With time to spare during self-isolation and local lockdown, Mark wonders: What programming language should I learn for my geoscience career? Dear Mark, The pandemic has made us look long and hard at our career choices. Were you inspired as a student by a cool field geologist in a documentary? Were you profoundly marked by that school trip at an active volcano? Did you fell in love with coral reef ...[Read More]
GMPV is excited to announce in advance the next three sessions of ECS online talks for October, November and December 2020! We’ll be announcing speakers for each of the events in advance so keep a look-out here on the blog, on social media and in your inbox! Note: when you register for an event, you have the option to sign up for emails too – if you can’t attend but would like to receive emails, w ...[Read More]
You know what has been missing from this blog so far? Book reviews! This week, Maeve Murphy Quinlan, PhD student at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom studying meteorites, comes to our rescue and discusses the science fiction genre with a review and recommendation of the novella To be Taught, if Fortunate. I know what’s next on my reading list. What is science fiction? It is a wide-ran ...[Read More]
– Authors: The German Young Geomorphologists (Renee van Dongen, Jörn Profe, Steffi Tofelde, Janek Walk, Mario Kirchhoff, Julian Trappe, Johannes Buckel, Stefan Haselberger, Simon Meyer-Heintze) – COVID-19 Pandemic has changed the world this year. We as scientists are affected by this pandemic, but we can mostly work from home and most importantly, we can conduct our jobs. Nonetheless, ...[Read More]
On August 4, 2020, the coast of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, was rocked by an explosion caused by the blowing up of 2750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate, a chemical used in fertilizers (Figure 1). It resulted in at least 181 casualties, 6,000 injuries and 10-15 billion US dollars in damage [Ref 2]. Footage of the explosion has circulated widely: a large fire near the port’s warehouses and an in ...[Read More]
Breaking news: a bizarre early-September snowstorm dumped snow from Montana to New Mexico, a medicane hit Southern Italian regions and Greece, heatwaves and droughts are expected to increase in the future… These extreme events are becoming more and more frequent and one question spontaneously arises: is climate change making the weather more extreme? This is one of the reasons why climate change i ...[Read More]
Ice caps, valley glaciers, cirque glaciers, piedmont glaciers, ice sheets… I’m guessing that if you are a glaciology enthusiast, you have already heard about these types of glaciers. But you probably don’t know anything about regenerated glaciers, am I right? Well, you are in the right place! Let’s find out more about this little-known glacier type. Classifying glaciers Glaciers are classified on ...[Read More]
The August 2020 NPG Paper of the Month award goes to Josh Jacobson and colleagues for their paper “Beyond univariate calibration: verifying spatial structure in ensembles of forecast fields” (https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-411-2020). The ability to know the future has long been sought after and coveted. Yet, in contrast to prophecies and crystal balls, modern methods of prediction are ...[Read More]
Jade feels uncomfortable as she glides across the multi-faceted piazza of Earth sciences. Sometimes parents should think a tad longer about prospective names for their progeny, especially in case they push them into the world of minerals, rocks and equations-of-state. With all the facts on jade in her back-pocket, Jade wonders whether she should brush up and expand her knowledge: What is your favo ...[Read More]
After a few years spent at an Earth Science department researching social inequalities and hydrological extremes — i.e. floods and droughts — I have often been asked these rhetorical questions: “Isn’t it obvious that the weakest individuals or social groups suffer the most in case of extreme hydrological events? So, why should we study these inequalities?” Driven by these questions, and the years ...[Read More]
