Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
Conservation is Coherence: Introducing the Negawatt Philosophy of Lawful Design
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Other Planetary Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
This paper articulates the Negawatt Philosophy, reframing conservation not as omission or moral restraint, but as the structural intelligence that sustains life and preserves biospheric coherence. Modern economies valorise extraction and combustion while treating conservation as invisible absence. Yet thermodynamics reveals life as negentropy—an ordering that defies the drift into entropy’s [...]
Regional Responses to Oceanic Variability Constrain Global Drought Synchrony
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Synchronized droughts threaten global food security, with concerns about increased frequency and duration under climate change. However, their long-term evolution and physical limits remain unknown. We analyze 61 drought networks over 120 years (1901–2020) of scPDSI data, employing a suite of network synchronization measures and empirical orthogonal functions to unravel the physical drivers and [...]
Insights into the 3D structure and behaviour of Icelandic crystal mushes from gabbroic nodules
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Crystal mushes – porous yet cohesive frameworks of crystals interspersed with interstitial melts – form the plumbing systems of most active volcanoes. In Iceland, magmatic plumbing systems are inferred to be constructed from vertically stacked mushy magma reservoirs separated by subsolidus rock. Gabbroic nodules from Gígöldur in central Iceland provide a rare window into the structure, evolution, [...]
Desert dust exerts a substantial longwave radiative forcing missing from climate models
Published: 2025-07-17
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Historical increases in desert dust have affected climate by perturbing Earth’s energy balance, including through interactions with longwave radiation that remain poorly quantified. Here, we use a data-driven analytical model to estimate the global dust longwave direct radiative effect (DRE). Our results align with observational estimates of longwave radiative effects, constraining the [...]
Challenges with Developing a Measurement-Based Basin Methane Intensity Estimate: A Case Study from the Haynesville
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane intensity, the emissions relative to production, has been a focus in global regulations on oil and gas production and imports, given the climate benefits of methane emission reductions. Methodological frameworks to create annual measurement-based emissions inventory estimates and calculate methane intensity using snapshot measurements have been developed. However, there are still multiple [...]
Domain-Specific Embedding Models for Hydrology and Environmental Sciences: Enhancing Semantic Retrieval and Question Answering
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Education, Engineering
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet their general-purpose embeddings often fall short in domains with specialized terminology and complex syntax, such as hydrology and environmental science. This study introduces HydroEmbed, a suite of open-source sentence embedding models fine-tuned for four QA formats: multiple-choice (MCQ), [...]
Ancient DNA and lipid biomarkers quantify the climate sensitivity of highland shrubification in Iceland
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Future changes in high latitude shrubification are expected to lead to changes in ecosystem structure and positive climate feedbacks, but the rates and elevational range of shrubification are still poorly constrained. Using a sediment record from a small lake in Iceland’s eastern highlands (422 m asl), we merge a sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) record of Betula with mean summer lake temperature [...]
Integrated Disaster Nursing Response for Public Healthcare Settings in Pakistan: A Sequential Mixed Method Approach Study Protocol
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Public Health
Abstract Background Natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes pose significant threats to human lives and infrastructure, particularly in low-lying regions of Pakistan. Among the most vulnerable areas are Sanghar and Dadu in the Sindh province, which experience recurrent flooding. These disasters often overwhelm healthcare systems and underscore the urgent need for adequately [...]
Thermal analysis of meso-scale high-temperature Borehole Thermal Energy Storage (BTES) systems with varying operational cycles
Published: 2025-07-12
Subjects: Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Other Mechanical Engineering
High temperature and short-term subsurface heat storage using BTES is a promising option and an emerging technology for increasing the fraction of renewable energy in the heat sector and supplying stored heat at high and directly usable temperatures. Investigation of thermal interactions of multiple BHEs employed for high-temperature cyclic storage operations is required to understand the system [...]
Microbe-vegetation-nutrient interactions affect long-term carbon accumulation in a northern peatland
Published: 2025-07-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
A Critical Review of Life Cycle Assessment in Shrimp Aquaculture: Uncovering Methodological Dominance and Analytical Blind Spots
Published: 2025-07-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used to evaluate the environmental impacts of shrimp aquaculture, a rapidly expanding global food sector. However, existing shrimp LCA studies report widely divergent results, varying by more than fiftyfold across key impact categories. This systematic review identified 16 peer-reviewed shrimp LCAs and investigates the reasons for these discrepancies, [...]
Recommendations for improving the design, amenity and performance of privately owned, small-scale biobasins
Published: 2025-07-13
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Due to spatial constraints in cities, it is increasingly challenging to integrate appropriate water sensitive urban design (WSUD) solutions. There has been a shift from larger, precinct-scale bioretention systems owned by local governments to smaller scale ‘biobasins’ managed by private landholders. This shift has brought about unique challenges in regulation, design, maintenance, and [...]
The Largest Mountain Belt of the Last Billion Years: The East African Orogen, its tectono-topographic evolution and global significance.
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Hutton’s Principle of Uniformitarianism suggests that the present is the key to the past, and in the present, Earth’s topography is dominated by the Himalaya. The geological record clearly preserves past mountain ranges, but few have purported to have the effect on Earth’s surface systems (such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and ocean chemistry) that the Himalaya does today. The [...]
Volcano-tectonic controls on magmatic evolution at Campi Flegrei, Italy: insights from thermodynamic modelling
Published: 2025-07-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Volcanology
Campi Flegrei caldera (Naples, southern Italy) is one of the most hazardous volcanoes on Earth, having produced more than 70 eruptions in the past 15 kyr, and currently showing significant signs of unrest within a densely populated part of Europe. Post-15 ka eruptions span a range of eruptive styles and compositions, which broadly correlate with the spatial and structural location of vents within [...]
Screening Global Solar and Wind Energy Investment Potential Accounting for Drought and Surplus
Published: 2025-07-14
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Risk Analysis, Sustainability
Climate-induced variability of solar and wind energy impacts renewable electricity scaling. Long duration renewable energy droughts, i.e., extended periods of renewable supply deficits, lead to contract penalties or use of thermo-electric sources, while long duration surpluses result in curtailment or in low energy prices and revenue. We present the first global assessment of the implied [...]