The past few months have been busy with other work, and unfortunately I’ve not been able to post much on here. I’m hoping to get back to regular posts over the coming weeks, starting with a note on GfGD involvement in the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) in Cape Town later this month. The IGC takes place every four years, and is a flagship event of the International Union o ...[Read More]
Coastlines take a battering from stormy seas, gales, windy conditions and every-day wave action. The combined effect of these processes shapes coastal landscapes across the globe. In calm weather, constructive waves deposit materials eroded elsewhere and transported along the coast line via longshore-drift, onto beaches, thus building them up. Terrestrial material, brought to beaches by rivers and ...[Read More]
“MAPPING THE UPPER MANTLE: THREE-DIMENSIONAL MODELING OF EARTH STRUCTURE BY INVERSION OF SEISMIC WAVEFORMS” (Woodhouse & Dziewonski,1984) commented by Andrew Valentine. Here we are again with our Paper of the Month (PoM) series! Our guest writer is Andrew Valentine, who has chosen to comment one of the landmark papers in global seismic imaging: “Mapping the upper mantle: Thre ...[Read More]
Imagine you find yourself standing atop a wooden box in the middle of your home town, on a rainy weekend day, with the sole aim of talking to passersby about your research work. It can be a rather daunting prospect! How do you decide what the take-home message of your work is: which single nugget of information do you want members of the public to take away after having spoken to you? Even more im ...[Read More]
Today’s image of the week comes from stunning setting of Chhota Shigri Glacier in the Pir Panjal Range of northern India. The range is part of the Hindu-Kush Karakorum Himalaya region which is a notoriously challenging place to work as it is very remote and completely inaccessible during the winter months. However, when have these challenges ever stopped a hardy glaciologist?! Our image thi ...[Read More]
The relentless retreat of glaciers, globally, is widely studied and reported. The causes for the loss of these precious landforms are complex and the dynamics which govern them difficult to unravel. So are the consequences and impacts of reduced glacial extent atop the world’s high peaks, as Alexis Merlaud, explains in this week’s edition of Imaggeo on Mondays. This picture was taken on 20 August ...[Read More]
Coral reefs and other benthic marine ecosystems play a very important role in the biogeochemical cycles of our oceans. However, laboratory based study of these environments ranges from being difficult to actually impossible. In order to look at the microscopic-scale processes that occur in the benthic environment a team of scientists developed the Benthic Underwater Microscope (BUM). The device, w ...[Read More]
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ From a tender age, we are regularly asked that question, with answers ranging from the downright hilarious through to those kids who’ve got it all figured out. As we grow older the question of what career we want to pursue carries more weight and the outcome of our choices is scrutinised closely. In today’s GeoEd column, Rhian Meara (a geography and geo ...[Read More]
Earth’s oceans are not simply just water, they are a complicated multi-component fluid consisting of water and dissolved salts (ask anyone who has tried to drink it!). The existence of these salts has a significant impact on global ocean circulation. Nowhere is this more significant than in the polar oceans where it is one of the key factors influencing sea ice formation. In this week’s imag ...[Read More]
Much ink is spilled hailing the work of the early fathers of geology – and rightly so! James Hutton is the mind behind the theory of uniformitarianism, which underpins almost every aspect of geology and argues that processes operating at present operated in the same manner over geological time, while Sir Charles Lyell furthered the idea of geological time. William Smith, the coal miner and canal b ...[Read More]
