Understanding how rocks melt, deform, and evolve within Earth’s interior is a central challenge in geoscience. These processes span a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and are governed by complex interactions between temperature, pressure, composition, and phase stability. Capturing this complexity in numerical models requires integrating mineral thermodynamics directly into geodynamic mod ...[Read More]
Unraveling volcanic patterns between adjacent rift zones

Continental rifts are a prime example of how the forces at work beneath our feet are constantly shaping our world, and often host volcanic activity. The patterns and distribution of volcanism in rift settings, however, is far from intuitive. The picture gets even more complicated if we look between the segments that often make up a rift. This week, Valentina Armeni from the University of Potsdam, ...[Read More]
Don’t Stop Me Now: A Fracture Mechanics Perspective on Earthquake Nucleation

How do earthquakes start? Earthquakes occur when a block of rock rapidly slides past another along an interface or a discontinuity in the medium and release energy in the form of seismic waves. Turns out, the surface of the earth is riddled with a lot of these discontinuities, which we call “faults”. If we plot the locations of earthquakes on a world map (Figure 1a), we will see that they highligh ...[Read More]
Happy 8th blog birthday and introducing the new blog team!
Hello there! It’s Constanza and Michaël your GD editors-in-chief once again. End of June marks the 8th anniversary of the blog, so happy birthday to the blog! It’s been some pretty busy weeks of preparation behind the scenes after the EGU General Assembly to bring together the new blog team for the year 2025-2026. We are a team of early career scientists who are very enthusiastic about ...[Read More]