Preprints
There are 4720 Preprints listed.
Observations and models of dynamic topography: Current status and future directions.
Published: 2022-04-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The slow creeping motion of Earth’s mantle drives transient changes in surface topography across a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Recent decades have seen substantial progress in understanding this so-called `dynamic topography’, with a growing number of studies highlighting its fundamental role in shaping the surface of our planet. In this review, we outline the current frontiers of [...]
Comparative Analysis of Performance and Mechanisms of Flood Inundation Map Generation using Height Above Nearest Drainage
Published: 2022-04-09
Subjects: Engineering
For flood inundation extent prediction, it is important to have a faster, more accurate, and input-parsimonious model during response and recovery efforts. Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND) is a simplified conceptual model whose efficacy and utility have been demonstrated in previous studies. This study aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of prediction performance of the [...]
Groundwater connections and sustainability in social-ecological systems
Published: 2022-04-09
Subjects: Dynamical Systems, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Groundwater resources are connected with social, economic, ecological, and Earth systems. We introduce the framing of groundwater-connected systems to better represent the nature and complexity of these connections in data collection, scientific investigations, governance and management approaches, and groundwater education. Groundwater-connected systems are social, economic, ecological, or Earth [...]
Knowledge co-production reveals nuanced societal dynamics and sectoral connections in mapping sustainable human-natural systems
Published: 2022-04-08
Subjects: Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass environmental, social, and economic dimensions which are linked to the characteristics of place and have a strong local dimension. They are interconnected at local scales in complex ways which makes progress towards them difficult to predict. To understand how these interconnections play out at the local scale, we used knowledge co-production [...]
Quantifying Rates of Landscape Unzipping
Published: 2022-04-07
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Measuring rates of valley head migration and determining the timing of canyon-opening are insightful for the evolution of planetary surfaces. Spatial gradients of in situ-produced cosmogenic nuclide concentrations along horizontal transects provide a framework for assessing the migration of valley networks and similar topographic features. We developed a new derivation for valley head retreat [...]
Rivers of the Variscan Foreland: fluvial morphodynamics in the Pennant Formation of South Wales, UK
Published: 2022-04-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Sedimentology
The morphodynamics of ancient rivers can be reconstructed from fluvial stratigraphy using quantitative techniques to provide insights into the driving forces behind the sedimentary systems. This work explores how these drivers can be evaluated from Paleozoic stratigraphy. Field measurements are taken in fluvial sediments from the Westphalian (Bolsovian and Asturian; 315.2–308 Ma) Pennant [...]
Comment on “If not brittle: Ductile, Plastic, or Viscous? By Kelin Wang”
Published: 2022-04-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering
In continuum mechanics, viscous materials are those that lack rigidity and elastic response under shear stress. We argue that using the term viscous to refer to the aseismic lithosphere is thus a misnomer, as it denies the propagation of S-waves through the lithosphere in total contradiction to decades of seismic surveys. Likewise, viscous materials lack yield stress, which is another feature [...]
Economic Analysis of CCUS: Accelerated Development for CO2 EOR and Storage in Residual Oil Zones Under the Context of 45Q Tax Credit
Published: 2022-04-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Petroleum Engineering
Residual oil zones (ROZ) undergoing CO2-EOR may benefit from specific strategies to maximize their value. We evaluated several strategies for producing from a Permian Basin, West Texas, USA field’s ROZ. This ROZ lies below the main pay zone (MPZ) of the field. Such brownfield ROZs occur in the Permian Basin and elsewhere. Since brownfield ROZs are hydraulically connected to the MPZs, development [...]
Strategies for and Barriers to Collaboratively Developing Anti-racist Policies and Resources as Described by Geoscientists of Color Participating in the Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE) Program
Published: 2022-04-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education
The Unlearning Racism in Geosciences (URGE) program guides groups of geoscientists as they draft, implement, and assess anti-racist policies and resources for their workplace. Some participating Geoscientists of Color (GoC) shared concerns about microaggression, tokenism, and power struggles within their groups. These reports led us to collect and analyze data that describe the experiences of GoC [...]
A machine learning approach to water quality forecasts and sensor network expansion: Case study in the Wabash River Basin, USA
Published: 2022-04-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Midwestern cities require forecasts of surface nitrate loads to bring additional treatment processes online or activate alternative water supplies. Concurrently, networks of nitrate monitoring stations are being deployed in river basins, co-locating water quality observations with established stream gauges. However, tools to evaluate the future value of expanded networks to improve water quality [...]
Feedbacks between internal and external Earth dynamics
Published: 2022-04-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Countless continuously interacting processes determine the functioning and evolution of the Earth. Even geodynamic and climate changes, which have been classically studied independently because they pertain to different Earth ‘spheres’, are linked by mutual cause-effect relationships that recent research has just started to recognize and quantify. Modeling, be it analogue or numerical, is a trump [...]
Revealing the Global Longline Fleet with Satellite Radar
Published: 2022-04-06
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Remote Sensing
Because many vessels use the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to broadcast GPS positions, recent advances in satellite technology have enabled us to map global fishing activity. Understanding of human activity at sea, however, is limited because an unknown number of vessels do not broadcast AIS. Those vessels can be detected by satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, but this [...]
A theory of cloud spacing for equilibrium deep convection
Published: 2022-04-05
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Precipitating convection is an important component of tropical atmospheric circulation. A cloud typically persists for an hour before it is shut down by its own evaporation-driven downdraft, which generates a gust front in the mixed layer that triggers neighboring clouds. There is no systematic theory for what sets the spacing of precipitating clouds, which is the first step towards understanding [...]
On the combination of the planktonic foraminiferal Mg/Ca, clumped (Δ47) and conventional (δ18O) stable isotope paleothermometers in palaeoceanographic studies
Published: 2022-04-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Assuming that foraminiferal clumped isotope (Δ47) values are independent of seawater salinity and pH, the combination of Mg/Ca, 18O and 47 values, may in theory allow us to disentangle the temperature, salinity/δ18Osw and pH signals. Here, we present a new Mg/Ca-Δ47 dataset for modern planktonic foraminifera, from various oceanographic basins and covering a large range of temperatures (from 0.2 [...]
The deep Arctic Ocean and Fram Strait in CMIP6 models
Published: 2022-04-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Arctic sea ice loss has become a symbol of ongoing climate change, yet climate models still struggle to reproduce it accurately, let alone predict it. A reason for this is the increasingly clear role of the ocean, especially that of the "Atlantic layer", on sea ice processes. We here quantify biases in that Atlantic layer and the Arctic Ocean deeper layers in 14 representative models that [...]