Frontiers in Earth Science | New and Recent Articles

Turbidity currents commonly transport mixtures of clay, silt, and sand, but reduced theories of depositional onset often treat the suspended load as one effective class. This obscures a central sedimentological issue: different grain-size fractions can pass from bypass to deposition at different downstream locations. Here we develop a class-dependent state-variable theory for depositional onset i…

Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) are typical mountain hazards on the Tibetan Plateau, posing serious threats to the Sichuan–Tibet transportation corridor. This study focuses on the Dankanongba glacial lake in Bomi, Tibet. Through methods such as remote sensing interpretation, field investigation, regional geomorphological feature analogy, and numerical simulation, the development characterist…

Volcanic mercury cannot be interpreted from bulk flux alone because the atmospheric transport, deposition, and preservation depend on speciation. This study presents a thermodynamic–kinetic approach for constructing equilibrium and quench speciation diagrams for mercury-bearing volcanic gases. The proposed workflow treats the major H–O–C–S–Cl–Br gas system as the thermodynamic background controll…

In the stability assessment of geotechnical engineering, predicting the spatial distribution of cracks on joint surfaces is a key but unresolved issue. This study combines direct shear tests with machine learning methods to analyze the influence of surface shape on the shear failure behavior. Based on the Naive Bayes classifier, a prediction model was constructed. Under constant normal force cond…

IntroductionSmall-scale irrigated agriculture in arid regions relies heavily on unmetered groundwater, creating an “invisible pumping” threat to aquifer sustainability. Monitoring these diffuse withdrawals remains a critical challenge for water governance. This study proposes a synergistic multi-sensor remote sensing workflow to infer groundwater abstraction and assess its impact on local water s…

IntroductionTo address the difficulty of simultaneously achieving high density, high-temperature stability, low-friction transport, effective gel breaking, low formation damage, and operational reliability in ultra-deep well fracturing, a sodium-formate-weighted non-crosslinked fracturing fluid was developed using a hydrophobically associating polymer containing C16AMSE-Na. Unlike previously repo…

Rock typing plays a pivotal role in reservoir characterization by categorizing reservoir rocks into distinct units based on their petrophysical and geological properties. This is essential for accurate reservoir modelling, simulation, and enhanced hydrocarbon recovery. Conventional techniques, including the Hydraulic Flow Units (HFU) and Winland R35 methods, have provided foundational insights ov…

In the delineated watershed containing Wadi Samnan near Az Zulfi, Saudi Arabia, soil erosion is a local management concern because sparse vegetation, erodible sandy surface materials, escarpment-influenced terrain, and episodic rainfall events can concentrate runoff and sediment movement along wadi channels and drainage corridors. These conditions make it difficult to identify erosion-prone zones…

In tropical agricultural regions, accurate estimation of reference evapotranspiration (ET0) remains challenging due to climatic variability, data scarcity, and limitations of empirical models such as FAO-56 Penman–Monteith. To provide the technical basis for future field-based evapotranspiration studies, this study reports the design, construction, and calibration of an automated weighing lysimet…

Topographic free surfaces and seismic anisotropy significantly modify seismic wave propagation. With increasing demands for high-precision subsurface imaging, advanced seismic prospecting and seismological imaging methods require simultaneous consideration of topographic free surface and anisotropy effects on P-wave propagation. However, conventional finite-difference methods struggle to accurate…

High-altitude desert ecosystems exhibit extreme conditions, including intense UV radiation, strong diurnal temperature shifts, and aridity, shaping bacterial abundance and pedogenesis. This study investigates how episodic water availability shapes bacterial abundance and soil forming processes in a temporary lake system on the Barrancas Blancas plain (Ojos del Salado region). Using a multi-method…

Tourism destination image encompasses the multifaceted perceptions of visitors that influence their choice of destination. However, current computational methodologies often analyze visual and textual signals separately and seldom link image perception to the quality of recommendations. This study introduces multimodal destination image perception and recommendation (MM-DIPR), a framework utilizi…

Under climate change, the increasing frequency of extreme rainfall events has made soil cut slopes more prone to progressive instability. Understanding their deformation–failure mechanisms and reinforcement effects is therefore of engineering significance. However, previous studies have mainly focused on overall stability evaluation or mechanical behavior of anti-slide piles, while the progressiv…

IntroductionInterlayer slip is a key mechanism during fold evolution; however, its effects on preexisting or contemporaneous secondary structures (e.g., cleavage and fractures) remain poorly constrained. This study investigates a well-exposed outcrop in the southern Yidun Arc, northwestern Yunnan, to decipher the modification of fold-related structures by interlayer slip and the resulting tectoni…

Deep learning (DL)-based three-dimensional (3D) gravity inversion has emerged as a promising approach for subsurface density reconstruction in near-surface resource exploration, offering significantly lower computational cost than conventional inversion methods for large datasets. However, existing convolutional neural network (CNN)-based gravity inversion studies are largely limited to binary or…

Elastic full-waveform inversion serves as a fundamental technique for recovering subsurface elastic parameters. However, its application is hindered by mode coupling between P- and S-waves, multi-parameter crosstalk, and a strong dependence on the initial model, all of which degrade the accuracy of velocity model building at depth. The conventional inversion methods employing P-wave sources rely …

Reservoir water level monitoring and early warning are critical components of flood control and disaster mitigation in river basins, as they can effectively prevent dam failures or downstream flooding. However, existing reservoir monitoring systems generally suffer from response delays and ineffective early warnings when dealing with sudden anomalies in water level readings (such as those caused …

The efficient development of tight sandstone reservoirs is challenged by complex pore structures and heterogeneous remaining oil distribution. This study provides a quantitative pore-scale investigation into waterflooding mechanisms in the Changqing Oilfield’s C61 reservoir using Real Sandstone Micro-Models that preserve native pore geometry and wettability. Through integrated physical experiment…

IntroductionDuring seismic data acquisition, noise interference and bandwidth limitations often degrade signal-to-noise ratio and resolution, thereby compromising geological interpretation.MethodsTo address this issue, we propose an adaptive dual-attention wavelet denoising and enhancement network (AdaWaveNet) based on a trainable wavelet feature extractor. The network is built upon trainable dis…

The Huadian area in Jilin Province records multiple tectonic phases from the Paleozoic to the Mesozoic, which have generated a complex geological framework. However, Jurassic magmatic rocks are extremely scarce in this region, resulting in a significant gap in the geological record for this critical period. This study presents integrated geochemical, zircon U-Pb geochronology, and Hf isotopic dat…