Frontiers in Earth Science | New and Recent Articles

Vegetation plays a vital role in maintaining ecological stability, carbon cycling, and food security. However, vegetation dynamics are strongly influenced by large-scale climate oscillations, particularly the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Understanding vegetation responses to different ENSO phases is essential for assessing ecosystem resilience and supporting agricultural planning in monso…

The “Kashmir Seismic Gap” is located between the epicentral regions of the 1905 Kangra and the 2005 Kashmir earthquakes. The area corresponds to the Jhelum basin and encompasses the Kashmir Valley. The geodetic measurements indicate that the Kashmir Himalaya accommodates ∼12 mm/yr of India-Asia convergence and ∼5 mm/yr of dextral shear. However, except for the known Karakoram Fault, which is furt…

Tensile strength of coal naturally exhibit anisotropic characteristics and affected by the spatial distribution of its internal microstructures. Microwave heating realizes auxiliary coal breaking, via the thermal difference generated thermal stress in different material after microwave absorbing. Understanding the tensile strength anisotropy affected by microwave heating is significant for the st…

Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWS) are now operational across multiple jurisdictions, including Canada, issuing messages designed to trigger protective behaviour such as Drop-Cover-Hold-On in the seconds before damaging waves arrive. Because most recipients will have no prior experience of an EEW alert, the experiential background they bring to a first alert is general earthquake comprehensi…

To improve the contour quality of smooth blasting in rock tunnels, a comprehensive study was conducted on the initiation behavior of emulsion explosives subjected to axial shaped-charge jet impact under different charging configurations, confinement conditions, and charge spacings through model experiments, numerical simulations, and field investigations. The results indicate that: (1) the axial …

Ground subsidence in abandoned gypsum mines represents a typical geological hazard in evaporite regions, posing a direct threat to infrastructure and public safety. This study investigates a collapse-induced seismic event (ML3.4) that occurred on 8 March 2025, in an abandoned gypsum mine in Hunan Province, China. The primary objective is to propose a multi-scale conceptual model for this stratal …

The shallow shear-wave velocity structure obtained from surface-wave dispersion inversion is essential for seismic site characterization; however, deterministic inversion provides only point estimates without uncertainty, while existing probabilistic approaches often lack coverage calibration, systematic robustness evaluation, and physical-consistency checks. A mixture density network is trained …

The Sinian Dengying Formation in the western Deyang-Anyue Rift Trough is a key target for deep carbonate gas exploration, yet its reservoir controls remain debated. Integrating core, thin-section, and geochemical data, this study clarifies the coupled mechanisms governing reservoir development. Results reveal that reservoirs predominantly occur in platform-margin and high-energy shoal facies, wit…

IntroductionTo address the lack of a reliable basis for optimizing blasting parameters in deep high-stress tunnels, this study aims to investigate the evolution mechanism of blasting damage and parameter optimization under a confining pressure of 20 MPa.MethodsA numerical model of double-hole blasting coupling ground stress and charge configuration is established using ANSYS/LS-DYNA software, wit…

The Upper Permian succession of the northern Sichuan Basin records plume-related extension within a carbonate-platform system characterized by pronounced lateral facies differentiation. However, basin-scale sequence correlation, the evolutionary history of the Kaijiang–Liangping extensional trough, the stratigraphic affinity of fine-grained siliceous deposits developed in the upper Changxing Form…

Accurate prediction of shale methane adsorption capacity is crucial for reservoir evaluation. This study integrates 486 experimental datasets to develop a multivariate machine learning prediction model. Six key geological parameters, including depth, total organic carbon (TOC), moisture, porosity, vitrinite reflectance (Ro), and clay minerals, were selected as features. Correlation analysis metho…

Double-shield tunnel boring machine (TBM) construction is an important mechanized excavation method for long hydraulic tunnels. However, in mountainous water-conservancy projects, portal construction sites are often confined and tunnel alignments commonly include multiple curves. Conventional out-of-tunnel integral assembly and straight-line launching are therefore difficult to implement. Taking …

Incompleteness and lack of precision are common problems with geochemical data, limiting the data analysis methods that can be reliably applied and what subsets of data can be used. This study introduces a clustering method that is designed to have high robustness to significant data incompleteness. It can also be used to impute missing values and distributions. A Gaussian mixture model is define…

Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) is central to achieving carbon neutrality, with CO2 geological storage serving as a key negative-emission pathway. Although extensive research has addressed storage mechanisms and monitoring tools, the site-specific applicability of these techniques and the trade-off between storage security and cost remain insufficiently constrained. This review sy…

Resolving the origin and flowpaths of meltwaters in Arctic glacierized catchments, beyond the traditional atmospheric versus water-rock framework, is crucial for understanding how weathering processes evolve with glacier retreat and regulate solute export. We investigated the hydrochemistry and isotopic composition of glacial meltwaters and proglacial streams in the Kongsfjorden region (Svalbard)…

Deepwater pre-salt lacustrine carbonate reservoirs in the Santos Basin hold hydrocarbon potential but present exploration challenges due to supercritical CO2. The dual physical nature of supercritical CO2 and reservoir heterogeneity make conventional single-domain fluid identification ambiguous. This study presents an integrated engineering workflow coupling log-scale petrophysical characterizati…

Shale reservoirs influenced by multiscale factors such as mineral composition and depositional processes, are characterized by the development of micro-to nanopores and pronounced bedding structures. These features lead to extreme fluid occurrence states and significantly increased structural complexity of fracture networks after hydraulic fracturing. In the case of degassed crude oil, particular…

Electrical resistivity is a fundamental parameter for evaluating fluid saturation and reservoir properties in shale formations. However, existing conductivity models often exhibit limited accuracy due to the highly complex, coupled conductive mechanisms inherent to shale, which involve multi-scale pore networks, mineral surface conduction, and variable wettability. To address this limitation, thi…

Flood frequency and magnitude are expected to increase under future climate scenarios, yet long-term records of flood variability remain sparse beyond the instrumental period. Lake sediments provide valuable archives of past floods, but existing detection methods often struggle to identify both minerogenic and organic flood layers at high resolution. Here, we present a new non-destructive approac…