Concomitant thrusting and magmatism resulted in the development of ductile mylonites in the Calamita Schists, part of the contact aureole of the Late Miocene Porto Azzurro pluton. This mylonite is made up of stretched and recrystallized quartz layers, interlayered with thin sericite-rich levels. Sericite resulted from the crushing of contact-metamorphic minerals such as andalusite, cordierite, and ...[Read More]
Martijn van den Ende, a Postdoctoral research fellow at Université Côte d’Azur, takes us through his seismoArt project – a new and colourful way of visualising the ground motions of earthquakes! First of all: how does it work? Imagine that you have an incredibly steady hand, holding a pen, and a piece of paper on a table. Once you put your pen on the paper, an earthquake happens ...[Read More]
Where is Webb? This seemingly simple question is quickly making its way into everyday conversation, and not just in scientific and astronomy circles. After a long 32-year wait, NASA officially launched the James Webb Telescope a couple of weeks ago on 25 December 2021. More recently, the telescope deployed its final primary mirror segment on 8 January this year, a crucial milestone in its mission ...[Read More]
Trying to juggle teaching, advising, publishing, finding a new (or permanent) job, relocating, attending conferences, and actually doing research sometimes requires more hours in the day than exist (oh and that global pandemic situation is sticking around). Additionally, many scientists have children or are starting a family at the same time as maintaining and building a career. In this week’s blo ...[Read More]
The hard truth is, that the geosciences are among the least diverse disciplines in the wide fields of the natural sciences. When we look at the time span from 1973 to 2016, we find that 14,246 PhD degrees were given to white men, while “only” ~5234 were earned by white women in the US. These numbers are already quite shocking, but I promise you it will even get worse: a total of only 163 PhD degre ...[Read More]
It’s been well established that tsunamis generate magnetic fields as they move seawater (which is conductive unlike freshwater) through the Earth’s magnetic field. Although researchers previously predicted that the tsunami’s magnetic field would arrive before a change in sea level, they lacked the means to simultaneously measure magnetics and sea level to confirm this phenomenon. Now, a new study ...[Read More]
Hello all, Matthew here wishing you a very Happy New Year! A new year provides an opportunity for a fresh start, a chance to reflect on the past and look to the future. I don’t know about you, but 2021 was a rather mixed bag for me, with strict lockdowns gradually fading into freedoms (and back again…). 2022 still holds many uncertainties, but I do hope that as a community we can come together aga ...[Read More]
It can be tough realising you’re not on the path you want to be on. This week, we have Leiaka Welcome from the Colorado School of Mines showing us how a change of heart led her to start her PhD journey. Currently on social media (Instagram Reel, TikTok), there is a video trend where users are editing a video of themselves in a scenario with an audio sound where you can hear a classic record scratc ...[Read More]
Hotspot Theory How would you explain a series of volcanoes in the middle of the ocean such as the Hawaii, the Midway or the Canary islands? J.T. Wilson, in 1963, suggested they are formed by relatively small, long-lasting, and exceptionally hot regions of magma located beneath the Earth crust, so-called “hotspots” (Wilson, 1963). Firstly, he applied this idea to the Hawaiian Islands, but the conce ...[Read More]
Sometimes in order to test a theory about how processes work below the surface of the Earth, scientists need to recreate minerals found in very specific circumstances. This photograph was taken through a binocular microscope during a critical step of the creation of artificial peridotite: extraction of the artificial peridotite from its gold capsule. The sample is a little cylinder, 3 mm long with ...[Read More]
