Every week, The Sassy Scientist answers a question on geodynamics, related topics, academic life, the universe or anything in between with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Do you have a question for The Sassy Scientist? Submit your question here. Iris asks: Will I ever finish my PhD? Dear Iris, Most researchers won’t admit to it publicly, but they all had doubts when trying to complete their PhD researc ...[Read More]
At the EGU General Assembly 2019, more than 16,000 scientists came together in Vienna to present their research, discuss the latest advances in their field, and engage in workshops. On the Wednesday evening of the EGU conference, hundreds of researchers also came together to play geoscience-based games! Games can be great tools for geoscience outreach and education, as they have the ability to sim ...[Read More]
At the EGU General Assembly 2019 last month, if you walked through the dark basement and the most distant hallways of the convention centre, into room -2.62 on Wednesday evening, you may have heard people introducing themselves followed by the words “… and I have a problem.” This may have sounded like a support group. In fact, if you had entered the room it would have been clear that you had just ...[Read More]
Seismologists work hard to provide the best snapshots of the Earth’s mantle. Yet tomographic models based on different approaches or using different data sets sometimes obtain quite different details. It is hard to know for a non specialist if small scale anomalies can be trusted and why. This week Maria Koroni and Daniel Bowden, both postdocs in the Seismology and Wave Physics group in ETH ...[Read More]
In its “Hallway Conversations” series, the Young Hydrologic Society has recently published an interview with Thorsten Wagener, who is currently professor and the head of the Water and Environmental Engineering research group at the University of Bristol, UK. The interview was conducted by Wouter Knoben, a PhD student at the University of Bristol. With their agreement, we reproduce below some short ...[Read More]
Do ancient structures control present earthquakes in the East African Rift? Åke Fagereng, Reader in Structural Geology, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University For this edition of Minds over Methods, we have invited Åke Fagereng, reader in Structural Geology at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University. Åke writes about faults in the Malawi rift, and the seismic ha ...[Read More]
Roughly 50 million years ago, the Eurasian and Indian continental plates began to crash into each other, dramatically changing the landscape of modern-day Asia. The force of the collision caused the Earth to scrunch together at the zone of impact, subsequently forming the Himalayan mountain range. However, to the north of the crash, a stretch of the Earth uplifted without bunching up or wrinkling; ...[Read More]
Post by Jared van Rooyen, PhD student in Earth Science at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa. When the Cape Town water crisis first emerged it took almost a year before active contingencies were put in place. Four major ideas were proposed: (1) Intense water restrictions for municipal water users, (2) greywater recycling facilities, (3) groundwater augmentation of water supplies, and (4) des ...[Read More]
There are some crystals that we are all familiar with. Look at an analogue clock (you may need a screwdriver and/or a hammer, and the watch owner might not be too happy) and you will probably find quartz – a crystal with silicon and oxygen arranged in a well-ordered three dimensional pattern. We can also describe quartz as silicon dioxide, which describes its chemistry – one silicon for every two ...[Read More]
The GROCE project, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), takes an Earth-System approach to understand what processes are at play for the 79°N glacier (also known as Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden), in northeast Greenland. 79°N is a marine-terminating glacier, meaning it has a floating ice tongue (like an ice shelf) and feeds into the ocean. Approximately 8% of all the ice contain ...[Read More]
