EGU Blogs

Climate: Past, Present & Future

How to reconstruct past climates from water stable isotopes in Polar ice cores ?

Mathieu Casado, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany. Anais Orsi, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, Université Paris-Saclay, France March 15, 2018

Ice cores are a favored archive to study past climates, because they provide a number of indications on the history of the climate and of the atmospheric composition. Among these, water stable isotopes are considered as a very reliable temperature proxy. Yet, their interpretation is sometimes more complicated than a simple one-to-one correspondence with local temperature and requires intercomparis ...[Read More]

GfGD

Geology for Global Development

What would you do in the minute before an Earthquake? Do our planet’s environmental limits hamper socio-economic development? Find out in Jesse Zondervan’s Feb – Mar 7 2018 #GfGDpicks #SciComm

Jesse Zondervan March 15, 2018

Each month, Jesse Zondervan picks his favourite posts from geoscience and development blogs/news which cover the geology for global development interest. Here’s a round-up of Jesse’s selections for the last month: In the late afternoon of 16 February people in Mexico City celebrate Chinese New Year when they hear an earthquake alarm. If you ever wondered what it is like to experience an earthquake ...[Read More]

GeoLog

EGU 2018: Getting to Vienna, getting to sleep and getting to know the city

Olivia Trani March 15, 2018

With the conference only a few weeks away here is a brief, and by no means comprehensive, introduction of how to get to Vienna and what to do when you’re there! Getting here Vienna’s International Airport is served by many of the major European airlines. If you would like to consider overland you’ll find more information on the General Assembly website. And, if you haven’t seen it already, make su ...[Read More]

SSP

Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology

Ocean drilling: 50 years of explorations

Cinzia Bottini March 15, 2018

After 50 years of ocean explorations, scientists continue to rely on cored material from beneath the ocean floor. The material recovered during oceanographic expeditions constitutes, in fact, a great archive where to look for answers to unravel the Earth’s system history. Over the last decades, subsequent scientific ocean drilling programs (Deep Sea Drilling Project, Ocean Drilling Program, ...[Read More]

GeoLog

Short courses at EGU 2018

Olivia Trani March 14, 2018

At this year’s General Assembly there are loads of short courses to choose from for broadening your expertise. You can supercharge your scientific skills, broaden your base in science communication and pick up tips on how to boost your career – be it in academia or outside. There is also a course aimed at making your time at the conference easier – be sure to take part, especially if i ...[Read More]

GD

Geodynamics

Subduction through the mantle transition zone: sink or stall?

Iris van Zelst March 14, 2018

The Geodynamics 101 series serves to showcase the diversity of research topics and methods in the geodynamics community in an understandable manner. We welcome all researchers – PhD students to professors – to introduce their area of expertise in a lighthearted, entertaining manner and touch upon some of the outstanding questions and problems related to their fields. For our latest ‘Geodynamics 10 ...[Read More]

TS

Tectonics and Structural Geology

Minds over Methods: Reconstructing oceans lost to subduction

Derya Gürer March 12, 2018

Our next Minds over Methods article is written by Derya Gürer, who just finished a PhD at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. During her PhD, she used a combination of many methods to reconstruct the evolution of the Anadolu plate, which got almost entirely lost during closure of the Neotethys in Anatolia. Here, she explains how the use of these multiple methods helped her to obtain a 3D understa ...[Read More]

GeoLog

Imaggeo on Mondays: Chilean relics of Earth’s past

Anita Di Chiara March 12, 2018

As Earth’s environment changes, it leaves behind clues used by scientists to paint portraits of the past: scorched timber, water-weathered shores, hardened lava flows. Chile’s Conguillío National Park is teeming with these kind of geologic artifacts; some are only a few years old while others have existed for more than 30 million years. The photographer Anita Di Chiara, a researcher at Lancaster U ...[Read More]

GeoLog

Geosciences Column: The science behind snow farming

Olivia Trani March 9, 2018

For roughly the last decade, some ski resorts and other winter sport facilities have been using a pretty unusual method to ensure white slopes in winter. It’s called snow farming. The practice involves collecting natural or artificially made snow towards the end of winter, then storing the frozen mass in bulk over the summer under a thick layer of sawdust, woodchips, mulch, or other insulating mat ...[Read More]

CR

Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – The colors of sea ice

Polona Itkin March 9, 2018

The Oscars 2018 might be over, but we have something for you that is just as cool or even cooler (often cooler than -20°C)! Our Image of the Week shows thin sections of sea ice photographed under polarized light, highlighting individual ice crystals in different colors, and is taken from a short video that we made. Read more about what this picture shows and watch the movie about how we got these ...[Read More]