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. 2026 May 27;16:24114. doi: 10.1038/s41598-026-55055-1

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© The Author(s) 2026

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

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Fig. 14 — Simplified geological cross-section of the study region (see location in Fig. 2) illustrating the principal tectonic domains hosting potential hydrogen-generating lithologies (modified after⁹²). The distribution of the fairy circles (blue stars) spatially coincides with zones where three major geological hydrogen-generation mechanisms may operate: (1) shallow to intermediate-depth, low-temperature serpentinization, where the ~ 60 °C isotherm is estimated to occur at depths of approximately 2.5 km; (2) deep-seated, high-temperature serpentinization processes occurring at depths generally exceeding 10 km; and (3) radiolytic hydrogen generation associated with granitoid bodies within the western Mugodzhar zone.