If the title and image didn’t tip you off: the EGU Geodynamics blog is celebrating its first anniversary! Almost exactly 1 year ago (okay, so it’s one year and one day, because I wanted to stick to the Wednesday upload schedule), the EGU GD blog was launched! Yay! Applause! Good thing we’re not insanely vain about or proud of this and going to milk this event with a blog post. Oh wait…
Prepare for a lovely blog post where we will be celebrating ourselves (mainly), our guest authors (we’d be lost without them), and our faithful readers (you! unless it’s your first time here… in which case: welcome!).
Since the start of our blog, we have been trying to provide you with a weekly dosis of geodynamics or general-academic-life posts every Wednesday. This didn’t always go according to plan, as we had a few hiccups – most notably in February 2018, when we had an all time low of zero posts. Oops. I will use the fact that I was organising and attending a conference as an excuse. Other – less serious – hiccups occurred at other times when we very sneakily uploaded on a Thursday or a Friday instead of the promised Wednesday. Notwithstanding these hiccups, we still managed to write 58 (!!, excluding this one) posts! That’s even more than one post a week on average!
*pats herself and her team on the back*
What did we write about?
Most of our blog posts were part of our regular features, such as our popular Geodynamics 101 series, which has since been adapted into a successful EGU short course in collaboration with the EGU ECS Geodynamics team. We have also discussed several Remarkable Regions and Peculiar Planets. Several new, exciting papers have been discussed in our News & Views posts and we have reported about several Conferences, such as Nethermod and the EGU GA. Other travel adventures – often with a more geological focus – have been described in our Travel Log. To make you laugh; discuss about the current academic environment; and give you tips on how to make posters, figures, and presentations, we have the popular Wit & Wisdom posts. So, just to summarise: there is a blog post for everyone.
Who (and how many) are you (= our readers)?
We have quite a large amount of readers (hoorah! it would be very sad if no one read these posts. Which might ironically end up to be the case for this post…), with on average a minimum of 100 unique visitors per blog post, but recently nearing 200 or more unique views per blog post (and that is not counting the people that just stay on the homepage of our blog and don’t actually click on the post). Our most popular blog posts include The Rainbow Colour Map (repeatedly) considered harmful with almost 2000(!) unique views, How good were the old forecasts of sea level rise? with more than 500 unique views, and Going with the toroidal mantle flow with almost 400 unique views. Our unique readers come from all corners of the world (see figure below).
Amount of users of our EGU GD blog website per country for the last year
Who are we?
We have a very enthusiastic blog team that has been working round the clock the past year to provide you with all this content! If you still don’t know who we are by now, you can check out our introduction post here. We also recently had a new addition to the blog team, who has already written his first blog post. Together, the five of us hope to keep this blog running for at least another year! However, we wouldn’t be able to provide so many regular geodynamics posts if it weren’t for the outstanding contributions by our many guest authors. They have really proved to be the backbone of this blog, so they deserve a proper shout out! While hunting for all the names of our guest authors in our blog record, I found the following 27 wonderful people who contributed one or more blog posts (because yes, these amazing guest authors sometimes came back for more and insisted on writing multiple posts!):
| • Alice Adenis • Manar Alsaif • Suzanne Atkins • Marie Bocher • Clint Conrad • Fabio Crameri • Juliane Dannberg • Maximilian Döhmann • Richard Ghail |
• Saskia Goes • Kirstie Haynie • Matthew Herman • Charitra Jain • Agí Királi • Kristina Kislyakova • Maurits Metman • Luke Mondy • Elvira Mulyukova |
• Jessica Munch • Lena Noack • Vojtech Patočka • Jyotirmoy Paul • Adina Pusok • Cedric Thieulot • Anthony Osei Tutu • Sabin Zahirovic • Yue Zhao |
And now what?
Speaking for the entire blog team, we have had a blast this year and we are very much looking forward to continue with this blog and to bridge outreach, geodynamics, and general academic life. We hope that we can more firmly establish ourselves in the geodynamics community in the coming year and hopefully we will meet and collaborate with many more (recurring) guest authors to continue making this blog a success. Thanks to everyone who has been involved in the blog in any way by either writing or reading it. Cheers to another successful year!
