Preprints
There are 8003 Preprints listed.
Autogenic initiation of basin-scale salt tectonics
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Salt structures typically form due to the post-depositional flow of salt triggered and maintained by allogenic drivers such as differential loading, gravity gliding, or shortening. Using ~26,000 km² of 3-D seismic reflection data and 34 wells from the Southern North Sea, we propose that the earliest regional deformation of the Southern Permian Basin salt giant (Zechstein Supergroup) was instead [...]
Horizontal Strain Rate estimation from InSAR Observations and the Strapdown Method
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Other Earth Sciences
Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) is able to estimate ground-surface displacements, but interpreting deformation mechanisms and infrastructure risk requires analysis of spatial displacement gradients. The recently introduced strapdown method enables three-dimensional displacement velocities to be estimated from InSAR observations alone, including the east and north components [...]
Geospatial Foundation Models for forest diversity mapping in structurally complex, species-rich forests
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Foundation-model satellite embeddings have been proposed as transferable, analysis-ready predictors for Earth Observation, yet their value for biodiversity mapping in forest ecosystems remained unclear. This study addresses three main methodological gaps as one of the first applications of foundation-model embeddings to forest diversity mapping in structurally complex forests: (i) a head-to-head [...]
Validating and Comparing Open InSAR Vertical Land Motion Products: Lessons from Three Cases
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Education, Engineering
Open, satellite-derived vertical land motion (VLM) products are increasingly used to estimate relative sea-level rise and coastal hazard, often well beyond the studies that produced them. Researchers often infer the reliability of these VLM products from agreement with other products rather than validating them against independent observations. Researchers then sometimes attribute differences [...]
Decoupling Kinetic and Hydrological Controls on Global Silicate Weathering via a Stratified Observational Factorial Framework
Published: 2026-09-17
Subjects: Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys, Geochemistry
Continental silicate weathering acts as the primary geological sink for atmosphericcarbon dioxide over multimillion-year timescales, yet whether weathering fluxes arefundamentally governed by thermodynamic temperature limits or hydrological runoffremains fiercely debated. Resolving this controversy globally has been hindered by thestrong natural collinearity of terrestrial temperature and [...]
A CNN with spectral-channel adaptation for interpretable and edge-ready fractional vegetation cover mapping using UAS multispectral and imaging spectroscopy
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing
Non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) remains difficult to map in semi-arid fractional vegetation cover (FVC) because it overlaps with photosynthetic vegetation (PV), bare ground (BE), shadows, and mixed vegetation–soil surfaces. We developed an NPV-aware convolutional neural network workflow with spectral-channel adaptation for UAS multispectral and imaging spectroscopy data. The benchmark [...]
Rare deglacial-aged corals point to weaker El Niño in a colder world
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Extreme El Niño events, the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), have increased in frequency since the late 20th century, intensifying concerns about ENSO’s response to a changing climate and its far-reaching impacts on global weather. Yet climate model projections of future ENSO behaviour remain divergent, and simulations under past glacial boundary conditions likewise lack [...]
What constitutes fine-scale geodiversity? Taxonomic geodiversity mapping across environmental gradients in a sub-Arctic mountain environment
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science
The integration of geodiversity information, i.e., the diversity of abiotic features in the Earth surface and subsurface, into assessments of the sustainability and resilience of natural environments and ecosystems is increasingly considered important. However, geodiversity data is highly scale-dependent and there is an urgent need to find optimal ways on how geodiversity should be quantified and [...]
Hotspots and Drivers: Locating Critical Groundwater Storage Watersheds and Their Dominant Factors
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is a vital freshwater resource, and groundwater storage (GWS) is a key indicator of its resilience. This study identifies the watersheds of Türkiye with the most critical GWS conditions and the factors that dominate GWS variability in each of them. GWS, precipitation, and evapotranspiration (ET) data of 25 watersheds (October 2003 – September 2024) are used to train a Graph WaveNet [...]
An Idealized Model of Matrix Storage and the Tidal Response of Coastal Aquifers
Published: 2026-10-08
Subjects: Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Oceanography, Partial Differential Equations
Tides entering a coastal aquifer weaken and lag the sea as they travel inland, and classical theory requires the two rates to be equal. Field records often show the amplitude decaying faster than the phase lag grows, which is usually attributed to geometry or leakage. We examine a third mechanism, the exchange of water between a conduit network and the matrix blocks it surrounds, and ask when [...]
Erosion-induced momentum production and system acceleration govern landslide mobility
Published: 2026-10-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geotechnical Engineering, Glaciology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Sedimentology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Erosion can fundamentally alter landslide acceleration through the produced momentum. However, existing analytical landslide velocity models do not account for the energy dissipation associated with erosion-induced system acceleration. Here, I present a novel, complete dynamical velocity model for erosive landslides that incorporates two intrinsically coupled mechanically essential processes: [...]
Generation of Orientation-Independent Response Spectrum Matched Records Satisfying Minimum Fourier Amplitude and Power Spectral Density Requirements
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Engineering
The seismic design and assessment of critical infrastructure, particularly within the nuclear industry, relies heavily on acceleration time histories compatible with a Design Response Spectrum (DRS). While current spectral matching algorithms effectively tune ground motions to match a target DRS, this process can inadvertently deplete the signal’s energy at specific frequencies, leading to [...]
A 400 Myr subduction memory in the mid-ocean ridge source
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The upper mantle sampled by mid-ocean ridges carries the volatile imprint of past subduction, but the global distribution of hydration through time and how long that imprint survives mixing and melt extraction are poorly known. We investigate the history of mantle hydration by calculating where and when hydration occurred using a plate reconstruction model of subducted water over the past 410 [...]
A Spatiotemporal Dataset of Urban Water Distribution Schedules
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Urban water supply in several rapidly growing cities in Latin America is managed through intermittent distribution schedules rather than continuous service, often in response to drought or water scarcity conditions. However, these practices are unevenly documented, and publicly available information is largely limited to cities where water authorities disclose distribution schedules. As a result, [...]
No Universal Urban Form Heat Relationship: Contrasting Thermal Controls in African Cities
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Rapid urbanization and climate change have intensified urban heat island effects. Tropical African cities face particularly high heat vulnerability, yet they remain underrepresented in urban thermal research. Existing research often assumes universal morphology temperature relationships, lacking cross city comparative evidence and spatially rigorous nonlinear attribution in African contexts. This [...]