is intimately tied to the tectonic and climatic history of an area, but research into the exact causes and processes of internal drainage is constrained by the ability to accurately delineate both internally and externally draining watersheds. Until recently, existing global catalogs of internally drained regions were either hand-drawn or based upon digital [...]
Reconstruction of ancestral drainage patterns in an internally draining region, Fars Province, Iran
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Google Earth imagery is used here in conjunction with a Geographic Information System to identify transverse drainages and recreate paleodrainage in an internally draining region in Iran. At least thirty-five water gaps and thirty-four wind gaps are shown to exist in the region, as well as evidence for an integrated paleodrainage that originated north of the internally draining region and [...]
Feature-Relative Deployment Optimisation of Ice-Tethered Buoy Arrays in the Southern Ocean
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Southern Ocean marginal ice zone is critical for climate dynamics and sea-ice model validation, yet remains severely undersampled due to costly deployment and short buoy lifetimes. The sea-ice edge shifts by hundreds of kilometres between years, so fixed-coordinate optimisation fails when future ice conditions are unknown. This paper presents a robust multi-objective framework that encodes [...]
The July 2026 North American wildfire smoke event was three times deadlier due to climate change
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In mid-July 2026, numerous fast-burning wildfires affected western Ontario and northern Minnesota, resulting in extensive smoke plumes across eastern North America. Here, we conduct a rapid attribution analysis of the 14–21 July smoke event, quantifying the change in wildfire smoke (WFS) PM2.5 concentrations and mortality compared to a counterfactual world without anthropogenic climate change [...]
Who Breathes Worse? Socio-economic Deprivation and PM2.5 in India
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Air pollution in India has intensified rapidly, alongside substantial population growth across regions with highly uneven socioeconomic and developmental conditions. Ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is among the leading environmental contributors to premature mortality in India, where national average concentrations exceed the World Health Organization guideline by an order of magnitude. [...]
Fingerprinting PFAS pollution in European surface waters
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) comprise a large group of synthetic chemical substances used across industries and find application in a diverse range of consumer products. Owing to their ubiquitous use and ongoing emissions, such substances are distributed throughout the environment. PFAS and their metabolites pose considerable risk to environmental and human health due to their high [...]
MELVIS: An open-source web application for computing and modelling the viscosity of volcanic melts
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Volcanology
The viscosity of volcanic melts governs magma transport, eruption dynamics, and a broad range of magmatic processes, so predicting it as a function of temperature, composition, and dissolved water content is central to physical volcanology. Yet no freely accessible tool integrates global machine-learning predictions, physically motivated viscosity equations, and composition-specific models [...]
Using 4D synchrotron X-ray microtomography rigs for time-resolved X-ray diffraction experiments: applications with the Mjölnir suite
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Synchrotron 4D X-ray microtomography provides unique insights into evolving microstructures during deformation, fluid flow and mineral transformations, but offers limited access to crystallographic information such as phase composition, lattice strain, and stress. Conversely, synchrotron X-ray diffraction (XRD) provides direct crystallographic measurements but is commonly restricted to small [...]
Along-strike stress delays the ordering of slip on a fixed-length fault
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The size of a large earthquake depends on how far the rupture runs and how much the fault slips. An early correlation with magnitude can appear while those two contributions are still mixed. Patches at both ends stop every rupture on a 120 km fault, so the length no longer varies and the early order is an order of slip. One background stress is a single value along the fault, and the other also [...]
Universality and Information Loss in the Stratigraphic Record
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Statistical Models, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, Stratigraphy
Sedimentary rocks are the main archive of Earth history, yet most of the time they span is not represented by rock. Material deposited at any moment survives only if the depositional surface never later erodes below it, so the stratigraphic column keeps only the lowest levels that a fluctuating surface will reach in the future. We treat this rule as a filter on a randomly evolving surface and [...]
X-ray microdiffraction mapping on experimentally synthesized clinopyroxenes
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Volcanology
Crystallographic parameters serve as fundamental archives of crystallization environments, with pressure generally acting as a key variable governing crystal formation. In magmatic systems, tracking crystallographic and chemical parameters in clinopyroxene is critical for robust magmatic thermobarometry and reconstructing crystal life histories. While chemical thermobarometry is limited by melt [...]
Evaluating Dynamic Viability of Finite-Fault Slip Models with Ensemble Kalman Inversion
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Finite-fault slip models are widely used to infer earthquake rupture processes, yet they are inherently non-unique and do not guarantee physically consistent rupture evolution. Here, we develop a data-constrained framework that couples Ensemble Kalman Inversion (EKI) with large-scale 3D dynamic rupture simulations to efficiently evaluate the dynamic viability of finite-fault slip models. The [...]