Antarctica is well known for its large ice sheet, covering 98% of the continent. A large part of the ice sheet is losing mass leading to vertical and horizontal movements of the crust as well as changes of the gravitational attraction. To observe these changes in gravity with the highest accuracy, it is necessary to visit Antarctica and measure gravity on a regular basis. Since the late 198 ...[Read More]
“I was told that there will be a piedmont glacier on the way from Station Nord, a Danish military base in northeast Greenland, to our destination in no-man’s-land next to the 79°N Glacier. On half the way, we passed the beautiful Elephant Foot Glacier, named after its symmetric shape originating from the viscous flow of the ice. The glacier is located on a peninsula and connected to a small ...[Read More]
Each year EGU presents several keynote sessions called the Union Symposia and Great Debates. These Union-wide events are carefully selected each year to cover topics that are of broad interest to our members, regardless of which Division or field of Geoscience they most closely associate with. During the two weeks of the meeting we shared ten Great Debates and Union Symposia streamed live d ...[Read More]
Why talk about wine on the GMPV blog? Well, this geologist-favourite drink is not only good memories of the EGU General Assembly but also a topic that spans among all the GMPV categories. Indeed, wine composition, flavour, structure and quality are inevitably bound to the mineralogy and geochemistry of the soil, making it so common and appreciated since ancient times. And what gives us a nice comp ...[Read More]
Last year we introduced the ASPECT hackaton on this geodynamics blog. It was the first hackathon which went virtual which brought a whole set of new challenges. This year was the 8th version of the yearly hackathon, and it was still virtual (unfortunately). Fortunately lessons where learned from the previous virutal hackathon and generally from working more than a year online. Therefore a short bl ...[Read More]
The Zugspitze Geodynamic Observatory Germany (ZUGOG) has been setup on the summit of mountain Zugspitze at an altitude of almost 3000 m during 2018 with the main scientific objective being a better understanding of seasonal and long-term mass redistributions in the European Alps. This knowledge is very important (e.g. with regard to water storage and its high sensitivity to climate change), but is ...[Read More]
Each month we feature specific Divisions of EGU and during the monthly GeoRoundup we will be putting the journals that publish science from those Divisions at the top of the Highlights roundup. For July, the Divisions we are featuring are: Natural Hazards (NH) and Geomorphology (GM). They are served by the journals: Geoscientific Model Development (GMD), Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences ( ...[Read More]
The EGU’s #vEGU21 streamed a wide variety of virtual sessions from Short Courses to Union Symposia. While most #vEGU21 sessions had a specific scientific focus, a few highlighted topics that were of interest to geoscientists across multiple disciplines. The Union Symposia 3: “A Climate and Ecological Emergency: Can a pandemic help save us…?” was one of these sessions with a high level of participa ...[Read More]
Understanding the plate tectonics initiation can give us incredible opportunity to guess the physical state of the early Earth. This week, Hee Choi, a Ph.D. candidate, takes us on a journey on initiation of plate tectonics and how continental crustal growth is related to it. Our planet Earth is the only place where plate tectonics takes place. No other planet or rocky moon in our solar system has ...[Read More]
The mantle makes up the bulk of Earth, extending from near the surface to the edge of the core 2900 km down. It constitutes 84% of Earth’s volume and has roughly 6 times the mass of Mars! Despite its impressive bulk, the mantle is almost everywhere covered by several km of crust. As a result we don’t have a lot of pieces of it that we can look at, hold or study. Those we have (e.g. xenoliths ...[Read More]
