TerraMosaic Daily Digest: October 4, 2026
This catch-up issue is part 1 of a three-issue series allocated from the October 8, 2026 collection. Each issue reviews 429 input records. October 4–6 are editorial issue dates rather than exact paper-publication windows.
Daily Summary
The October 4 catch-up issue examines how past deformation and antecedent conditions shape the next failure. On the Noto Peninsula, river knickpoints and slow-moving landslides preserve complementary associations with vertical and horizontal coseismic displacement. At Niscemi, the January 2026 reactivation combines weak layers, inherited slip surfaces and severe rainfall, with limited pre-event satellite acceleration. In clay-rich terrain in Türkiye, four event inventories and crack-sensitive simulations show that dry spells can amplify the response to subsequent intense rain. Together, these studies broaden trigger assessment beyond rainfall on the day of failure.
Landscape history also shapes wildfire susceptibility. A Nature reconstruction of a thousand years of vegetation and fire in southeastern Australia links the interruption of Indigenous cultural burning to denser eucalypt forest and increased erosion before modern anthropogenic warming. Hazard inventories must also capture short-lived sources: the Afghanistan GLOF analysis documents lakes that formed and expanded within 33–42 days before catastrophic drainage and secondary blockage surges. In mountain forests, calibrated rigid-body simulations show how wet conditions mobilize long deadwood logs, while standing trees can restrict downhill travel yet widen the lateral impact corridor.
Uncertainty enters both hazard prediction and exposure estimates. An updated SPT framework jointly models liquefaction triggering and ground-surface manifestations while indicating database representativeness. Rare-rainfall ensemble sampling reduces uncertainty in statistical design levels but does not establish a physical maximum precipitation bound. Wajima flood maps combine spatially validated classifiers with census exposure, revealing that similar model discrimination can still yield different exposed-population estimates.
The supporting papers connect these hazards to material and observation choices. DEM resolution changes field-scale erosion estimates, progressive surface sealing alters the balance of detachment and runoff transport, and freeze–thaw cycles weaken saline loess. Related studies address earthquake energetics, cyclone landfall, meteotsunami discrimination, underground prospecting and post-earthquake rescue-support interaction. A verified title-level karst study adds a post-fire land-degradation perspective from Bosnia and Herzegovina; other title-level records address pore-gas slope failure, frozen-ground deformation and seismic vulnerability without introducing unavailable results.
Key Trends
This selection connects geomorphic memory, changing source conditions and explicit uncertainty across slopes, floods and earthquake-related ground failure.
- Hazard susceptibility depends on history: Inherited slip surfaces, prior earthquakes, drought-generated cracks and cultural-burning legacies shape how landscapes respond to present forcing.
- Short-lived sources challenge static inventories: Rapidly formed glacial lakes and mobilized deadwood require monitoring of source evolution rather than a permanent list of hazardous objects.
- Triggering and consequences need separate estimates: Liquefaction initiation, surface manifestation, flood susceptibility and population exposure are related quantities with different evidence requirements.
- Resolution and material state change erosion predictions: Terrain grids, sealing, freeze–thaw damage and salinity affect both where sediment is detached and how it can be transferred.
Selected Papers
The selection leads with earthquake-associated landforms, dormant-slope reactivation, drought-amplified shallow landslides and newly formed glacial-lake outbursts. Probabilistic liquefaction, deadwood runout and spatially validated flood exposure provide complementary ground-failure and consequence perspectives. Supporting methods address design-rainfall uncertainty, terrain resolution, material deterioration and monitoring errors; records with unavailable abstracts remain explicitly at title level.
1. Geomorphic Imprints of Coseismic Uplift: Knickpoints and Landslides on the Noto Peninsula, Japan
Core Problem: Persistent landforms may preserve different components of coseismic displacement.
Key Innovation: Noto knickpoints concentrate in strongly uplifted watersheds, while recent and historical slow-moving landslides overlap large horizontal displacement; the spatial association supports possible repeated reactivation without proving its chronology.
2. The reactivation of the Niscemi landslide (southern Italy) after the Cyclone Harry
Core Problem: Historically unstable slopes may fail rapidly after severe weather with limited observed acceleration.
Key Innovation: Niscemi mapping, DInSAR, feature tracking and stability modelling implicate weak layers and inherited slip surfaces; geomorphic history supplements satellite precursors for dormant-slope assessment.
3. Analysis of amplifying effect of antecedent drought on rainfall-induced shallow landslides
Core Problem: Dry antecedent conditions may increase failure when cracks alter infiltration and strength.
Key Innovation: Four events in clay-rich Türkiye combine crack-sensitive modelling with grouped-validation GAM analysis, supporting drought amplification at these sites and the need for additional event validation.
4. Glacial lake outburst flood hazard and downstream impacts: lessons from Afghanistan examples
Core Problem: Inventories of existing lakes can miss newly formed short-lived outburst sources.
Key Innovation: Afghanistan lakes grew over 33–42 days before drainage; field and satellite evidence with breach modelling show severe confined-valley flow and secondary blockage surges, supporting attention to rapid lake formation.
5. Simulation of sliding deadwood logs in mountain forests: towards a quantitative hazard assessment
Core Problem: Deadwood can switch from a protective forest component to a downslope impact source.
Key Innovation: Rigid-body simulations calibrated on two Swiss incidents represent long logs, terrain and trees; wet slopes above about 35° favor sliding, while trees reduce downhill propagation but can broaden lateral trajectories.
6. Probable Maximum Precipitation Estimation Under Climate Change: Addressing Sampling and Bias Correction Uncertainties Using Large Ensemble Climate Simulations
Core Problem: Rare-event sampling and changing-climate bias correction destabilize infrastructure design rainfall.
Key Innovation: Large ensembles and spatial transposition expand samples to almost 10,000 annual maxima per location and narrow rare-event confidence intervals; projected PMP-equivalent return levels are explicitly statistical design estimates rather than a physical upper bound.
7. SPT-Based Evaluations of Seismic Soil Liquefaction Initiation and Severity of Its Ground Surface Manifestation
Core Problem: Liquefaction triggering and surface damage require related but distinct predictions.
Key Innovation: Updated case histories, SPT corrections and Bayesian inference jointly estimate initiation and manifestation severity, with a representativeness index identifying how closely a design site resembles the supporting database.
8. Australia’s current wildfire crisis linked to colonial land-use change
Core Problem: Historical vegetation and fuel changes complicate attribution of current wildfire susceptibility to climate alone.
Key Innovation: A thousand-year southeastern Australian reconstruction links colonial disruption of Gunaikurnai burning to hotter fires, a fourfold rise in eucalypt cover and increased erosion before anthropogenic warming; the regional sequence supports a land-use legacy that amplifies modern climate risk.
9. Integrated assessment of flood susceptibility and population exposure using machine learning: a case study of Wajima, Japan
Core Problem: High flood-model discrimination does not determine how many residents are exposed.
Key Innovation: Five-fold spatial validation in Wajima compares four models; RF and XGBoost perform similarly, while model-dependent susceptibility classes place 33–58% of residents in moderate-to-high exposure zones.
10. Evolution of Scaled Energy During Earthquake Ruptures
Core Problem: Time-integrated seismic energy obscures changes within individual ruptures.
Key Innovation: More than 1,500 events show an energetic first 20–30% of rupture duration, subsequent decline and a smaller terminal rise; heterogeneous dynamic-rupture simulations reproduce the pattern.
11. An Innovative Approach for Estimating Coseismic Surface Uplifts Using Ionospheric Observations From Remote GNSS Stations: First Application for the 2025 Myanmar Earthquake
Core Problem: Sparse near-fault GNSS coverage limits vertical displacement constraints.
Key Innovation: Three total-electron-content peaks recorded more than 300 km away constrain relative acoustic-source locations and strengths along the Myanmar rupture, providing indirect uplift information rather than direct surface displacement measurements.
12. Contrasting Effects of Turbulence on Tropical Cyclones During Landfall
Core Problem: Boundary-layer turbulence can intensify a storm over water but weaken it after landfall.
Key Innovation: Simulations of Beryl, Francine and Milton attribute the reversal to enhanced oceanic heat supply versus continental cool-air entrainment, linking one turbulence change to opposing landfall responses.
13. The Growing Role of Evaporative Demand in Driving Record‐Breaking Droughts in the Amazon Basin
Core Problem: Rainfall deficits alone do not explain recent Amazon drought severity.
Key Innovation: A 1979–2024 decomposition attributes nearly doubled 2024 drought severity and expanded exceptional-drought coverage to evaporative demand; background warming and shortwave radiation both contribute.
14. Distinct Dependencies of Tropical Cyclone Inner‐Core and Outer‐Region Precipitation on Translation Speed and Intensity
Core Problem: Inner-core and outer-region rainfall respond differently to storm motion.
Key Innovation: Satellite observations reveal a nonmonotonic inner-core response but an approximately linear outer-region increase with translation speed, with forward-left rainfall enhancement as storms move faster.
15. Preservation of Isolated Vesicles in Submarine Pumice and Implications for Submarine Slope Stability
Core Problem: Sealed gas vesicles can modify the effective-stress response of submarine pumice deposits.
Key Innovation: Preserved low-pressure vesicles may depress pore pressure when fractured during shear and thereby increase effective stress; the proposed strengthening mechanism remains a material-specific implication rather than a universal slope rule.
16. Shaking table test on accumulation of excess pore water pressure in silty sand ground subjected to repeated liquefaction histories
Core Problem: The stated focus is excess-pore-pressure accumulation after repeated liquefaction histories.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
17. Simulation‐Based Nonlinear Site Amplification Models for Western United States
Core Problem: Sparse empirical coverage limits nonlinear amplification estimates across site conditions.
Key Innovation: 286,254 one-dimensional analyses support Fourier- and response-spectrum amplification models with explicit velocity and input-motion limits; regional ground-motion residuals improve when the nonlinear terms are incorporated.
18. Global disaster risk assessment from Emergency Events Database (2013–2023)
Core Problem: Recent event recurrence needs to be interpreted alongside contextual vulnerability.
Key Innovation: An EM-DAT indicator combines major-event accumulation with national risk values and identifies 14 priority cells; its coarse, threshold-conditioned screening is accompanied by a high-resolution imagery resource.
19. Spatiotemporal patterns of global earthquake disaster impacts from a human-Earth perspective
Core Problem: Event counts, mortality and economic losses can follow different trajectories.
Key Innovation: EM-DAT records for 1980–2024 show increasing recorded events and losses alongside declining mortality indicators, with factor interactions explaining spatial associations rather than establishing causal national risk drivers.
20. Multi-source geospatial modelling of direct economic losses from rainstorm-related disaster events in Guangxi, South China
Core Problem: Changing exposure and clustered event reporting complicate loss attribution.
Key Innovation: 1,811 Guangxi county-event records support grouped, geographic and temporal validation of interpretable loss models; precipitation effects persist under influence tests while the population association weakens.
21. Development of the Potential Evapotranspiration-Vegetation-Precipitation Drought Index (PETVPDI) and Its Application in West Africa Using Remote Sensing Datasets
Core Problem: Supply, evaporative demand and vegetation jointly shape drought variability.
Key Innovation: PETVPDI improves some anomaly correlations but not every pairwise significance test; pixel-relative normalization measures temporal wetness position and should not be read as absolute aridity across locations.
22. Atmospheric fronts and their wave precursors as possible sources of meteorological tsunamis
Core Problem: Atmospheric gravity-wave precursors may indicate a storm's capacity to force coastal oscillations.
Key Innovation: Microbarograph measurements constrain precursor amplitudes and front propagation; comparison with known meteotsunami forcing motivates joint infrasound/gravity-wave monitoring, without establishing operational warning skill.
23. Error evaluation for geotechnical displacement back-analysis via Monte Carlo simulation
Core Problem: Measurement error propagates into inferred strength and subsequent stability estimates.
Key Innovation: Rock-slope Monte Carlo tests show cohesion is more sensitive than stiffness and Bayesian inversion is more robust in the tested scenarios; the suggested 3 mm surface-error limit is site-specific.
24. Distinction between seismic tsunamis and meteotsunamis recorded in Greece from antiquity up to the present
Core Problem: Temporal earthquake coincidence can misclassify atmospheric sea-level disturbances.
Key Innovation: Ten Greek cases are reassessed using credible documents, gauges, attenuation and atmospheric evidence; most favor meteorological forcing, while one local disturbance is interpreted as a seismic seiche.
25. Engineering application of integrated geophysical exploration methods for disaster identification and treatment in thick fault zones of tunnels: a case study of the right tunnel of the West Tianshan ultra-long tunnel
Core Problem: Separate survey windows can miss hazard boundaries in thick fault zones.
Key Innovation: Overlapping seismic and GPR surveys in the West Tianshan tunnel improve continuity of weak, water-bearing and fractured-zone interpretation, with anomaly positions checked against excavation observations.
26. Numerical simulation methodology for seismic response analysis of coupled building ruins and emergency rescue supports
Core Problem: Rescue supports must remain compatible with already damaged structural configurations.
Key Innovation: Restart-based FEM–FDEM preserves ruin mechanical fields and compares frictional and nailed interfaces; one case shows contact mode and pulse-like loading strongly affect stability and support demand.
27. The infiltration paradox: Pore-gas pressure controls on early slope failure during rapid hydraulic loading
Core Problem: The verified study examines pore-gas pressure as a control on early failure during rapid hydraulic loading.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
28. Characterizing surface deformation from ice-rich permafrost degradation in the Beiluhe region, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, using InSAR and interpretable machine learning
Core Problem: The verified study characterizes ice-rich permafrost degradation in Beiluhe using InSAR and interpretable machine learning.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
29. AN EXPEDITIOUS SEISMIC VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT METHOD FOR EXISTING UNREINFORCED MASONRY BUILDINGS IN CONTINENTAL CROATIA
Core Problem: The verified study develops an expeditious vulnerability assessment for existing unreinforced masonry in continental Croatia.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
30. A full-chain resilience assessment framework for seismic disaster management of transportation infrastructure
Core Problem: The verified study develops a full-chain resilience assessment for transportation infrastructure exposed to earthquakes.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
31. Study on slope erosion characteristics of soda-saline loessial soil under freeze–thaw cycles
Core Problem: Freeze–thaw, salt and clay content jointly alter rainfall-driven slope erosion.
Key Innovation: Laboratory and runoff-scouring tests locate much deterioration in the first 3–6 cycles, relate detachment-limited erosion to disintegration and distinguish salt dispersion from clay-related resistance.
32. Spatiotemporal disparities in flood exposure during transformations from natural areas to settlements
Core Problem: The verified study compares flood-exposure disparities as natural areas become settlements.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
33. Tracking hydrological drought propagation in river networks: an event-based framework
Core Problem: The verified study tracks event-scale drought propagation through connected river networks.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
34. Contiguous evolution and hydroclimatic drivers of compound drought–heatwave events across mainland China
Core Problem: The verified study examines spatially contiguous compound-event evolution and hydroclimatic drivers across China.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
35. Characterization and quantification of compound drought-heatwaves events along with population exposure
Core Problem: The most severe climate events need not occur where the most people are exposed.
Key Innovation: A Northeast India–Bangladesh framework combines event indices with population and tests concurrence definitions; projected exposure growth depends on scenario, event metric and demographic change.
36. Influence of depth-dependent in-situ stress on the spatiotemporal distribution of acoustic emissions during rockbursts in circular openings
Core Problem: The verified study examines how depth-dependent stress controls acoustic-emission patterns during circular-opening rockbursts.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
37. Effects of DEM Resolution on Hectare‐Scale Potential Soil Loss Modelling: A Case Study Using a Spatially Distributed Erosion Model
Core Problem: Erosion estimates at field scale depend on the grid used to represent relief and flow concentration.
Key Innovation: LiDAR-derived grids from 1 to 30 m produce nearly threefold differences in mean soil loss; the study recommends fine grids for local erosion zones and cautions against transferring coarse regional results to field management.
38. State of Stress in Subduction Zone Forearcs: Influence of the Mantle Wedge Corner and Serpentinization
Core Problem: Buoyancy and elasticity of a serpentinized wedge can compete with plate-coupling forces.
Key Innovation: Quasi-two-dimensional models predict differing tension and compression patterns across four subduction systems as wedge properties, coupling depth and friction vary; the work constrains stress interpretation rather than forecasting earthquakes.
39. Hydrological Extremes Increase Water‐Resource Constraints Under Climate Change
Core Problem: Annual runoff totals omit constraints imposed by low flows and rapidly released high flows.
Key Innovation: Across 520 basins, an ensemble projects declining low-flow and accessible-runoff metrics in more than 40% of basins; lower emissions mitigate the declines in the investigated scenarios.
40. A Mechanistic Approach Accounting for Progressive Soil Surface Sealing in Interrill Erosion Modeling
Core Problem: Surface sealing simultaneously suppresses detachment and increases runoff transport capacity.
Key Innovation: Coupled sealing, infiltration and overland-flow modelling reproduces laboratory sediment loads with NSE 0.70–0.89 and shows why instantaneous or omitted sealing produces slope-dependent errors.
41. DeepTopoClustering: Unsupervised Derivation of Surface Process Taxonomy from 4D Point Clouds for Topographic Monitoring
Core Problem: Detected surface changes need interpretable grouping into processes.
Key Innovation: DeepTopoClustering encodes change histories as GeoMorphograms and derives a hierarchy of coastal process types, reaching F1 0.78 against expert annotations across two beach datasets.
42. Learning joint probabilistic weather forecasts from station observations alone
Core Problem: Compound risk depends on joint predictive distributions rather than separate marginal forecasts.
Key Innovation: CLARA learns five-variable Gaussian forecasts from 96 stations with about 28,000 parameters and improves joint scores; covariance recalibration helps short leads but can overcorrect longer leads.
43. GMM-SWE v1.0: A GRACE–Meteorology-Constrained Dataset of Snow Water Equivalent, Snow Depth, and Snow Density over the Northern Hemisphere, 2003–2022
Core Problem: Satellite water-storage observations do not directly isolate snow mass or density.
Key Innovation: GMM-SWE separates non-snow storage, assimilates GRACE with ERA5-Land and models compaction for 2003–2022; evaluation against 13,135 stations supports hemispheric hydrological use, with discussion-preprint status retained.
44. Virtual Rain v1.0: a unified toolkit for high-resolution rainfall simulation and disaggregation
Core Problem: Daily rainfall simulations need coherent subdaily disaggregation.
Key Innovation: Virtual Rain integrates an existing generator and disaggregation model into Python/R routines and an interactive interface; its contribution is accessible implementation, not a new rainfall-generating theory.
45. Interpretable Machine Learning for Predicting Freeze-Thaw-Induced Sandstone Strength Degradation: Physical Mechanisms and Engineering Validation
Core Problem: Prediction accuracy and inferred material thresholds need external validation.
Key Innovation: A 328-sample sandstone model links porosity and saturation to strength degradation and performs well on 18 independent Urumqi specimens; learned SHAP transitions should not be treated as universal causal thresholds.
46. Numerical Study and Forecasting of Hydromechanical Responses of Saturated Rocks Under Excavation with Physics-Informed Neural Networks Model
Core Problem: Boundary effects and coupled fluid–solid equations complicate learned excavation response.
Key Innovation: Stress splitting, sequential training and hybrid collocation achieve errors below 3% against FEM in the tested cases; the reference-data-assisted model's long-term extrapolation is not independently demonstrated field forecasting.
47. Soil degradation and wildfire impact on morphology of karst regions: Insights from Bosnia and Herzegovina
Core Problem: The verified study examines soil degradation and wildfire-related morphological change in Bosnia and Herzegovina's karst regions.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.
48. Effectiveness of multi-source merged soil moisture products using different triple collocation methods: A comprehensive assessment incorporating spatial similarity evaluation framework
Core Problem: Temporal scores do not establish accurate spatial moisture patterns.
Key Innovation: A local two-dimensional triple-collocation merge and structural-similarity evaluation improve heterogeneous-region patterns, with regional differences among SMAP, ASCAT and ERA5-Land retained.
49. Hybrid physics-data-driven diagnosis approach for transverse mechanical state of segmental tunnels considering discontinuous joint movements
Core Problem: Continuous displacement models cannot represent discontinuous segment-joint motion.
Key Innovation: Characteristic input functions and first-order physical losses reconstruct tunnel fields under sparse noisy monitoring, while simultaneously unknown stiffness parameters can still produce nonunique inverse solutions.
50. Maximum achievable span of rock-reinforced caverns in jointed rock masses – A parametric study
Core Problem: The verified parametric study examines achievable span of rock-reinforced caverns in jointed rock masses.
Key Innovation: Not assessed: a reliable abstract matching the verified record was unavailable. Findings and validation performance cannot be established from bibliographic evidence alone.