Geotalk is a regular feature highlighting early career researchers and their work. In this interview we speak to Jan Zika, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. This year he was recognized for his contributions to ocean dynamics research as the winner of the 2018 Ocean Sciences Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award. First, could you introduce your ...[Read More]
Every 8 weeks we turn our attention to a Remarkable Region that deserves a spot in the scientific limelight. After looking at several convergent plate boundaries, this week the focus lies on part of a nascent divergent plate boundary: the Kenya Rift. The post is by postdoctoral researcher Anne Glerum of GFZ Potsdam. Of course an active continental rift is worthy of the title “Remarkable Region”. A ...[Read More]
Next Tuesday (19th June) the POLAR18 Open Science Conference kicks off in Davos, Switzerland. We have put together a quick guide about events that might be of interest to you during the week! Conferences are about the science, of course, but the social side is just as important :) What is POLAR18? The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that the POLAR18 conference is, in fact, a collection of d ...[Read More]
If your morning commute is already frustrating, get ready to buckle up. Our climate is changing, and that may increasingly affect some of central Europe’s major roads and railways, according to new research published in the EGU’s open access journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences. The study found that, in the face of climate change, landslide-inducing rainfall events will increase in fr ...[Read More]
This year it is, once again, possible to upload your oral presentations, PICO presentations and posters from EGU 2018 for online publication alongside your abstract, giving all participants a chance to revisit your contribution – hurrah for open science! Files can be in either PowerPoint or PDF format. Note that presentations will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. ...[Read More]
The photograph shows water that accumulated in a depression on the ice surface of Vatnajökull glacier in southeastern Iceland. This 700m wide and 30m deep depression [1], scientifically called an ‘ice cauldron’, is surrounded by circular crevasses on the ice surface and is located on the glacier tongue Dyngjujökull, an outlet glacier of Vatnajökull. The photo was taken on 4 June 2016, less than 22 ...[Read More]
Many polar scientists who have traveled to Svalbard have heard several times how most of the stuff there is the “northernmost” stuff, e.g. the northernmost university, the northernmost brewery, etc. Despite hosting the four northernmost cities and towns, Svalbard is however accessible easily by “usual-sized” planes at least once per day from Oslo and Tromsø. This is not the case for th ...[Read More]
We’ve all attended conferences with those dreaded 15-minute talks and we have no problem picking out which talks were amazing and which talks were abysmal. However, when it comes to our own talks, it’s hard to judge them, find out how they can be improved or break away from long-established habits (such as our layout or talking pace). This week, Matthew Herman, postdoc at the Tectonoph ...[Read More]
As a colleague or proud supervisor of postgraduate students and post-docs, there is a simple thing you can do to congratulate them on their excellence and research: nominate them for the one of the European Geosciences Union’s awards for outstanding early career scientists. The deadline is 15 June 2018, so now is the time to act. Putting early career researchers in the spotlight To credit research ...[Read More]
Name of proxy Levoglucosan Type of record Biomass burning Paleoenvironment Lake and marine sediments and ice cores Period of time investigated Present to approximately 130,000 years ago How does it work? Levoglucosan is a molecule that is exclusively formed during the combustion of vegetation at low-temperature. It is therefore considered to be a source-specific tracer for biomass burning. During ...[Read More]
