Back in the day when my group organised the yearly retreat, we would also plan for a movie night. Usually, we would not get far because a heated discussion would break out about the quality of the movie: “…but this is a terrible movie!”, my colleagues would scream in agony and despair. In my opinion, that was exactly the point! The movies are so bad they passed the threshold of badness and e ...[Read More]
With the Natural Hazards 101 series, we meant to bring our readers closer to the terminology often used in the field of natural hazards, but that may not be so familiar. We started defining the very concept of hazard and natural hazard. We moved then to the concept of risk, which brought us to define exposure and vulnerability. In this episode, we will digest the disaster terminology provided by ...[Read More]
As a European scientific union with over 20,000 members, the EGU is well positioned to provide feedback on the current and future state of research and innovation funding in Europe. The recent cuts to the EU’s 2021-2027 research budget from European Parliament’s initial proposal of €120 billion to the current proposal of €81 billion (at 2018 prices), will not only affect researchers througho ...[Read More]
As a child, Shakir remembers long extreme winters with heavy snowfall and dry blistering winds, where it was hard to play outside. He grew up in a village named Gulmit, located at an elevation of 2500 m, surrounded by the high snow caped mountains in the Karakoram Range in northern Pakistan. That was 30 years ago, when climate change was still not a cause of concern for the local people. Today, in ...[Read More]
Hermione has finally completed her graduate studies, with some extra-curricular training that will remain unnamed here and with activities which some will not remember. Now the time has come to use that newly acquired title for good although demands, desires and duties meander through the realm of possibilities, leaving Hermione in a perpetual plight: What to do when obtaining a PhD in geodynamics ...[Read More]
Cooking of course! Let me explain. This week, instead of doing his job, Antoine Rozel (senior researcher in ETH Zürich), shows that all your life problems will instantly disappear if you start cooking. Warning, this introductory paragraph is not going to cheer you up, skip it if you are already feeling blue unless you want to suffer a little more (that’s OK). Clearly the explosion of number ...[Read More]
Conducting field courses in times of a pandemic can be challenging. In our case, we had to cancel a planned field trip in economic geography that would have taken 19 students and two advisors to the Valle Maira in the Italian province of Cuneo in the Piemont. We had planned to spend 10 days in this region to develop ideas for sustainable development of peripheral mountain regions. Students would h ...[Read More]
An angular unconformity is an erosional surface that truncates older, tilted sedimentary layers and that is overlain by younger layers, oriented parallel to the unconformity. The discovery and interpretation of angular unconformities, like the famous Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar Point, Scotland, marked a paradigm shift in the geological theories of the 18th century. At that time, the theo ...[Read More]
For any field-based seismologist, there is nothing more satisfying than standing in a remote location, laptop in hand finalising the installation of a new broadband seismic station. In 2013 this feeling was amplified as we deployed the first, and still the only broadband seismic array in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, the formal name for North Korea). That it took almost two year ...[Read More]
A series of deadly landslides and debris flows occurred in March 2013 in Petropolis, a municipality in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. This photo has been shot a little more than a month later. It highlights the important “supporting role” played by sewer pipes in this disaster. Description by Michele Calvello, after the description on imaggeo.egu.eu. Imaggeo is the EGU’s ...[Read More]
