October 2020

Featured catchment: Water Towers of Mesopotamia: Snow feeding the cultural heritage

EGU Guest blogger October 28, 2020

An aerial view from the water towers of Mesopotamia Credit: Celal Borazan, 08.03.2013 Palandöken Mountain, Erzurum ©️ 2020 TSMS

Importance and challenges of snow modelling in Turkey Snow and glaciers in the high mountains play a crucial role for 1.6 billion people living downstream of mountainous areas. Thus, understanding snow dynamics is crucial for downstream irrigation, hydropower, flood control etc. In eastern Anatolia, Turkey (the mean elevation is around 1140 m), much of the precipitation falls as snow and is retain ...[Read More]

Hybrid field courses – a teaching format beyond emergency solution?

Heike Mayer and Miriam Hug October 21, 2020

Field work in front of the computer - a new reality?

Conducting field courses in times of a pandemic can be challenging. In our case, we had to cancel a planned field trip in economic geography that would have taken 19 students and two advisors to the Valle Maira in the Italian province of Cuneo in the Piemont. We had planned to spend 10 days in this region to develop ideas for sustainable development of peripheral mountain regions. Students would h ...[Read More]

Virtual Meetings: Hypnotic sedative or effective stimulant?

Astrid Björnsen Gurung October 14, 2020

Visualization of the 3 biggest fears of digital workshop moderators. (A. Björnsen, June 2020).

Some people claim that teaching online courses or virtual workshops is not very different from face-to-face meetings. In my experience, however, it is much harder to sneak away secretly from a half-occupied seminar room than to withdraw from a virtual meeting where you simply mute the speaker to work on your emails located only one mouse click away. And that’s not all! In contrast to physically pr ...[Read More]