Befuddled by the yearly returning celebration of science during the Nobel award ceremonies, and heavy-heartedly noticing the absence of Earth sciences at this ball time after time, Pippi pulled herself out of her rationally induced depression and asked: Shouldn’t there be a Nobel prize in Earth sciences? Dear Pippi, Well, isn’t that a particular poignant question? Earth sciences simply being denie ...[Read More]
The soil market: plants spend some of their carbon on buying nutrients from mycorrhizae Similar to the way that we take up carbon (C) through the food we eat, plants absorb C in the form of CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and use it to build sugars (Fig. 1). After having a good snack, our body decides where to send the C it has just gained: should I use it to grow muscles (or fat), ...[Read More]
Starting to teach a course at a university can be an exciting but daunting experience. In today’s post Menno Fraters shares his experiences of starting to teach a class of 100+ students during the challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic. He provides three quick tips for when you start teaching, that may be useful for teaching in academics. During your time as a PhD student, you may have al ...[Read More]
We live in a time of unprecedented pressure on water resources. The combination of drivers, such as human water use and land use, climate change by greenhouse gases and the human modification of other components of the Earth system coupled to the water cycle, may be pushing water resources beyond levels of sustainability at all spatial scales (Gleeson et al., 2020; Zipper et al., 2020). A particul ...[Read More]
The structures in this photo might look three-dimensional, but they are completely flat. It is a photo of a polished thinsection of a rock, taken through a petrographic microscope under cross-polarized light. The width of the image is just 2 mm. The brownish mineral around the edges is carbonate, the white to grey mineral in the centre is serpentine, a water-bearing silicate mineral. The different ...[Read More]
It is my great pleasure to introduce you to our new SSS Early Career Scientist (ECS) & Outreach team. This year, apart from having a new ECS Representative – Layla San Emeterio – we realized that there’s just too much fun for one person! That’s why this year, our division has also elected two ECS Co-representatives: Mika Turunen and Dan Evans. Mika and Dan started immediately helpi ...[Read More]
Hi Rhian, thanks for talking with us today about the EGU’s Award nominations, please start by introducing yourself! I’m a physical geography and geology lecturer at Swansea University, with a particular focus on teaching through the medium of Welsh. I have been awarded the Katia and Maurice Krafft Award for my work on the British Sign Language Glossary Project, with colleagues from the ...[Read More]
Recent studies show that glaciers are significantly affected by pollution, and in general by human activities, but few people would imagine that their surface contains traces of nuclear contamination and radioactivity. It has been recently claimed that high amounts of radioactivity have accumulated on glaciers, only beaten by the radioactivity levels of sites where nuclear incidents and tests have ...[Read More]
While a previous blog entry dealt with the question whether we can use lessons from the nonlinear nature of climate for projections of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is now a first example of how the pandemic can teach us something on climate. The several weeks long lockdown of China made February 2020 an exceptional month in terms of air quality; aerosol emissions were tremendously reduced leading ...[Read More]
A new year, a new blog team! During the virtual EGU, we managed to find a lot of new people for the blog. In addition, some oldies but goldies will stay on, and, unfortunately, some editors also resigned (but they might still pop up every once in a while with a cheeky post). So, without further ado, here are the superstars of the blog team for the 2020-2021 EGU blog year who will provide you with ...[Read More]
