The Amazon rainforest covers an area of 5.5 million km² and is well known for being an invaluable global resource for carbon storage. But it’s not just the trees and vegetation of the Amazonian rainforest that lock in and store carbon – the very soil in these forests can do the same thing, according to research published in EGU’s journal SOIL earlier this year. In this study Carlos Alberto Quesada ...[Read More]
Ah, love – that elusive feeling most people search for. It can be hard to find and hard to hold on to. Let me help you out. This week, I will give you 10 definitive tips to find your perfect match and fall and stay in love with your research. 1. Size doesn’t matter Some people like big, broad research topics, while others like smaller, niche research topics for which you really need to dive ...[Read More]
On the day of Christmas Eve, five years before the turn of the century, Marguerite Thomas Williams (December 1895 – August 1991) was born. She was the youngest of her five siblings born to her parents Henry and Clara Thomas. We don’t know much about her early life. Perhaps her older brothers and sisters would take her by the hand when walking to school, maybe the family would g ...[Read More]
Tell me if this sounds familiar to you: Act I After a fruitful discussion with a colleague, you exchange codes and algorithms. You are happy because you are convinced you will save some time through this collaboration and you don’t need to develop the same codes yourself. Act II The drama unfolds slowly. Firstly, you search without success for a README file or instructions on how to execute ...[Read More]
Tarun Goswami, an archaeologist from India, asks: How is a tuff formed? and more specifically… Why do some deposits have more ash than others? We are paraphrasing – the questions are specifically about the tuffs formed in the Toba supereruption. So… you asked, we answer! First of all, modern definitions generally describe a tuff as a volcaniclastic rock composed of solid volcanic ...[Read More]
Today’s imaggeo on Monday provides us with a space to reflect on the interconnected nature of our planet’s systems. The photographer, Antonello Provenzale, wrote of this image: Earth is a living planet, where the water cycle plays an essential role. A waterfall in the mountains of Valle Pesio, Italy, in a landscape of vegetation and mosses, reminds us of the fluxes and cycles of water ...[Read More]
Hello Olga, thanks for speaking with us today, can you tell us a little about your background and how you got to where you are now? Thank you for inviting me for what might be my first interview! My background is in environmental science and I chose to study soils because of how useful they are (in supporting ecosystems and our well-being) and how interdisciplinary their study is, spanning biology ...[Read More]
Tatiana feels the pressure. A never-ending workload, a busy home life and unparalleled expectations of her own devising leave her with this: Why does everything have to be last minute in academia? Dear Tatiana, Last minute? Don’t know what you’re talking about. Nothing is last minute in case you’ve mapped out your activities properly beforehand. Do you find it difficult planning your to-do list an ...[Read More]
A fairly recent blog post here reiterated the compelling comparison between the current COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing climate emergency, focusing on extreme events such as hurricanes, heatwaves and severe rainfall-related flooding, all of which are likely to get worse as the climate warms (Langendijk & Osman 2020). This comparison has been made by us Climate Scientists since the COVI ...[Read More]
One of the only regions that have been observed to cool over the past century is the North Atlantic cold blob just south of Greenland. In our recent paper, we analyse the cold blob or “warming hole” and the processes that contribute to its creation and evolution. While sea surface temperature has been reliably observed, the underlying mechanisms of changing ocean circulation are only sparsely meas ...[Read More]
