Preprints
There are 6390 Preprints listed.
Abrupt shift to El Niño-like mean state conditions in the tropical Pacific during the Little Ice Age
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Hydrology
The mean state of the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere climate, in particular its east-west asymmetry, has profound consequences for regional climates and for the El Niño/ Southern Oscillation variability. Here we present a new high-resolution paleohydrological record using the stable-hydrogen-isotopic composition of terrestrial-lipid biomarkers (δDwax) from a 1,400-year-old lake sedimentary [...]
Paleocene to Miocene southern Tethyan carbonate factories of the Southwestern and Western Central Asia
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Geology, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Sedimentology
One hundred and forty-four sections of shallow-water carbonates, deposited between the Paleocene and the Miocene, from the Levant to the Himalaya, have been investigated to analyze the distribution of carbonate facies and carbonate producing organisms. Large benthic foraminifera resulted the volumetrically most important group of carbonate producers during the whole period, with a peak in [...]
Multi-faceted analyses of seasonal trends and drivers of land surface variables in Indo-Gangetic river basins
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Statistics and Probability
The Indo-Gangetic river basins feature a wide range of climatic, topographic, and land cover characteristics providing a suitable setting for the exploration of multivariate time series. Here, we collocated a comprehensive feature space for these river basins including Earth observation time series on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), surface water area (SWA), and snow cover area [...]
Temporal Variability in Snow Accumulation and Density at Summit Camp, Greenland Ice Sheet
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A three-year record of weekly snow water equivalent (SWE) accumulation at Summit Camp, central Greenland Ice Sheet, obtained by direct sampling, is presented. While the overall SWE accumulation of 24.2 cm w.e. per year matches long-term ice core estimates, variability increases at shorter time scales. Half of the annual SWE accumulation occurs during a few large events, with the average [...]
Marine ecosystem changepoints spread under ocean warming in an Earth System Model
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Sudden shifts in marine plankton communities in response to environmental changes are of special concern because of their low predictability and high potential impacts on ocean ecosystems. We explored how anthropogenic climate change influences the spatial extent and frequency of changepoints in plankton populations by comparing the behavior of a plankton community in a coupled Earth System Model [...]
Inverting passive margin stratigraphy for marine sediment transport dynamics over geologic time
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Geology, Geomorphology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Passive margin stratigraphy contains time-integrated records of landscapes that have long since vanished. Quantitatively reading the stratigraphic record using coupled landscape evolution and stratigraphic forward models (SFMs) is a promising approach to extracting information about landscape history. However, there is no consensus about the optimal form of simple SFMs because there has been a [...]
Scaling relationships for whole-lake primary production
Published: 2022-03-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Scaling relationships provide simple rules for understanding complex ecological patterns. We evaluated scaling relationships between whole-lake (benthic + pelagic) primary production and the surface areas and volumes of 73 lakes. Whole-lake primary production scales isometrically with surface area, after accounting for latitudinal gradients of temperature and insolation. Whole-lake primary [...]
Climate nonlinearities: selection, uncertainty, projections, & damages
Published: 2022-03-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences
\textbf{Abstract:} Climate projections are highly uncertain; this uncertainty is costly and impedes progress on climate policy. This uncertainty is primarily parametric (what numbers do we plug into our equations?) and structural (what equations do we use in the first place?). The former is straightforward to characterise in principle, though may be computationally intensive for complex climate [...]
The size-distribution of Earth’s lakes and ponds: limits to power-law behavior
Published: 2022-03-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Global-scale characterizations of Earth's lakes and ponds assume their surface areas are power-law distributed across the full size range. However, empirical power-laws only hold across finite ranges of scales. In this paper, we synthesize evidence for upper and lower limits to power-law behavior in lake size-distributions. We find support for the power-law assumption in general. We also find [...]
State-dependence of Cenozoic thermal extremes
Published: 2022-03-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Oxygen isotopes in sediments reflect Earth's past temperature, revealing a cooling over the Cenozoic punctuated by multimillenial thermal extreme events. These extremes are captured by the generalized extreme value distribution, and the distribution's shape changes with baseline temperature such that large thermal extremes are more likely in warmer climates. Anthropogenic warming has the [...]
The relationship between lake surface area and maximum depth
Published: 2022-03-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Maximum depth varies among lakes from $<$1 to 1741 meters, but attempts to explain this variation have achieved little predictive power. In this paper, we describe the probability distribution of maximum depths based on recent developments in the theory of fractal Brownian motions. The theoretical distribution is right-tailed and adequately captures variations in maximum depth in a dataset of [...]
Geodynamics of continental rift initiation and evolution
Published: 2022-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
A rift is a nascent plate boundary where continental lithosphere is extended and possibly broken. In the geologic past, rifting played a major role in shaping the surface of our planet, while at present, continental rifts are of societal relevance by hosting key georesources such as geothermal energy and ore deposits. This Review discusses fundamental rift processes, geodynamic forces and their [...]
Causing of missing snowmelt following drought
Published: 2022-03-05
Subjects: Water Resource Management
Water management in snowy mountainous regions hinges on forecasting snowmelt runoff. However, droughts are altering snowpack-runoff relationships with ongoing debate about the driving mechanisms. For example, in 2021 in California, less than half of predicted streamflow arrived. Mechanisms proposed for this `missing' streamflow included changes in evapotranspiration, rainfall, and subsurface [...]
Magma chamber detected beneath an arc volcano with high-resolution velocity images
Published: 2022-03-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Volcanology
Arc volcanoes are underlain by complex systems of molten-rock reservoirs ranging from melt-poor mush zones to melt-rich magma chambers. Petrological and satellite data indicate that eruptible magma chambers form in the topmost few kilometres of the crust. However, very few chambers have ever been definitively located, suggesting that most are too short-lived or too small to be imaged, which has [...]
Climate control on the relationship between erosion rate and fluvial topography
Published: 2022-03-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Conceptual and theoretical models for landscape evolution suggest that fluvial topography is sensitive to climate. However, it remains challenging to demonstrate a compelling link between fluvial topography and climate in natural landscapes. One possible reason is that many studies compare erosion rates to climate data, although theoretical studies show that, at steady state, climate is encoded [...]