Preprints
There are 7598 Preprints listed.
Reactive halogens drive rapid mercury oxidation in hot volcanic emission-plumes
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Volcanoes release mercury (Hg) alongside gases and particles through continuous passive degassing and by explosive and effusive eruptions. The global dispersion and environmental impact depend on volcanic Hg oxidation state, which remains poorly constrained: thermochemical calculations of magmatic gas composition and crater-rim sampling indicate Hg to be predominantly in the reduced Hg0 form that [...]
Predictive Modeling of Hydrodynamic Dispersion for High-Pressure Atomized Crude Oil Plumes During Tidal Phase-Lag Loops in Santa Barbara Estuaries, Nigeria
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Engineering
This study models the multi-phase hydrodynamic atomization, near-surface jet shattering, and transient longitudinal advection-diffusion transport of high-pressure crude oil plumes within a tidally driven tropical estuary. It maps the 38-day uncontained wellhead failure at the Santa Barbara South Well-1 (OML 29) in Opu-Nembe, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, to quantify sub-surface contaminant migration [...]
Fabric memory during repeated reversal shear in clay-rich materials: An experimental study using SEM, SP-µCT, and AMS
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Tectonics and Structure
Fine-grained shear zones occur in both tectonic faults and gravitational landslides, making their origin difficult to determine from individual microstructural features alone. A potentially useful distinction is provided by deformation history: tectonic faults commonly experience repeated earthquake cycles in which the sense and magnitude of deformation may change, whereas landslide slip zones [...]
A transparent constrained stochastic framework for urban expansion forecasting and future service-network screening: Cape Town demonstration using annual building evidence, empirical land constraints, spatial hindcasting, and multi-horizon ensembles
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Other Earth Sciences
Spatial forecasts of urban expansion require separate, auditable answers to two questions: how much built area is assumed to appear, and where it is allocated. This study presents a constrained stochastic workflow and demonstrates it for metropolitan Cape Town, South Africa. Annual Open Buildings Temporal building-presence surfaces for 2016–2023 are harmonised to a 10 m grid and cleaned with a [...]
Revisiting the felsőbányaite-basaluminite question : nomenclatural synonymy and unresolved structural issues
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Mineral Physics, Soil Science
Felsőbányaite (1853) and basaluminite (1948) share the formula Al4(SO4)(OH)10·4H2O, and were shown to be crystallographically identical in 1997, leading the IMA to discredit basaluminite in 2006 in favor of the older name. This nomenclatural choice is not an issue. Instead, this opinion article explores a more focused contemporary question: is the poorly crystalline material that geochemists [...]
Beyond Hard-to-Abate: Matching Models to Transition Bottlenecks
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Computational Engineering, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oil, Gas, and Energy
In energy-intensive industry, the difficulty of decarbonising is not a uniform property of the emissions involved but a property of the pathway, conditional on identifiable bottlenecks at three interlocking levels. At the process level, heterogeneous products and coupled processes multiply the low-carbon option space. At the firm level, financing premiums and coordination failures across the [...]
From Heat Summation to Climate Adaptation: Lessons from 75 Years of the Winkler Index for Agroclimatic Metric Design
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Agroclimatic indices are foundational tools for matching crop cultivars to suitable climates, yet the accelerating pace of climate change is exposing the limits of indices built on mean conditions. The Winkler Index (WI) is a regional categorization system based on heat summation informed by wines made from grapes throughout California in the 1940s to 1960s, and it remains one of the most widely [...]
How much of a machine-learning earthquake catalogue can an expert verify?
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Machine-learning systems are becoming the instruments that generate the primary data of a scientific field, and what such a system asserts is not the same as what an expert would endorse. Earthquake detection is one of the few settings where the difference can be measured, because a detection can be checked blind against the waveforms that produced it. Four seismologists returned 4,800 blind [...]
Terrain-Dependent Generalization Failure in Multimodal Lunar Crater Classification: A Comparative Study Using Optical and Topographic Data
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Sciences
Automated lunar crater detection is an important task in planetary mapping, geological analysis, and future lunar exploration. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of combining optical imagery with topographic information; however, the influence of terrain variability on crater classification performance remains insufficiently explored. This study presents a comparative evaluation of [...]
Biodiversity conservation policies alter the solution space of climate mitigation scenarios
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Conserving biodiversity while mitigating climate change is one of the defining sustainability challenges of this century. Paris-aligned mitigation pathways rely heavily on forest restoration and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). While forest restoration can simultaneously enhance wildlife habitat and increase carbon sequestration, large-scale biomass production for BECCS may [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
Beyond climate-change risk: subjective attribution, multidimensional impact appraisal, and adaptation advocacy among Swedish forestry professionals
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adaptation may depend on whether decision-makers recognise climate change, but also on whether they attribute experienced changes to climate change and how they appraise consequences across valued domains. We analysed survey data from 140 Swedish forestry professionals to examine whether stronger subjective attribution of experienced forest changes to climate change is associated with more [...]
Causal Analysis of Key Factors Enhancing Drought Resilience through Water Management: A Hybrid Content Analysis, Fuzzy Delphi, and DEMATEL Approach
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering
This study aims to identify and analyze the key factors affecting drought resilience through water management and to examine the causal relationships among them. A mixed-methods sequential design was applied. First, a meta-synthesis and content analysis of studies published between 2005 and 2025 identified the main resilience factors. Then, the fuzzy Delphi method validated these factors through [...]
Lab-based X-ray imaging for accurate seismic velocity measurements at high pressure
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Mineral Physics
A novel approach for accurately measuring the compressional (P) and shear-wave (S) velocities of materials at high pressure is demonstrated up to ~6 GPa using a Paris-Edinburgh press. Typically, accurate ultrasonic velocity measurements at high pressure require synchrotron facilities to image the sample length in-situ and to determine the internal cell pressure using X-ray diffraction from an [...]
Cloud Cover and Structural Observation Gaps in African Agricultural Earth Observation: Evidence from Six Agroecological Zones
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth observation underpins a growing number of agricultural-monitoring and agri-fintech services across Africa, all of which need a usable view of a field often enough to track its condition. Cloud gaps in that record are usually treated as random missing data; we test whether they are instead structurally biased. Using three growing seasons (2022–2024) of Sentinel-2 scene-classification [...]