Preprints
There are 6136 Preprints listed.
Seasonal ice dynamics control the timing of crevasse drainage at a fast-flowing outlet glacier
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Glaciology
Crevasse field drainage transfers at least half of the seasonal runoff from the surface to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet, but the patterns of drainage are complex and spatio-temporally heterogenous. To better understand controls on crevasse drainage processes, we use an automated deep learning method to map the seasonal filling and drainage of water-filled crevasses at Sermeq Kujalleq (Store [...]
Author citation metrics in paleontology: the h-index and the c-score
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Paleontology
The “Stanford ranking” (SR) of standardized citation indicators calculates an individual scientist’s composite c-score, addressing limitations of the h-index. Updated annually, the SR lists the top 100,000 scientists and the top 2% in each specialty. This study examines all (500) palaeontologists included in the SR (SR-palaeontologists), comparing their h-index, c-score and related productivity [...]
Paleoclimate pattern effects help constrain climate sensitivity and 21st-century warming
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Abstract: Paleoclimates provide examples of past climate change that inform estimates of modern warming from greenhouse-gas emissions, known as Earth's climate sensitivity. However, differences between past and present climate change must be accounted for when inferring climate sensitivity from paleoclimate evidence. The closest paleoclimate analog to near-term warming from greenhouse-gas [...]
Contrasting patterns of deforestation and reforestation in India’s tropical dry woodlands
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Tropical dry woodlands are key ecosystems for global biodiversity, carbon storage, and forest-based livelihoods in some of the poorest regions of the world. Many of these woodlands have been historically converted and degraded, and while recovery occurs in some areas, the pressure on remaining tropical dry woodlands remains high. Despite this, our understanding of spatial patterns of tropical dry [...]
Peatland Mid-Infrared Database 1.0.0
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Soil Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Systematic collections of peat mid-infrared spectra and other peat properties are scarce, but useful to understand peat chemistry and develop spectral prediction models. The Peatland Mid-Infrared Database ('pmird') stores 3877 mid-infrared spectra of peat, peat-forming vegetation, and dissolved organic matter, together with measurements of other peat properties that were collated from previous [...]
Methane and nitrous oxide concentrations and sea-air fluxes in western Long Island Sound, a seasonally hypoxic urban estuary: Hourly to seasonal variability
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We report the first water column profiles of dissolved methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) in western Long Island Sound, an urban estuary in which seasonal hypoxia occurs due to eutrophication and restricted exchange with the ocean. We collected samples at seven stations along an 18 km transect in August 2023, October 2023, and May 2024. CH4 concentrations and sea-air fluxes were highest in [...]
Database of Generated Rock Microstructures and their computed Geometrical and Hydraulic properties
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering
There is a strong link between a material’s microstructural features and its macroscopic physical properties. However, heterogeneities in real-world rock microstructures often result in strong cross-correlations between the microscopic features, making it difficult to evaluate the influence of individual characteristics. Minkowski functionals (MFs), a set of measures derived from integral [...]
Geochronology of Taung and other southern African australopiths
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
One century after the Taung juvenile’s discovery, its age and that of many other southern African australopiths remains unknown. This lack of accurate geochronological constraints leaves important questions unanswered, including the temporal relationship between the South African fossil sites and their well dated eastern African counterparts. Previous age estimates for the Taung fossil range from [...]
Transformer Assisted U-Net for Marine Litter Detection on Sentinel-2 Imagery
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
The contamination of marine environments with man-made litter is a growing nation-wide concern. Satellite imagery combined with deep learning–based detection models has emerged as a robust and cost-effective solution for large-scale marine litter monitoring. In this article, we present a novel deep learning-based scheme to detect marine litter using Sentinel-2 imagery based on the Deep UNet [...]
A Field Study on Background Radiation Variability with Elevation in Eastern Nepal
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
This research investigates how environmental radioactivity varies with altitude in the diverse landscapes of Eastern Nepal. Employing two calibrated Geiger–Müller (GM) counters, background radiation was recorded as counts per minute (cpm) across selected sites in the districts of Dhankuta, Panchthar, Taplejung, and Ilam. Data were geo- referenced using GPS to correlate radiation levels with [...]
Ecosystem extent mapping in a global monitoring context
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
The vital role of ecosystems in maintaining biosphere stability is now recognised globally. Updates in policy frameworks on biodiversity and environmental decline include information on ecosystem extent (EE) as a core assessment indicator, e.g., the Global Biodiversity Framework indicator A2 ‘Extent of natural ecosystems’. The recently proposed System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – [...]
Accessible Climate and Impact Model Output for Studying the Human and Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Conflict
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Nuclear winter refers to the suite of physical and biological consequences that may follow nuclear conflict, particularly the cooling and darkening of Earth’s surface due to black carbon soot in the upper atmosphere. While the associated changes in temperature, precipitation, and food system productivity have been the subject of climate modeling for decades, the outputs of models used to project [...]
Unified Granular Intrusion Dynamics for Planetary Materials
Published: 2025-10-03
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Granular friction μ is a sensitive and poorly understood function of packing fraction ϕ. Every granular material has a distinct critical volume fraction ϕc that delineates two mechanical deformation modes – compaction for ϕ < ϕc, and dilation for ϕ > ϕc. Here we examine the relation(s) between friction and packing fraction, using quasi-static penetration tests in materials ranging from [...]
Worldwide inference of national methane emissions by inversion of satellite observations with UNFCCC prior estimates
Published: 2025-10-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering
Meeting climate policy goals to reduce methane emissions under the Paris Agreement and the Global Methane Pledge requires nations to set targets and quantify reductions. Individual countries report emissions by sector to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) but there are large uncertainties. Here we optimize 2023 national emissions at up to 25 km grid resolution for [...]
Rapid increase of climate extremes across northern Amazonia
Published: 2025-10-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Amazonia’s exceptional biodiversity, cultural significance, and ecosystem services make it pivotal to global and regional sustainability. However, the region is increasingly threatened by climate extremes, which exacerbate the effects of land use change (Barlow et al., 2018) and bring about abrupt changes in social and ecological condition (Bennett et al., 2023; Berenguer et al., 2021; Campanharo [...]