To understand the fundamental behaviour of the ocean, and any changes it’s undergoing, we need to know what the ocean is doing today, and on each day in the recent past. We can do this by creating reanalyses, which use data assimilation to combine state-of-the-art models with observations. The focus is often on ocean physics, but we also need to know about the marine ecosystem and carbon cycle. As ...[Read More]
By Mike Simmons and Andy Davies. It seems that geoscience is facing something of an existential crisis. The September 2020 issue of Geoscientist, the magazine of the Geological Society of London, contains a number of articles on the future of geoscience and its relevance to society. At the heart of the concerns are a drop in student numbers, with total 2019 undergraduate student enrolments down by ...[Read More]
The Steepest Descent is a yearly one-day meeting taking place in Vienna, Austria, close to the EGU general assembly. Participants have the opportunity to see a few keynote talks by outstanding geomorphologists and to discuss their posters in a more informal and geomorphology-focused community than at the EGU. Despite its youth, the Steepest Descent Meeting seems to have lost its aura of a niche-ev ...[Read More]
The InterArctic project (Fig. 1) focuses on vulnerability, resilience and adaptation of northern societies facing global change. The current rapid warming of Arctic and Subarctic climates has already produced many changes in the social, economic and cultural behaviour of the populations inhabiting these regions and more changes are expected to come. In this context, looking at the past provides th ...[Read More]
“Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow”. Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1 (W. Shakespeare) Snow and ice are not always as pristine as one may think. If you have ever walked on a glacier or on a snowfield during summer, you might have already noticed that. In fact, both snow and ice are often darkened by impurities. In this blog post, you will learn about the main processes leading to ice and snow darkeni ...[Read More]
As a new coping mechanism with reality, Sascha has been digging into some science history and asked: How did scientists discover plate tectonics? Dear Sascha, I do enjoy a good walk on the memory lane of scientific discoveries. You might know by now that great insight is gained when we look at data with fresh eyes. Hence, lots of advances in certain narrow scientific fields come from outsiders. In ...[Read More]
It looks like a spike, orange against the blue sky, sticking out the green ocean of the Amazon forest: Standing 325 m tall, the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) is the highest construction in South America. This tower celebrates its 5th anniversary this year, while the ATTO research site, located ~150 km northeast of Manaus, Brazil, has been in operation for 10 years. During the past 5 years, ...[Read More]
August was not highlighted by a large event (> M7) and the choice for the earthquake of the month was a bit tricky. Four events were available to choose from: An intraplate EQ in the US (M5.1), the largest event in this region since 1916, an M6.6 in the Philippines, a deep earthquake (~620 km) M6.9 in Indonesia, and a doublet earthquake (M6.8 – 6.9) in Indonesia. After some discussion, we ...[Read More]
Though giant earthquakes are disastrous, they provide essential information to investigate earthquake physics. In this week’s news and views, Thyagarajulu Gollapalli, a PhD student jointly from the Monash University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, discusses our present understanding of such big earthquakes and how advanced numerical models will help to get a more precise picture of ...[Read More]
In 1965, JT Wilson published “A New Class of Faults and their Bearing on Continental Drift” (https://doi.org/10.1038/207343a0). This is one of the papers that led to a paradigm shift in Earth Sciences and would become one of the bases of plate tectonics. The concept of the transform fault, introduced in this paper in a very smart way, is fundamental in tectonics textbooks nowadays. Indeed many of ...[Read More]
