San Francisco has been a natural gathering place for people across the millennia. It is not a coincidence that this city, situated at the entrance to the largest estuary on the U.S. West Coast, owes its dramatic setting to active geology on the North American plate margin. The first people of the San Francisco Peninsula, the Ramaytush Ohlone, cared for the land here for thousands of years before E ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
A buffet of new resources for teaching hydrology and water resources!
By Tom Gleeson (aka Dr. H2O) The content of this post will be presented as an invited eLightning presentation at AGU 2020 in the session “Online Hydrology Education: Lessons Learned from Designed and Impromptu Remote Instruction”. When: Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 07:00 – 08:00 PST What I teach and basic resources I teach Sustainable Water Resources (CIVE 340) at the University of Victoria – a ...[Read More]
GeoLog
How many transdisciplinary researchers does it take to find out how an ocean sinks?
There is no shortage of increasingly uphill challenges in the current research landscape, especially for Early Career researchers: discouragingly long-standing science questions; minimal freedom for developing methodologies; invariably ambivalent proposal reviews; an academic grading scheme based mainly on publication productivity and impact; and enforced competition for few permanent research pos ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Seafloor secrets: traces of the past Patagonian ice sheet
Today’s Patagonian ice caps are confined to the high-altitude Andean Mountain range as the Northern and Southern Patagonia ice fields, and they are rapidly melting. The southern part of the Patagonian ice cap drains partially through fast-flowing ice streams into the fjords of Patagonia. Glaciers in this region have been losing ice at accelerating rates by large calving events, due to rising globa ...[Read More]
Tectonics and Structural Geology
Franciszka Szymakowska (05/02/1927 – 2007): the woman whose drawings unraveled the geological history of the Carpathians
Franciszka Szymakowska was born on the 5th of February in 1927 in Krakow. She was lovingly known as “Niusia” (Antoni 2007). About her early life, not much is known. Franciszka did her studies at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Jagiellonian University and graduated in 1952. During her studies, she started to work at the Polish Geological Institute. She remained affilia ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
Geodynamics 101: Dynamic Topography
The Geodynamics 101 series serves to showcase the diversity of research topics and/or methods in the geodynamics community. In this week’s post, Fred Richards explains how ‘Dynamic Topography’ is used in the Geosciences, and discusses the knowns, unknowns, and the challenges ahead. Since shortly after its tumultuous formation 4.5 billion years ago, Earth has been steadily cooling, wit ...[Read More]
Climate: Past, Present & Future
LOESS IN TRANSLATION
Loess is a mineral, aeolian deposit with a range of definitions in literature, which class it as either a sediment, soil, or rock. Some classic texts suggest that “loess is not just the accumulation of dust” [1], and it must include additional processes such as loessification, calcification, pedogenesis, and in-situ weathering. The definition adopted depends on the scientific background and the qu ...[Read More]
GeoLog
How Open Science may help us during and after the pandemic
As Hedding et al. (2020) indicate, it is “not business as usual” for higher education across the globe. There are many testimonies by scientists who are struggling to work while their children are stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic (Langin, 2020). Indeed, it is very complex to stay at home to raise and home-school kids and remain productive as an academic while living through a pandemic ...[Read More]
Seismology
Field work in winter in Iceland: The beautiful nature of Strokkur geyser
I was fascinated and excited on my first trip to Iceland in August 2010; just a few months after the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull that affected the air traffic across Europe for a few days. Besides these dangerous volcanoes, the Icelandic landscape is beautiful, rough, wide and impressive with elements such as water and ice interacting directly at some locations. Part of this trip was, of course, ...[Read More]
Ocean Sciences
Career Progression – from Academia to Industry
During the summer Liam Brannigan contributed to an EGU careers workshop. Liam has had a diverse career, following his masters in maths at Edinburgh University he worked for several years as an investment consultant. In 2010 however, he fancied a change and embarked on a career in physical oceanography, completing his MSc at Bangor University and his PhD at the University of Oxford. A few post-docs ...[Read More]