“Crazy Lace” is an agate collected in Mexico, which offers great opportunities for aesthetic photomicrography. Here we see the common arrangement of fibers of chalcedony (microcrystalline quartz) in parallel bands alternating with black thin layers of Fe oxides. Polarized light photomicrograph, crossed polarizers and red tint plate. width 5.4 mm. Sample kindly provided by Denise M. Har ...[Read More]
There are not many scientific publications that tackle the issue of subjectivity in geological studies and its impact. In one of them, Baddeley et al. (2004), they state it clearly in some sentences: “the judgements of experts can be biased by their use of heuristics to guide the formation of their opinions” or “accepted or prior opinions of existing experts certainly affect the judgement of other ...[Read More]
It’s the end of 2021! For our HS Blog, it is time to recap what we have published during the year (in case you want to go further back in time, you can also check the 2019 and the 2020 recaps). In 2021, we published 23 posts, covering a large range of topics, as you can see below. We warmly thank all the authors and contributors that made it possible. We hope you have enjoyed reading their c ...[Read More]
At the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet, surface melt releases old layers of dust, that have travelled thousands of years into the ice. Under sunny weather, the dust heats up with radiation, melts the ice underneath, and thus accumulates in tiny potholes and meltwater creeks. However, this photo was taken after a rainy day. The rain triggered increased melt on the surface of the ice irrelevant of i ...[Read More]
In June 2020 I made (my first!) blog post for the EGU blog on the topic of teaching, describing what I learned by for the first time teaching a full class on my own. It was at the time when teaching suddenly had to shift from in person to online teaching. Last quarter I was teaching again, but now the situation was the reverse. We had to move from online teaching back to in person teaching. In thi ...[Read More]
When I started as Division president, at the General Assembly in 2019, I thought: “Well, my predecessors were very nice; people did not complain (at least not too much), so I guess I can do exactly as they did.” I was not expecting a virus pandemic that would change so many things, including moving, with short notice, all activities online! As I mentioned in a previous post, I cannot hide that the ...[Read More]
Annual ridges and troughs (called wave ogives) are formed as the ice of the Gates Glacier (in Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains) flows through a steep icefall. Down-glacier, as the ice melts, the rushing meltwater is funnelled into streams, carving ice canyons as it flows, but ultimately directed by these topographic constraints. Description by Allen Pope, after the description on imaggeo.e ...[Read More]
Scaling law behaviours are ubiquitous in geosciences both from a theoretical and practical point of view. They are required to better understand, analyse and simulate the underlying processes, which yields the observed variability of geophysical fields over wide ranges of spatio-temporal scales. A group of scientists within the Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences (NP) Division of the European Geosc ...[Read More]
Science communication is the practice of informing and inspiring the public about scientific knowledge. It comes in different forms, from documentaries, books, academic publishing, mass media journalism, to public talks. These days, digital communication, including blogging, vlogging, podcasting, and social media, has become an increasingly popular form of science communication, reaching a wide au ...[Read More]
Each month we feature specific Divisions of EGU and during the monthly GeoRoundup we will be putting the journals that publish science from those Divisions at the top of the Highlights roundup. For December, the Divisions we are featuring are: Cryospheric Sciences (CR), Soil System Sciences (SSS) and Tectonics and Structural Geology (TS). They are served by the journals: Geoscientific Model Develo ...[Read More]
