Preprints
There are 8001 Preprints listed.
Counting the Solomon Islands: How Many Islands Does the Archipelago Actually Contain?
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Solomon Islands is widely reported to comprise approximately 900--1,000 islands, a figure repeated across government, tourism, and encyclopedic sources without a traceable methodology. We re-examine this figure using two independent, reproducible geospatial datasets: the USGS/Esri/UNEP-WCMC Global Islands database (30 m Landsat-derived classification) and OpenStreetMap (OSM) land polygon data [...]
Predicting the reactivity of trawl-disturbed sediment carbon from measurable seabed properties
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Mobile bottom-contact fishing gear disturbs a large area of the continental shelf each year. How much carbon that releases depends on how fast the disturbed material is mineralised. Assessments represent that with a first-order rate constant, and because its value is unmeasured they sample it across five orders of magnitude, which makes it their dominant uncertainty. Here the constant is derived [...]
Flooded Rivers, Drying Wetlands, Vanishing Tributaries: Hydrological Paradox of the East Ganga Plains
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The East Ganga Plains (EGP) present a striking hydrological paradox: while embanked rivers flood with increasing magnitude, adjacent wetlands and groundwater-fed streams are desiccating, and aquifer storage is declining. Using satellite remote sensing and gravimetry, we document that: (i) wetlands exhibit significant water-cover loss despite stable monsoon rainfall; (ii) small rivers and [...]
Physics-informed LSTMs improve streamflow prediction when storage–discharge dynamics are temporally resolved
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Engineering
Flood prediction at sub-daily resolution requires models that are accurate and physically plausible beyond observed conditions. We augment a per-basin Long Short-Term Memory network with a linear reservoir constraint (Q = KS), embedding storage-discharge dynamics as a soft physics loss, and evaluate it in hourly and daily streamflow-prediction experiments across New Zealand and Great Britain. At [...]
ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Precipitation Outlook and Hydrological-Hydrogeological Assessment for the Middle East: August 2026-January 2027
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Higher Education, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
This preprint presents a regional hydrological and hydrogeological interpretation of the ECMWF SEAS5 System 51 ensemble-mean precipitation forecast initialized on 1 August 2026 for the Middle East and adjacent portions of the analysis domain. The supplied NetCDF field is time-mean total precipitation rate (tprate; m s^-1), converted to monthly precipitation depth (mm/month) using the actual [...]
Satellite Embedding: A Review
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Satellite embeddings have become a practical interface between large-scale Earth observation data and downstream geospatial analysis, yet the liter ature is still organized mainly around foundation models rather than the embeddings they produce. This review reframes the area from an embedding centered perspective. We first define satellite embeddings as reusable latent representations derived [...]
Along-strike stress delays the ordering of slip on a fixed-length fault
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The size of a large earthquake depends on how far the rupture runs and how much the fault slips. An early correlation with magnitude can appear while those two contributions are still mixed. Patches at both ends stop every rupture on a 120 km fault, so the length no longer varies and the early order is an order of slip. One background stress is a single value along the fault, and the other also [...]
Effect of the interfacial continuity on the elastic full-waveform inversion
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Full-waveform inversion (FWI) routinely assumes welded interfaces between subsurface layers, yet many geological and engineering targets including karst cavities, fractures, and unbonded soil-structure contacts exhibit interfacial slip. We show that this modelling assumption is not merely a geometric detail but introduces a systematic bias in the recovered physical parameters. Using a [...]
Plasticity more than (linear elastic crack) Propagation may govern standard Propagation Saw Test in snow: evidence from “Fracture toughness of mixed-mode anticracks in highly porous materials” experiments1
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Engineering
An extensive experimental campaign of propagation saw tests (PST) has recently been conducted, enabling systematic investigation of critical cut length vs. slope angle in snowpacks1. PST is considered crucial for understanding avalanche release. Using a linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) framework built upon a linear elastic analysis, it was concluded that not a theoretical but a [...]
The long-term persistence of microbial biospheres introduces a temporal bias into the Drake equation: implications for the search for extraterrestrial life
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Drake equation was designed to estimate the number of communicative technological civilisations, not the prevalence of life. Its lifetime term therefore describes a detectable technological phase that may represent only a small part of a planet’s biological history. This emphasis introduces a temporal bias when Drake-style reasoning is extended from technological civilisations to life more [...]
Global limits on CO2 geological storage deployment using a coupled industry growth - pressure constrained model
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Geology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering
Geological storage of CO2 at scale is critical to meeting climate objectives, yet deployment targets often rely on top-down climate pathways that overlook the coupled constraints of subsurface pressure buildup and realistic industry drilling rates. Here we map global limits on CO2 storage deployment using CO2LOGIX 2.0, an improved model coupling subsurface pressure evolution with country-level [...]
Wildfire severity reshapes remotely sensed surface temperature and vegetation phenology in a Western Cascades forest ecosystem
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wildfire reorganizes forests by altering canopy structure, surface energy balance, vegetation activity, and microclimate. However, these effects remain difficult to quantify across seasons, times of day, burn severities, and complex terrain. We used the 2023 Lookout Fire at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon, to test how fire severity altered coupling between surface temperature and [...]
Azores–Canaries mantle plume interactions revealed by seismic imaging
Published: 2026-09-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Mantle plumes transport heat and material from the deep Earth towards the surface, yet how neighbouring plumes interact and influence mantle flow remains poorly understood. The Azores--Madeira--Canaries region, which hosts several closely spaced mantle upwellings, provides a unique opportunity to investigate these processes. Here we use data from the UPFLOW experiment, an unprecedented [...]
Orogenic architecture diagrams to reconstruct paleogeography and plate tectonics: Newfoundland (Canada) as a case study
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Geology, Tectonics and Structure
Reconstructing paleogeography from accretionary records is challenging due to the difficulty of integrating data sources transcending a range of fields and scales. Here, we present the ‘orogenic architecture diagram’ method to systematically compile geological data in temporal and spatial context at the scale of the ‘building blocks’ of orogens and to use their interpreted geological histories as [...]
A Unified and Scalable Framework for the Comprehensive Evaluation of Hydrological Model Behavior and Structural Diagnostics
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Robust evaluation of hydrological models requires assessing not only predictive accuracy, but also uncertainty behavior and structural realism. This study introduces the Hydrological Model Evaluation System (HyMES), a unified framework that organizes deterministic, probabilistic, and structural diagnostics, including dynamic hysteresis analysis, into a coherent, station level evaluation workflow. [...]