Preprints
There are 7129 Preprints listed.
Can Green Infrastructure Curb Urban Sprawl? Evidence from China's Sponge City Program and Spatial Implications for Emerging Asia
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Motivated by the global challenges of unsustainable urban expansion and climate vulnerability, China implemented the Sponge City Program (SCP) as a large-scale nature-based intervention. Moving beyond its conventional framing as a purely hydraulic tool, this study re-evaluates the SCP as a catalyst for spatial governance. Utilizing a Double Machine Learning (DML) approach on spatial data from 279 [...]
ENSO-Driven Modulation of the Caribbean Subsurface Salinity Maximum
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study identifies El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as the primary driver of interannual subsurface salinity variability in the Caribbean Sea. Using 30 years of high-resolution, data-assimilative ocean reanalysis (1993–2022), we show that the Subsurface Salinity Maximum (SSM) closely tracks ENSO cycles: El Niño events correspond to a saltier and deeper SSM, while La Niña drives a fresher [...]
Internal Processes Driving the Slow-to-Fast Transition of a Rockslide
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Landslides may creep slowly for decades to centuries under external influences such as rainfall or seismic shaking. Predicting when and how they transition into catastrophic acceleration remains a major challenge because the internal processes driving failure occur at depth and are often not evident from surface observations alone. Here, we combine local seismic and geodetic measurements to [...]
Why the Earth Exhibits Interhemispheric Albedo Symmetry: Erosion–formation asymmetry of low-cloud responses to circulation reorganization.
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earth exhibits a striking near symmetry in interhemispheric mean albedo despite substantial asymmetries in surface properties, aerosols, and geography. Whether this symmetry is coincidental or dynamically constrained remains unresolved. Here we present a minimal theoretical framework showing that a moist atmosphere provides a physically constrained, but bounded, tendency to oppose [...]
The role of glauconite content in controlling sand crushing and compressibility
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Geotechnical Engineering
Glauconite-rich sands are increasingly posing engineering challenges in offshore and nearshore developments, since their mechanical behaviour remains poorly understood owing to the extreme crushability of glauconite grains. Particle crushing in these sediments alters stiffness, compressibility, grading, particle morphology and, consequently, engineering performance. This study presents a [...]
Ecosystem Metabolism as an Early Warning Indicator of Lake Algal Blooms
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Algal blooms represent ecosystem state shifts that degrade drinking water, restrict recreation, threaten public health, and lower property values. Detecting blooms in advance on management relevant timescales of days to weeks can support proactive intervention. Early warning statistics derived from indicator time series offer a framework for detecting state shifts, but the use of lake metabolic [...]
Less is more: how to capture carbon efficiently – lessons from long-term rock weathering and soil development in natural warm temperate ecosystems.
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Other Environmental Sciences
Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) has been proposed as a viable strategy to offset greenhouse gas emissions. The field is currently plagued by uncertainty in the rates of C capture through alkalinity export, resulting from variation in extent and lag due to soil exchange, secondary minerals, and effects on soil organic carbon. Provided are quantitative estimates for weathering losses in these pools [...]
Samoa Basin Abyssal Mapping: Box Coring Leg
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This cruise report describes work from leg three of the NOAA American Samoa Abyssal Mapping effort, OPR-T900-KR-26. Leg one preceded this effort and collected ship-based acoustic data. Leg two collected autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) data and began before, continued contemporaneously, and finished subsequently to leg three. The USGS field activity number assigned to this expedition is [...]
Bacterial tetraether lipid biosynthesis links membrane adaption to paleoclimate proxies
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Membrane-spanning tetraether lipids are best known as an adaptive mechanism of archaea for stabilizing their membranes under extreme conditions. Bacteria typically rely on bilayer-forming phospholipids, making the occurrence of membrane-spanning branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) in some bacteria highly unusual. BrGDGTs occur globally in soils and sediments and exhibit [...]
Who has rådighet? An agency-centred perspective on water conservation
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Water Resource Management
Water conservation is usually catalogued by technology, efficient fixtures, leak control, reuse, metering, process integration. That framing hides a stubborn fact: realised savings consistently fall short of engineering potential and often fade with time. Rebound, poor maintenance and behavioural decay explain part of the gap, but not all. We argue that a large share is an agency mismatch: the [...]
Condensation Radiation of Water Vapor Drives Diurnal Temperature Range Patterns
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The global distribution and variation of the Diurnal Temperature Range (DTR) remain “an essential knowledge gap” in our understanding of climate dynamics in IPCC assessment reports. This study introduces the radiative mechanism of water vapor condensation as a novel physical driver of DTR dynamics. Contrary to classical heat conduction theory, which assumes latent heat transfers via temperature [...]
Novel Source Apportionment Methodologies for Secondary PM2.5 during Extreme Wintertime Meteorological Conditions in the Western U.S.
Published: 2026-06-14
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Traditional receptor-oriented source apportionment methods, such as positive matrix factorization and chemical mass balance, rely on vector-component analyses of robust observational records or pre-determined source fingerprints, respectively. These methods may struggle to resolve sources that are similar in composition due to source fingerprint collinearity. It is important to isolate [...]
Implicit-tuning signal quantified through a tri-experiment design in a legacy spectral GCM
Published: 2026-06-14
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
We quantify the climate response of the MGO atmospheric general circulation model (MGO-03 T42L25) to two alternative implementations of a structural fix in the vertical-exchange parameterization. A companion parallelization study (under review) identifies an unintended inter-latitude state leakage through SAVE-persistent working arrays in the boundary-layer scheme. Here we contrast the legacy [...]
Mixing-Limited Effective Reaction Rates in Porous Media: An Explicit Prediction from Pore-Scale Mixing
Published: 2026-06-14
Subjects: Geochemistry, Hydrology
Two solutes can share the same volume of a porous medium and still barely react, because sharing a volume is not the same as mixing. As the flow carries them, it stretches each into thin filaments that interleave through the pore space, and reaction is confined to the narrow fronts where those filaments meet. A continuum model that simply multiplies the average concentrations ignores this and [...]
Modification of Antarctic geothermal heat flux by groundwater flow
Published: 2026-06-13
Subjects: Fluid Dynamics, Glaciology
The geothermal heat flux to the bed of the ice in Antarctica is important for ice flow and basal meltwater production, but is also highly uncertain. In particular, it is thought that groundwater flow in sedimentary basins could modify the geothermal heat flux to the ice bed by advecting heat, but this process is unaccounted for in current models. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model to [...]