Aerosol particles typically have short life spans in the atmosphere (days to weeks) but they can travel far and wide in that time. They can be lifted up to new horizons, higher and higher in the atmosphere. This is important for their impact on our climate, for example, at least 20% of the uncertainty in the climate impact of black carbon aerosol is due to differences in its vertical distribution. ...[Read More]
Standing on the vast expanse of gleaming white sea ice of the Atka Bay, Michael Bock took this stunning picture of an Antarctic iceberg. The days, during the Antarctic summer, are never ending. Despite capturing the image at midnight, Michael was treated to hazy sunlight. “Clearly visible [in the iceberg] are the annual snow accumulation layers which illustrate how the ice archive works.; as you l ...[Read More]
You’re an early career scientist (ECS), or maybe you mentor one. So you know that we ECS are busy people, with responsibilities ranging from coursework to teaching, research to outreach, and labwork to fieldwork. And now there is this listicle (no, I’m not embarrassed about choosing this format) telling you to make time in your already packed day to volunteer some of your time to a(n early career) ...[Read More]
Firstly, happy New Year from all those at BaR! The start of January always seems to herald a surfeit of navel-gazing blog posts. Therefore, I thought I would attempt to broaden my horizons and consider whether, with only five years to go to meet the 20-20-20 EU climate targets, will 2015 be the greenest year yet?
From the rifting of the African continent, to mighty waterfalls in Slovenia, through to a bird’s eye view of the Glarus Thurst in the Alps, images from Imaggeo, the EGU’s open access geosciences image repository, they have given us some stunning views of the geoscience of Planet Earth and beyond. In this post we have curated some of our favourites, including header images from across our social me ...[Read More]
The picture shows a spectacular aerial view of a sunset over the Lusi mud eruption in East Java, Indonesia. Here thousands of cubic meters of mud, are spewed out every day from a 100 m sized central crater. Since the initial eruption of the volcano in 2006, following a 6.3 M earthquake, a surface of about 7 km2 has been covered by boiling mud, which has buried more than 12 villages and resulted in ...[Read More]
The range of challenges scientists face when carrying out Earth science research in the field are vast. However, the story behind Vincent Felde’s, a PhD candidate at Giessen University, image of the wadi, is truly remarkable and highlights how geoscientific research is not limited by borders or conflict. Wadi Nizzana (the Arabic term used to describe valleys that remain dry except during times of ...[Read More]
When the public think about natural hazards, space weather is not the first thing to come to mind. Yet, though uncommon, extreme space weather events can have an economic impact similar to that of large floods or earthquakes. Although there have been efforts across various sectors of society to communicate this topic, many people are still quite confused about it, having only a limited understandi ...[Read More]
Recently, I came across a tiny (10 x 10cm) book called “Ich hab eine Freundin, die ist Geodätin” (“I have a friend, and she is a geodesist”), by Sylvia Schuster with drawings by Dorothea Tust. Virtually all of my colleagues were quite sentimental about this since it was published as a so-called ‘Pixi-book’. And Pixi-books, as I learned, are the de facto story books in Germany to explai ...[Read More]
Twinning is a phenomenon in mineralogy whereby a single crystal of a mineral has two or more parts in which the crystal lattice is differently orientated. The shared surface between two twins is called the composition or twin plane, and the orientation to either other is determined by symmetry through rotation or reflection; this relationship is described by a twin law.
