In a previous post I gave a cristal-clear explanation on what to write in a “teaching statement”, an essential document in your tenure-track application package. In this post I shall offer invaluable insight on an even more obscure document required for academic job hunters, by answering Inessa’s question: What should you include in your “diversity, equity, inclusion statem ...[Read More]
This week Dunyu Liu a computational scientist at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, shares his tips, tricks, and best practices for painless code development. The scientific world is becoming more and more computational, with numerical methods and models being critical to many disciplines such as geodynamics, earthquake dynamics and climate modelling to name a few. M ...[Read More]
It’s the first time Stella is organizing a session at the upcoming, 2022 EGU general assembly. Tantalized yet nervous due to the possibility of a forced merger with another, uninspiring session, she exclaims: How do I get people to submit abstracts to my session? Dear Stella, Why don’t you write a post on this very blog? Oh wait, you’re not the first one to do that. Ugh. How uncr ...[Read More]
Observing the Earth’s changing surface is the only thing solid Earth scientists can do; we simply cannot drill deep enough into the Earth and look at the processes that occur at very high temperatures and pressures. We must combine surface measurements from various disciplines to infer that specific surface imprints are caused by specific processes at depth. The sinking of oceanic plates into the ...[Read More]
Long (mostly self-inflicted) working hours, low pay, one short-time contract after another and no long-term guarantee whatsoever. That is academic life for you, in case you haven’t noticed. Sooner or later all academics start to ask themselves the same thing that Gabby asks: What are the nicest alternatives to academia? Dear Gabby, My personal favourites are careers that involve telling acad ...[Read More]
Science is all about discovering new things. But how do we make these discoveries, adding to the ever growing pantheon of knowledge? This week, we sit with one of our editors Antoniette Greta Grima, a Postdoctoral Fellow from the University of Texas at Austin, to understand what it takes to discover a new slab process. Thanks for sitting down with us this week! First things first, which subductio ...[Read More]
Jesper has a lot of green on his mind. No not money, you capitalists. Nature. The environment. Basil and chives. With the recent advent of billionaires finding new ways to caress their egos, and in a totally-not-aiming-to-start-mining-other-celestial-bodies kinda way, Jesper has some troubled thoughts: Should we really colonize other planets? We are already destroying this one… Dear Jesper, Sure. ...[Read More]
This week Daniel Douglas, who is now a PhD student at New Mexico Tech, discusses his master thesis research while at the university of Hawaii. He investigated the role of magma in the flexure of the Hawaiian lithosphere. When a topographic load is applied to the lithosphere, the lithosphere accommodates the load by flexing. The observed flexure can be measured through seismic methods, gravity anom ...[Read More]
Applying for tenure-track (or something close to that) positions is the very reason for many brilliant scientists to eventually run away from academia as fast as they can. Finding an opening, preparing your application and bracing yourself for the n-th `no thank you, but you should really try again!’ is a tedious, time-consuming, numbing, soul-destroying, kill-me-now process. Among the many ...[Read More]
As geodynamicists, we are sometimes oblivious on how we get the geophysical constraints in our numerical models. This week Molly Anderson, a PhD student at the University of Florida, takes us on a exciting dive to study the geochemical signatures of the East Pacific Ocean seafloor! People are often surprised to hear that the seafloor is covered with volcanoes, let alone that the most extensive cha ...[Read More]