Since August 2013, Elspeth and Charly, editors of Between a Rock and a Hard Place, have contributed a range of interesting and thought-provoking posts to the EGU network blogs: from a broad volcanology and petrology theme, through to sharing valuable insights they picked up during their journey towards completing their PhDs. However, the PhD theses are now submitted and defended, and Elspeth and C ...[Read More]
This year, the 63rd Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy is taking place alongside the 24th Symposium of Palaeontological Preparation and Conservation with the Geological Curators’ Group (what a mouth-full..), at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton. I don’t have much to say about this conference, as I’m heading to it’s international co ...[Read More]
On a small and isolated island in the Indian Ocean you’ll find an endemic population of Dragon Blood Trees (Dracaena cinnabari). Burly, with an interesting umbrella-shaped fractal canopy, these unique trees are a sight to behold. To see them for yourself, you’ll have to travel to the little known Socotra archipelago. Off the coast of Somalia, but belonging to Yemen, the group of islands boast an i ...[Read More]
Going on a cruise for a month sounds tempting for most people and that is exactly how I spent one month of my summer. Instead of sunshine and 25 degrees, the temperature was closer to the freezing point on the thermometer and normal summer weather was replaced by milder weather conditions. The destination of the cruise was the western Nordic Sea and the east Greenland Margin. The ice2ice cruise wa ...[Read More]
OK, bear with me on this one. It’s a bit of a thought dump, but it would be interesting to see what people think. You can’t go anywhere in academia these days without hearing about impact factors. An impact factor is a metric assigned to a journal that measures the average number of citations per article over the preceding two year interval. It was originally designed to help libraries ...[Read More]
The EGU offers a platform for early career scientists (ECS) to become involved in interdisciplinary research in the Earth, planetary and space sciences, through sessions, social events and short courses at the annual General Assembly in April. One of the ways of ensuring that the voice of the Union’s ECS membership is heard is via the division early career scientist representatives. Feedback gathe ...[Read More]
The b-value is that parameter of the Gutenberg-Richter relation which controls the ratio of small to large earthquakes. Intriguing temporal and spatial variations of the b-value have been reported in recent years, for example sudden b-value changes at active fault zones. Are such sharp spatial b-value variations merely a result of crude undersampling? To address this unsettling question, a recentl ...[Read More]
It’s conference season! Wooooo!! The annual meeting for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is looming, and is taking place in Dallas this year. Damn I love Texas! This meeting represents the bringing together of the finest minds around the world in vertebrate palaeontology, and covers the whole spectrum of this vast field. The abstract book is now online and freely available in pdf form ...[Read More]
Late last year the Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) announced that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft has been studying since August 2014, was singing into space. Now, in a paper published today in the EGU’s open access journal Annales Geophysicae, the RPC team reveals more details about 67P’s song, including why the comet was singing. The sounds ...[Read More]
Words on Wednesday aims at promoting interesting/fun/exciting publications on topics related to Energy, Resources and the Environment. If you would like to be featured on WoW, please send us a link of the paper, or your own post, at ERE.Matters@gmail.com. *** A recent Nature News Explainer by Chris Cesare describes how forecasters with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ...[Read More]