This is a slightly delayed summary of the sauropod symposium on day 2 of IPC4, following sessions the previous day on vertebrate taphonomy and diversity and extinction in the fossil record. This is also the final of these little summaries, and for that I apologise – my laptop is a bit kaput atm, and needs power sockets to run and which were not available in some of the rooms. I might be a little c ...[Read More]
GeoLog
The known unknowns – the outstanding 49 questions in Earth sciences (Part III)
We continue exploring the biggest conundrums in Earth sciences in this third post of the known unknowns. In the two previous instalments of the series we’ve discovered what the major questions still to be answered about the early days of planet Earth and its inner workings are. We now move onto the planet’s surface. The advent of plate tectonic theory, arguably one of the biggest advancements in t ...[Read More]
Soil System Sciences
Environmental Management Centre Research Group
Paulo Pereira pereiraub@gmail.com Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania The Environmental Management Centre The Environmental Management Centre (EMC) was founded in 2013 at Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania. The group is composed by young and proactive researchers from the entire world. The centre has an interdisplinary vision of science and aims to connect environmental, sociological ...[Read More]
Soil System Sciences
Soils at Imaggeo: fire watch constellation
Egle Rackauskaite, Xinyan Huang and Guillermo Rein HazeLab, Imperial College London, UK Winner of the Best Fire Science Image, 11th IAFSS Symposium, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2014 Description This composite shows a constellation of combined visual and infrared imaging of a smouldering combustion front spreading radially over a thin sample of dry peat. The central watch is created by a series of t ...[Read More]
Green Tea and Velociraptors
IPC4 Day 1 – Death is the road to awe
Following on from the previous post, the afternoon symposium was all about the applications and implications of vertebrate taphonomy. Matt Carrano kicked things off with a great talk on how microfossil bonebeds help to guide our understanding of terrestrial palaeoecosystems. Using sites from the well-known but poorly understood Cloverly Formation, he provided a key insight from abundances from ter ...[Read More]
Green Tea and Velociraptors
IPC4 Day 1 – Using the past to inform the present
Welcome to the fourth International Palaeontology Congress! 900 palaeontologists have piled into the land of steak, sun, and malbec in Mendoza, Argentina, for the biggest palaeontology conference that draws from all parts of the field. What I want to do with these posts is just provide snapshot summaries of the talks I’ve been at to provide a window into the conference and the amazing diversity of ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
Communicating research results through comics: is the permeability of crystalline rock in the shallow crust related to depth, lithology, or tectonic setting?
Mark Ranjram, a Masters student in my research group, wrote a paper on crystalline permeability that is coming out in a special edition of Geofluids on ‘Crustal Permeability’ early in 2015 (other cool papers in early view here). Here is Mark’s awesome response when I asked him if he wanted to write a plain language summary:
GeoLog
Imaggeo on Mondays: Marble outcrops
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image was taken by Prof. Konstantinos Kourtidis, in Alykes, along the southern coast of Thassos island, where he photographed the beautifully white marbles that outcrop along the coastline. The Greek Island of Thassos is located in northeastern Greece, close to the coast of Thrace in the Aegean Sea, although geographically it belongs to the Macedonia region. There is ...[Read More]
Soil System Sciences
Special issue on geo-environmental effects of wildfires
Noemí Lana-Renault Monreal noemi-solange.lana-renault@unirioja.es University of La Rioja, Spain We are glad to announce that the Special Issue on “Geo-environmental effects of wildfires”, which has been recently published by Cuadernos de Investigación Geográfica (volume 40 (2), 2014). This Special Issue aims at bringing together the key impacts of wildfires on runoff, soil properties and erosion, ...[Read More]
GeoLog
GeoEd: Under review
In this month’s GeoEd column, Sam Illingworth tells us about how teaching undergraduate students about peer review can help eliminate bad practice. To anybody other than a researcher, the words peer review might seem like a fancy new age management technique, but to scientists it is either the last bastion of defence against the dark arts or an unnecessary evil that purports to ruin our grea ...[Read More]