What if we brought all four major space-geodetic techniques together on a single spacecraft for the first time? ESA’s Genesis mission, expected to launch in 2028, will do just that, combining Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), DORIS and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) on one carefully calibrated platform. Well before launch, scientists are inve ...[Read More]
Part 2 – the regional case In our previous post, we discussed global scale phenomena, showing how the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) constellation is the ultimate instrument for monitoring the Earth as a whole: tracking plate tectonics, defining the planet’s absolute size, and measuring variations of its gravity field. Essentially, the big questions of our constantly changi ...[Read More]
Greenland, the world’s largest island, has one of the most challenging environments for geodetic measurements. Maintaining GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) stations here isn’t just about precision – it’s about ensuring data continuity in an area that’s constantly moving. This is the behind-the-scenes story of a 15,000 km journey around Greenland: five weeks of helicopter-bas ...[Read More]
Part 1 – the global case When you check directions on your smartphone or track your morning run, you’re tapping into a global infrastructure that has revolutionized not just navigation, but our understanding of Earth itself. What began as military technology has evolved into powerful scientific tools that confirm longstanding theories and reveal previously unobservable phenomena. In th ...[Read More]
Effective scientific communication of geodetic research often relies on clear visualizations, and colours are needed to make complex data much easier to understand. However, traditional colormaps don’t always provide the needed clarity and can be especially challenging for people with colour-vision deficiencies (CVD). In this post, we will first describe what CVD is and how it is present in academ ...[Read More]
Summer vacations are finally here! Like every year, many of us are ready to travel and explore new and exciting destinations. And of course, the GPS on our phones will be an indispensable travel companion! Did you know that GPS (or GNSS) positioning is one of the traditional geodetic techniques? Come along to discover how this technique can find your location in the world and the various applicati ...[Read More]
A remarkably large number of papers and proposals have sentences like “this study is critical to better project future sea-level rise” in their introduction. Most times this is just marketing to trick reviewers and program managers into believing the work is important. On the other hand, geodetic papers and proposals have some compelling reasons to use this statement: a lot of geodetic tech ...[Read More]
The Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) is a collaborative contribution of the global geodesy community to the observation and monitoring of the Earth System. Geodesy is the science of determining the shape of the Earth, its gravity field, and its rotation as functions of time. Essential to reaching this goal are stable and consistent geodetic ...[Read More]
Africa hosts the world’s most extensive subaerial rift system on Earth known as the East African Rift System (EARS). It stretches over 5000 km from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden intersection in the north to the Southwest Indian Spreading Ridge south of South Africa. East-West, the EARS spans the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo across to eastern Madagascar over 3000 km. The ...[Read More]
Stories from the field – how exactly are those GPS data collected? The geodesy community at large benefits from the many science projects with open data policies. A user simply has to navigate to a data portal, download the data, and within a matter of moments a world of possibilities opens up for potential research. But where exactly do these data come from? While scientific results get ...[Read More]