Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.03046

Spatially Organized Hillslope Weakening Localizes Retrogressive Thaw Slumps across the Tibetan Plateau

Yuting Yang·Gang Mei·Nengxiong Xu·Yongshuang Zhang·Jianbing Peng
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Long-term permafrost warming on the Tibetan Plateau is continuously and broadly reshaping cold-region landscapes, and has produced numerous localized and clustered retrogressive thaw slumps (RTSs). However, the question why RTSs are highly localized and clustered under the widespread permafrost warming remains incompletely understood. To understand and explain the RTS localization and clustering, we propose the Hillslope Weakening Field (HWF), which represents the spatial distribution of relative hillslope weakening states jointly formed by multiple environmental conditions, including thermal conditions, moisture and soil properties, topographic setting, permafrost and ground-ice conditions, and land-surface cover. We examined the correspondence between the HWF and RTS spatial selectivity across seven study regions on the Tibetan Plateau. Positive HWF-RTS correspondence was observed in six of the seven regions, with consistently strong relationships in five. In these five regions, RTSs preferentially occurred on more strongly weakened hillslopes, with occurrence rates 3.35-5.09 times the regional background rate within the 10% most strongly weakened slope units. Moreover, high-weakening hillslopes were not spatially isolated but correlated and connected across the landscape. RTS-bearing slope units and their surrounding hillslopes showed higher weakening levels than RTS-unrecorded slope units and their surroundings, and the weakening contrast declined with distance. These results suggest that RTSs preferentially occur on more strongly weakened hillslopes and cluster where high-weakening states are spatially continuous and connected. Our findings show how spatial differences in hillslope weakening states can help explain why geomorphic responses to widespread permafrost warming are highly heterogeneous across permafrost landscapes.

Explore related subjects

physics.geo-ph

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yuting Yang, Gang Mei, Nengxiong Xu, Yongshuang Zhang, Jianbing Peng. 2026-10-02. Spatially Organized Hillslope Weakening Localizes Retrogressive Thaw Slumps across the Tibetan Plateau. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03046

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Acceleration methods for the planar 3D ILSA hydraulic fracturing model

Planar 3D models of hydraulic fracturing provide a practical balance between models with restrictive geometric assumptions and fully 3D simulators, capturing fractures with arbitrary planar footprints at moderate computational cost. Nevertheless, applications such as treatment design optimization and mini-frac test interpretation require large ensembles of simulations, for which the cost of planar 3D models remains a significant bottleneck. This work presents acceleration strategies for the planar 3D Implicit Level Set Algorithm (ILSA) to reduce simulation runtime while preserving numerical accuracy. A unified planar 3D ILSA scheme that consolidates the nested loops of the elastohydrodynamic solver and the front tracking algorithm into a single iterative process is introduced. A matrix splitting approach is applied to the linearized elastohydrodynamic system, moving the dense part of the elasticity operator to the right-hand side and yielding a sparse system matrix that can be solved more efficiently. Anderson acceleration is incorporated into the solution of the elastohydrodynamic system to improve convergence. A predictor--corrector scheme is additionally examined in combination with these methods. Each technique is evaluated individually and in combination on both the reference and unified schemes across five benchmark cases. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the unified scheme alone delivers an average 2.3x speed-up, reaching 3.8x for the Sandglass case. The combined application of all techniques achieves an average 4.2x speed-up and up to 14.4x for the Sandglass case. The schemes are also assessed during fracture closure, where the matrix splitting and Anderson acceleration prove most effective, together reaching up to 3.4x.

physics.geo-ph↗
arXiv2026

Constructive Reuse of Free-Surface Ghost Wavefields in Marine Seismic Data: A Propagation-Based Framework

Recent advances in marine seismic acquisition and processing have substantially improved the decomposition of free surface ghost wavefields. Building upon these developments, this study proposes a propagation-based framework in which decomposed ghost wavefields are treated as physically meaningful components that can be constructively reused as additional wavefield components. Starting from a finite inverse expansion of the ghost operator, a recursive formulation is derived and implemented through adaptive predictive decomposition. The formulation is subsequently extended to multidimensional wavefields through wavefield extrapolation and reciprocity, enabling decomposition into components associated with real and mirrored sources and receivers. The decomposed wavefields are then restored to a common acquisition geometry by survey sinking and combined through wavefield superposition, forming a preprocessing module that can be incorporated into conventional marine seismic processing workflows. Synthetic examples demonstrate increased signal strength through ghost reuse, spectral amplitude recovery of ghost-related notches including frequencies near DC, and clear decomposition of ghost-related wavefield components. Field-data examples acquired using a conventional shallow-towed airgun survey further demonstrate improvements in reflector continuity and coherent reflection energy, together with partial restoration of spectral amplitudes degraded by the free surface ghost, supporting the practical applicability of the proposed framework. The proposed framework therefore provides a processing-based complement to conventional ghost decomposition technologies and suggests a unified approach in which acquisition geometry and ghost processing are jointly optimised to maximise the usable wavefield information.

physics.geo-ph↗
arXiv2026

The NCS-Model: A seismic foundation model trained on the Norwegian repository of public data

We present the NCS-models, a family of seismic foundation models pretrained on a large curated share of full-stack seismic cubes from the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) available through the public DISKOS database. The model weights are open-sourced for the wider geoscience community. Foundation models trained with large-scale self-supervision are emerging as a promising basis for automatic seismic interpretation. However, most existing seismic models rely on limited or proprietary datasets, and it remains unclear how well natural-image foundation models transfer to seismic data. Our goals are to develop basin-scale seismic foundation models, provide practical recipes for scalable 3D training, and compare the downstream performance of practical configurations trained under similar pretraining budgets. Using masked autoencoders with Vision Transformer backbones, we pretrain models on a DISKOS-derived corpus of 3D time- and depth-migrated seismic volumes. The NCS-model variants use 2D, 2.5D multi-view, and 3D tokenization and each variant is pretrained using approximately 250 GPU-hours on the same hardware. We evaluate the models using frozen backbones together with k-nearest neighbors and linear probing on NCS interpretation benchmarks and one out-of-basin benchmark. Baselines include an ImageNet-pretrained MAE, a frontier vision foundation model, and a globally pretrained seismic foundation model. Following large-scale pretraining on the curated DISKOS corpus, NCS-2.5D achieves the highest average performance among all evaluated models. The resulting embeddings additionally support similarity search for interactive interpretation.

physics.geo-ph↗