Preprints
There are 6976 Preprints listed.
Variable impact of wildfire smoke on ecosystem metabolic rates in lakes
Published: 2023-11-29
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Increasingly severe wildfires release smoke plumes that cover entire continents, depositing aerosols and reducing solar radiation fluxes to millions of freshwater ecosystems, yet little is known about their impacts on inland waters. This large scale study 1) quantified annual and seasonal trends in the spatial extent of dense smoke cover in California, USA, over the last 18 years (2006 - 2022), [...]
Downslope weakening of soil revealed by a rapid robotic rheometer
Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Moving down a hillslope from ridge to valley, soil develops and becomes increasingly weathered. Downslope variation in clay content, organic matter, and porosity should produce concomitant changes in soil strength that influence slope stability and erosion. This has yet to be demonstrated, however, because in-situ measurements of soil rheology are challenging and rare. Here we employ a robotic [...]
Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Selected Tea Factories in Kenya
Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Tea sector is a major contributor to Kenya’s economy through foreign exchange via export. However, extensive amount of energy is required to produce one kilogram of tea, making tea processing energy-intensive. Comparing greenhouse gas emissions from different types of energy consumed in tea factories is imperative to enable policymakers make informed intervention in emission reduction. Reducing [...]
Combining geological and historical archives to reconstruct flood variability in northwestern Italy during the last thousand years
Published: 2023-12-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Understanding Earth’s changing climate is a crucial challenge. However, the available time series of direct measurements are often insufficient to fully capture climatic process that unfolds over centuries and millennia. Combining History and Geology can fill this gap. Focusing on rainfall and flood events, this research proposes a multidisciplinary approach to integrate the sedimentary and [...]
Ten simple rules to bridge ecology and palaeoecology by publishing outside palaeo-ecological journals
Published: 2023-12-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Due to a specialised methodology, palaeoecology is often regarded as a separate field from ecology even though it is essential to understand long-term ecological processes that have shaped ecosystems that ecologists study and manage. Even though advances in ecological modelling, sample dating, and proxy-based reconstructions have enabled direct comparison of palaeoecological data with [...]
Stromatoporoids and extinctions
Published: 2023-12-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Stromatoporoids are common shallow marine hypercalcified sponges in two major episodes with distinctive skeletal architectures: 1) Palaeozoic: Early to Middle Ordovician, to Late Devonian; and 2) Mesozoic: Late Triassic to Cretaceous and rare Cenozoic, but not confirmed in Permian and earlier Triassic strata. Stromatoporoids appeared in Early to Middle Ordovician strata, important in buildups [...]
A study of extreme water waves using a hierarchy of models based on potential-flow theory
Published: 2023-12-02
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Partial Differential Equations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The formation of extreme waves arising from the interaction of three line-solitons with equal far-field amplitudes is examined through a hierarchy of water-wave models. The Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation (KPE) is first used to prove analytically that its exact three-soliton solution has a ninefold maximum amplification that is achieved in the absence of spatial divergence. Reproducing this [...]
On the origin of alkali feldspar megacrysts in granitoids. Part 2: evidence for nucleation and growth under magmatic conditions from crystal size distributions of the Cathedral Peak Granodiorite, California, USA
Published: 2023-12-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The mechanisms whereby alkali feldspar megacrysts form have been debated for several decades; yet, we do not understand well the processes that lead to their formation. We take advantage of glacially polished outcrop surfaces from the Cathedral Peak Granodiorite in the Tuolumne Intrusive Complex, CA to quantitatively characterize alkali feldspar textures, to provide better insight into their [...]
The Rhyolite Factory: Insights from rhyolite-MELTS geobarometry of plutonic rocks and associated volcanics
Published: 2023-12-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Magmatic systems feed eruptions to the surface; lead to the formation of ore deposits; provide energy for geothermal systems; and are key to Earth’s differentiation. While it is commonly accepted that silicic magmatic systems span much of the crust, little direct evidence is available for their vertical continuity (or lack thereof), or for the distribution of melt within them. We focus on [...]
The chitin raft hypothesis for the colonization of the open ocean by cyanobacteria
Published: 2025-01-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
It is often assumed planktonic cyanobacteria existed in Precambrian oceans, but that their productivity was constrained. However, available evidence suggests picocyanobacteria only colonized the open ocean near the Neoproterozoic-Phanerozoic boundary, close to the start of a period of sustained atmospheric oxygenation. If earlier open oceans were devoid of planktonic cyanobacteria, we lack [...]
Formation of giant Siberian gas emission craters (GECs)
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The recent discovery of eight giant gas escape craters (GECs) in the Russian Yamal and Gydan peninsulas has challenged researchers for the past decade. Despite numerous proposed models, ranging from meteor impacts to gas explosions, none provide a comprehensive explanation for why the GECs are found only in this specific region. This study proposes a new general model for the formation of GECs in [...]
Precipitation Inequality Exacerbates Streamflow Inequality, but Dams Moderate it
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Engineering
Access to clean water is a fundamental human right, yet millions worldwide face the dire consequences of water scarcity and inadequate sanitation. Water inequality, characterized by disparities in access and availability of water resources, has emerged as a critical global challenge with far-reaching social, economic, and environmental implications. Using a globally representative observational [...]
Towards an Integrated Texture Toolkit, 1: Unveiling the Complex Relationship Between Crystal Size, Shape, and Fabric in EBSD Data
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rock textures observed via thin section are skewed from their true 3D nature. This is due to a variety of cut effects—artifacts that are introduced due to the lower dimensional nature of the thin section relative to the rock. Typically, these methods invert crystal shape and crystal size, but with each process performed separately and in sequence. With the ongoing adoption of electron backscatter [...]
Multiple dikes make eruptions easy
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Dikes supply magma to most volcanic eruptions. Understanding how propagating dikes may, or may not, reach the surface is thus one of the fundamental tasks for volcanology. Many, perhaps most, dike segments injected from magma sources do not reach the surface to feed volcanic eruptions. Instead, the dike segments become arrested (stop their propagation), commonly at or close to contacts between [...]
The Certainty of Uncertainty in Atmospheric CO2 Removal: A Crisis-Response Abrupt Mitigation Scenario (CRAMS)
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Climate, Sustainability
The gap between current emission trend and the expected 1.5 °C warming target forces the deployment of different carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDRs). Even though large discrepancies and uncertainties presents in studies investigating the CDR potentials, costs and side effects of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture with CO2 storage (DACCS) and enhanced [...]