This week, the EGU Blog Team is authorised by me to buy itself a cake with 3 little candles on top to celebrate the fact that we have been blogging about geodynamics for 3 years! Hooray! We have had a particularly successful year, so let’s have a look at what happened.
What did we do?
At the start of this blog year, we reorganised how the blog team functions to relieve a bit of the pressure from me (your editor-in-chief). I needed to finish my PhD, so increasing the accountability and responsibilities of the editors seemed like a good idea. This actually worked out really well for us and we managed to consistently upload weekly.
Another big change this year was the introduction of The Sassy Scientist: an anonymous weekly columnist who answers all your deepest and darkest geodynamics and research questions. The Sassy Scientist has been very prolific and – with the exception of the blog-wide winter-break – managed to upload every single week. Incredible! Imagine the time and dedication needed for that. A round of applause for The Sassy Scientist!
So, in total you read 87 new blog posts this year (I will just assume you read every word we wrote).
I am very proud of all the content we published this year, but I need to mention several outstanding blog posts that garnered a lot of attention. For example, the posts on iron volcanism on metallic asteroids and whether or not we should still study LLSVPs received over 1500 unique pageviews! Not too bad for a little division such as geodynamics, right? However, top of the list is the recently published blog post #Black In Geoscience by our recently-recruited editor
Lucía Pérez-Díaz with almost 5000 unique pageviews in less than 2 weeks! A new record!
The overwhelming positive feedback, particularly on the logo Lucía designed for the blog post, lead to a spin-off initiative of a merchandise shop where you can buy items with the #BlackInGeoscience logo with all proceeds going to the Premier Legal Organisation Fighting for Racial Justice (NAACP LDF). So far, we have raised over $5500! If that isn’t a success story, I don’t know what is!
Who are we?
We had a fantastic blog team in 2019-2020! At our EGU changing-of-the-editors ceremony (I just made that up), we said goodbye to some of our old editors and welcomed some new members to the team. We now have 8 regular editors and one editor-in-chief (that’s me!). If you are curious who we are, we recently introduced ourselves here. We also found some extra help for The Sassy Scientist, so they are not lonely and/or heading towards burnout anymore.
All our editors are truly amazing and put in a lot of hard work, but we could never run this blog without our stellar guest authors! This year, we featured 31 guest authors, who passionately wrote about their research and (academic) life:
| • Marzieh Baes • Marie Bocher • Irene Bonati • Dan Bower • Eva Bredow • Gael Choblet • Nicholas Coltice • Juliane Dannberg • Caroline Dorn • Jac van Driel • Brad Foley |
• Kaustubh Hakim • Colin Hardy • Emilia Hernandez • Jeroen van Hunen • John Naliboff • Francis Nimmo • Craig O’Neill • Andrea Piccolo • Adina Pusok • Tobias Rolf |
• Patrick Sanan • Nicholas Schliffke • Stephan Sobolev • Dave Stegman • Bernhard Steinberger • Marcel Thielmann • Martina Ulvrova • Jamie Ward • Jolanthe van Wijk • Thilo Wrona |
Thank you for your contributions! We would not be able to run this blog without you! If you (the person reading this; maybe you are also on the list above; who knows?) would like to write a post, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Who are you?
We have a global readership with page visits from 183 different countries in the last year! Most of our readers reside in the USA, followed by the United Kingdom, India, Germany, and Australia. The number of blog visits has been steadily increasing every month. In fact, in the first half of 2020, we already surpassed the total amount of visits in 2019. So we are on track for another cracking blog year! If you want to know more about the statistics of the EGU Geodynamics blog and how it compares to other EGU division blogs, I highly recommend checking out our poster at EGU.
And now what?
Injected with fresh blood (that sounds weird) the blog team is ready for another year of intensive blogging! The new members of the blog team are slowly learning the ropes and have started to schedule their first posts. Our new Sassy Scientists are developing their unique, sarcastic writing style. The established members of the team have their posts lined up, ready to go! We hope to provide you with another year of exciting geodynamic posts on Wednesdays and heavy sarcasm posts on Fridays. Hopefully you are ready to read them all!
