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Cryospheric Sciences
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Maria Scheel

Maria Scheel is a Postdoc at Aarhus University (Denmark), working at the Wageningen University (Netherlands). Her current postdoc focuses on identifying permafrost microbial life and its impact on carbon fluxes when that permafrost thaws. She uses genetic tools to discover how Arctic life responds to climate change related stressors. During #EGU24, she is a press assistant besides being a regular author and chief editor for the EGU CR blog. Please contact her via maria.scheel@envs.au.dk.

SciComm notes: can Granny understand your science?

March 11, 2024
A conversation between a person and a smiling elder lady.
Did you ever experience frustration when trying to explain your science to friends or family? But why does it matter if your grandma could understand your work? (Photo credit: Brett Sayles from pexels)

As an EGU division blog, we facilitate that the most recent cryoscientific insights reach a wider audience. To do this, we have a team of experienced editors (and former authors), but we also love helping first time authors getting experience with outreach. But if you have ever written an outreach piece, you might know that it can be more difficult than expected to write down your research in simp ...[Read More]

You can’t unsee it – the impact of a good visual for scientific data

January 22, 2024
You can’t unsee it – the impact of a good visual for scientific data
From iconic album cover of Joy Division to depicting relevant updates on annual temperature anomalies. The way we depict our data, impacts how far it will be seen. [Credit: image left from Joy Division album ‘Unknown Pleasures’ from 1979 & right ERA4, C3S/ECMWF; edited by Maria Scheel].

We are visual learners after all and for many of us, creating visual content is far more out of our comfort zone than the already hard earned skills of writing itself. Still, creating an accessible image can be pivotal to not only the success of your paper, but also the reach of your science in general. Today’s post started with a climate figure that went viral because of its similarity to the ico ...[Read More]

Did you know… about worms surviving in permafrost for at least 46000 years?

September 29, 2023
Did you know… about worms surviving in permafrost for at least 46000 years?
Fig. 1 Shatilovich and colleagues discovered some (rather unexpectedly) still surviving eukaryotes, such as amoeba and this roundworm (nematode) in the long-term survival state called cryptobiosis (adapted from Shatilovich et al. 2023).

Lately permafrost makes the news more and more because of its enormous carbon stocks and its vulnerability to climate change. While permafrost greenhouse gas budget calculations are complex and harbour an ever-growing research community, its microbial ecology is still on the rise. A recent star are tiny roundworms that survived frozen in permafrost for 46’000 years. Take a short dip into this new ...[Read More]

It’s getting hot in here: Ancient microbes in thawing permafrost

October 22, 2021
It’s getting hot in here: Ancient microbes in thawing permafrost
Figure 1: You wondered what can live in frozen, ancient soil? Here you can see intact (A) and thawing permafrost (B). While Bacilli (red) and spore formers (green) can survive in the frozen and thawed permafrost, other species, such as Actinobacteria (blue) do not like it too much when it thaws. Carbon gets digested into carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), of which most is released into the atmosphere. Little is known about fungi (light brown) but they do exist. [Credit: Maria Scheel, created with biorender.com]

Did you know that the oldest organism on Earth is believed to be a microorganism found in 3-million-year-old permafrost in Siberia? There, it was living at a cosy average temperature of -10 °C at 14 m depth. Or did you hear that some other Arctic soil microorganisms can happily live at extreme temperatures down to -40 °C? Scientists often use these “extreme” microorganisms to get an idea on how ex ...[Read More]