These impressive glacial grooves observed along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence Estuary (Québec, Canada) were carved into the crystalline bedrock by the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The grooves mark the basement of a complex sedimentary system known as the Tadoussac Delta, lying at the mouth of the Saguenay Fjord and intimately tied to the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene deglaciation of the area. The ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – Oh Sheet!
The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are major players in future sea level rise. Still, there is a lot about these ice sheets we do not understand. Under the umbrella of the World Climate Research Programme, the international scientific community is coming together to improve ice sheet modelling efforts to better grasp the implications of climate change for ice sheet evolution, and consequently, ...[Read More]
Seismology
What’s Shaking? – Facts and figures of latest earthquakes
Haven’t you heard about the recent major earthquakes which stroke the globe? No worries, the ECS-reps will post a quarterly report with basic information about the latest earthquakes you can’t miss. Let’s start with June, July and August 2018. Between the 1st June and the 31st August, 425 earthquakes with magnitude Mw above 5.0 were recorded by the international network broadband se ...[Read More]
Climate: Past, Present & Future
What can artificial intelligence do for climate science?
What is machine learning? Artificial Intelligence, and its subfield of machine learning, is a very trending topic as it plays an increasing role in our daily life. Examples are: translation programs, speech recognition software in mobile phones and automatic completion of search queries. However, what value do these new techniques have for climate science? And how complicated is it to use them? Th ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
Presentation skills – 1. Voice
Presenting: some people love it, some people hate it. I firmly place myself in the first category and apparently, this presentation joy translates itself into being a good – and confident – speaker. Over the years, quite a few people have asked me for my secrets to presenting (which – immediate full disclosure – I do not have) and this is the result: a running series on the ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – The 2018 Arctic summer sea ice season (a.k.a. how bad was it this year?)
With the equinox this Sunday, it is officially the end of summer in the Northern hemisphere and in particular the end of the melt season in the Arctic. These last years, it has typically been the time to write bad news about record low sea ice and the continuation of the dramatic decreasing trend (see this post on this blog). So, how bad has the 2018 melt season been for the Arctic? Yes, the 201 ...[Read More]
Atmospheric Sciences
The puzzle of high Arctic aerosols
Current Position: 86°24’ N, 13°29’E (17th September 2018) The Arctic Ocean 2018 Expedition drifted for 33 days in the high Arctic and is now heading back south to Tromsø, Norway. With continuous aerosol observations, we hope to be able to add new pieces to the high Arctic aerosol puzzle to create a more complete picture that can help us to improve our understanding of the surface energy budget in ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
Reproducible Computational Science
We’ve all been there – you’re reading through a great new paper, keen to get to the Data Availability only to find nothing listed, or the uninspiring “data provided on request”. This week Krister Karlsen, PhD student from the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED), University of Oslo shares some context and tips for increasing the reproducibility of you ...[Read More]
Solar-Terrestrial Sciences
Cosmogenic Radionuclides – The quest of studying the solar activity of thousands of years
Thanks to the invention of the Neutron Monitor in 1948 and multiple spacecraft which monitor the cosmic ray environment since 1970’s we now have a constant record of the solar activity over almost 70 years. Information prior to this space era, however, are rare and take us back in time only to the late 1930s, when ionization chambers have been introduced. This of course allows us only a narr ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – Climbing Everest and highlighting science in the mountains
Dr Melanie Windridge, a physicist and mountaineer, successfully summited Mount Everest earlier this year and has been working on an outreach programme to encourage young people’s interest in science and technology. Read about her summit climb, extreme temperatures, and the science supporting high-altitude mountaineering in our Image of the Week. It’s bigger than it looks! Experiencing the majesty ...[Read More]