Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
Net energy analysis reveals sectoral strategies to mitigate derailment risks of electrification.
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mitigating climate change largely relies on substituting fossil fuels with low-carbon, electricity-producing energy sources. Resulting electrification alters sectoral energy demand and efficiency, and therefore also affects the amount of energy required to build energy transition infrastructure such as solar and wind farms, or grid extensions. As these transition energy requirements are [...]
Ichnoliths as results of authigenesis associated with aquatic animal traces
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Sedimentology
Animal-made bioturbational structures modify physio-chemical conditions and biota on the sediment surface and below. The behavior of the trace makers chiefly causes such changes by sediment irrigation, mucus lining, organic matter storage, microbial gardening etc. Such traces are preferential loci for accumulation of organic material that may foster syn- to post-bioturbational mineral [...]
Sampling variability under extreme skewness: sample size guidance for future methane measurement campaigns
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Methane emissions from the oil and gas sector follow highly right-skewed distributions, making it hard to accurately quantify average emissions with a limited number of measurements. In this study, we probe the statistical implications of sampling (i.e., measuring) from these highly right-skewed distributions, using six US oil and gas basins as an example. For each basin, we provide a minimum [...]
Global Climate Risks for Outdoor Sports Under CMIP6 Scenarios: A Multi-Indicator Assessment Based on WBGT, Heat Index, Heavy Rainfall, and Heatwaves
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Physiology
Outdoor sports are increasingly exposed to climatic conditions that challenge athlete safety, performance and event organisation. Despite extensive physiological and epidemiological evidence on heat stress, no global assessment has yet quantified how multiple climate hazards will jointly constrain outdoor sport under future climate change. Here we provide the first global, CMIP6-based, [...]
Tropical cyclones intensify mesoscale eddy variability and accelerate Western Boundary Current instability
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Tropical cyclones strongly disrupt the upper ocean, yet their influence on mesoscale variability in western boundary current systems remains poorly quantified. The Gulf of Mexico, where the Loop Current regularly sheds large warm-core eddies, offers an ideal setting to examine how hurricanes reshape mesoscale dynamics. Using a high-resolution ocean model and hurricane-denial experiments, we [...]
Plastic more than brittle failure may govern standard propagation saw tests
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Engineering
Understanding standard (1 m) propagation saw test (PST) as an invaluable tool for studying failure of snowpacks has remained elusive. Although fracture mechanics theories are commonly applied for interpreting PSTs, recently performed standard PSTs under controlled conditions of slope angle/loading suggest that such theories cannot adequately explain critical cut length measurements vs. slope [...]
A metadata schema for documenting material samples from multiple domains
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Library and Information Science
This paper documents a metadata schema, implementation, and associated vocabularies developed for the Internet of Samples (iSamples) project to integrate geoscience, archaeology/anthropology, biology and genomics sample descriptions in a single cross-domain catalog. To develop the sample description scheme for sample discovery across these disparate domains, we reviewed the metadata schema and [...]
Amazon deforestation footprint across global food and financial systems
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Remote Sensing
Agriculture-driven deforestation in the Amazon remains a major threat to ecosystem stability, biodiversity, and climate regulation. Yet the role of global commodity consumption and finance in driving deforestation in the Amazon remains poorly understood and inadequately addressed. We provide the first comprehensive assessment of the Amazon deforestation footprint embedded in global supply chains [...]
Seismic Evidence for an Ultralow Velocity Zone Beneath the Cape Verde Hotspot
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mega ultralow velocity zones (mega-ULVZs), thin patches of strongly reduced seismic velocity with large horizontal extent just above the core-mantle boundary (CMB), are increasingly found beneath deep mantle plumes, suggesting a link to hotspot volcanism. The Cape Verde hotspot is thought to overlie a deep plume, but whether a ULVZ exists at its base has remained unknown. We present [...]
Discharge Deficits in the Nepali Himalaya Linked to Greening and Warming
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Hydrology
Anthropogenic climate change and rapid infrastructure development have drastically altered the hydrology of many watersheds, influencing the speed at which water is absorbed, stored, and distributed. In this work, we use long-term daily discharge records in the Nepali Himalaya alongside rainfall and snowmelt data to explore whether there have been large-scale shifts in the conversion of upstream [...]
Scaling Spatiotemporal Transformers for Regional Food Security: A Tri-Stream Latent-Dynamic Approach to Pre-Harvest Yield and Price Forecasting
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Pre-harvest yield forecasting and price stability prediction are critical for food security planning in climate-vulnerable regions, yet existing approaches struggle to integrate heterogeneous data streams spanning satellite imagery, historical agricultural statistics, and socioeconomic indicators. We present the Tri-Stream Latent-Dynamic Transformer (TLDT), a novel deep learning architecture that [...]
The Anthropocene as a Multi-Level Stability Landscape Regimes, Transitions, and Reorganization of the Human–Earth System
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Understanding the evolution of the human–Earth system over decadal-to-centennial timescales remains a central challenge in Earth system science. The Anthropocene is commonly described using trajectories, tipping elements, and scenario pathways, which capture non-linear dynamics but do not provide a unified representation of regime structure and transitions at planetary scale. Here we introduce a [...]
Urban Green Cover and Land Surface Temperature in Ho Chi Minh City: A Remote Sensing Analysis of Vegetation Cooling Effects Across Historical Development Rings, 1990–2025
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
Ho Chi Minh City's 11.3 million residents live in a landscape shaped by four political regimes — French colonial, wartime, socialist, and market-era — each of which built the city it needed and left the green space debt for the next. Using Sentinel-2 and Landsat satellite imagery from 1990 to 2025, we map vegetation cover and surface temperature across the city at 100-meter resolution and trace [...]
Compound Drivers of Antarctic Sea Ice Loss
Published: 2026-02-10
Subjects: Oceanography
Antarctic sea-ice extent began declining since 2015, reaching its lowest extent in the post-1970s observational era in 2023. To diagnose the drivers of this decline, we analyse an observationally constrained sea ice-ocean model spanning 2013-2023, and identify three distinct phases of sea-ice retreat. First, an intensification of westerly winds preconditioned the Southern Ocean via increased [...]
Testing the accuracy and transferability of remotely sensed biomass models across heterogeneous grasslands
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Grassland aboveground biomass provides key insights into ecological processes such as carbon sequestration, animal movement patterns, and agricultural management practices. Different model types have been developed to estimate grassland biomass from satellite imagery. However, differences in model performance across sites with varying management and ecology remain largely understudied. In this [...]