Biochar is a carbon rich product of biomass pyrolysis, a process where biological material is exposed to high temperatures, in the absence of oxygen, to cause the decomposition of that material into various chemical and physical components. By going through this process, biochar can be a valuable soil additive and a carbon sink with a high potential to take up a wide variety of contaminants (throu ...[Read More]
Ravi is done with his research, mentally. As he muses on a potential departure from academia – awaiting an unhackneyed sense of perspective – he asks: I want to leave academia! Where do I go? Dear Ravi, I am sorry to hear you’ve given thought to a termination of your academic career. After years of working in geodynamics, it sure shall be a great challenge to find new perspective ...[Read More]
Today marks the centennial of the birth of Marie Tharp, the person responsible for creating the first map of our planet’s ocean floors. Though her work was underappreciated at the time of its publication – mainly because she faced many significant barriers due to her gender – her maps ended up being instrumental evidence in support of the theory of plate tectonics. Marie herself ...[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: Geodesy (G), Ocean Science (OS) and Tectonics and Structural Geology (TS). They are served by the journals: Geoscientific Model Development (GMD), Ocean Science ...[Read More]
We know the topography of the moon better than the Earth’s seafloor, so we need to keep studying the ocean, and, for me, going to sea is the best way. Only twenty percent of the seafloor is already mapped (see the Seabed 2030 Project), leaving eighty percent of our ocean unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. This is why ocean going research is fundamental, not only for seabed mapping, ...[Read More]
This month for GeoTalk, as we approach the centennial of Marie Tharp’s birth next week, we were lucky enough to speak with the author of her biography ‘Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor‘; Hali Felt. Hali has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa and has completed residencies at MacDowell, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecolog ...[Read More]
The photo was taken from the International Space Station (ISS), approx. 400 km above the Earth, in the educational project administered by NASA: Sally Ride EarthKAM, Mission 59, November 2017. The image was requested by a team of students from my college, coordinated by me. Even though we weren’t there, on ISS, to trigger the camera, all the locations in which the photographs were taken are ...[Read More]
In virtually all parts of the world glaciers are retreating, and this is often considered to be one of the clearest signs of global warming (e.g. Leclercq and J Oerlemans, 2011). Glaciers started to shrink in the second half of the 19th century and, apart from some minor interruptions, this development has continued until today. Over the past hundred years glacier melt has made a significant contr ...[Read More]
The world shut down due to COVID-19, but PhDs did not. During these unfamiliar times, most PhD students have found themselves working from home trying more than ever to write as much as possible. Over the past few of months, I have led several online writing retreats in collaboration with doctoral research schools and universities in Norway. They seem to have been very successful to help PhD’s wi ...[Read More]
Plumbing is something we take for granted: the pipes that bring us water to wash and drink, and the pipes that take the waste water away again. We see the taps and basins in our kitchen and bathroom – but the pipes are hidden away under the floor or inside the walls – and we mostly ignore them until there’s a leak or a blockage! It turns out that glaciers have plumbing too – and ...[Read More]
