News & Views

Simulating the Deep Earth with MAGEMin: A Toolkit for Thermodynamic Modeling in Geodynamics

Nicolas Riel and edited by Nuno Rodrigues July 23, 2025

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

Valentina Armeni and edited by Lorenzo Mantiloni July 16, 2025

The Sleeping Warrior volcano, located near Lake Elementaita in the Kenya Rift (East African Rift System). Its profile, shaped by erosion and tectonic activity, resembles a sleeping Maasai warrior, which is why it got its name.

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

Rajani Shrestha July 9, 2025

Schematic for a possible earthquake nucleation scenario. Inset figure adapted after Lebihain et al. (2021) and McLaskey (2019).

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!

Constanza Rodriguez Piceda and Michaël Pons June 25, 2025

An anniversary magnetic dipole. Illustration by Lea Pennacchioni

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]