Wit & Wisdom

Applying for a PhD in Geoscience: To do or not to do

Conor Farrell and edited by Michaël Pons August 27, 2025

"To do or not to do a PhD?", image generated by AI

Fresh out of your bachelor’s degree, or more commonly these days, your master’s degree, it can be tempting to pursue your PhD as quickly as possible. While there are compelling reasons to dive straight in, rushing into a PhD might not be your best choice. To be or not to be a researcher? Before you start firing off applications, take a step back. Forget any expectations you had ...[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]

The Sassy Scientist – Academic Motion Sickness

The Sassy Scientist September 25, 2024

The first year of a PhD can quickly shift from an exciting adventure (“Ok I got this“) to an exasperating rollercoaster (“What I am doing here? What if I just move to a husky farm in Canada?“). Marina, has reached that stage and, after having exhausted her patience scrolling through <insert your preferred social media platorm here> in search of threads on how to boost ...[Read More]

Geo-movie: Fire of Love (2022), a love story of Katia, Maurice and volcanoes

edited by Zhibin Lei April 17, 2024

Geo-movies are often Sci-Fi movies, which usually borrow disastrous concepts from earth science, and turn them into the end of the world while crystallizing humanity along with it. “Fire of Love”, on the other hand, is a 2022 documentary movie that explores the lives, relationship and careers of legendary volcanologists Katia Krafft and Maurice Krafft. The movie is directed by Sara Dosa, and most ...[Read More]