EGU Blogs

Divisions

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week — Cryo Connect: connecting cryosphere scientists and information seekers

October 12, 2018
Image of the Week — Cryo Connect: connecting cryosphere scientists and information seekers

Communicating scientific findings toward non-experts is a vital part of cryosphere science. However, when it comes to climate change and its impact, the gap between scientific knowledge and human action has never been so evident (see for instance, the publication of the latest IPCC special report). Today, our image of the week features an interview with Cryo Connect, a new initiative for more effi ...[Read More]

GD
Geodynamics

It’s just coding … – Scientific software development in geodynamics

October 9, 2018

As big software packages become a commonplace in geodynamics, which skills should a geodynamicist aim at having in software development? Which techniques should be considered a minimum standard for our software? This week Rene Gassmöller, project scientist at UC Davis, Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, shares his insights on the best practices to make scientific software better, and ho ...[Read More]

SM
Seismology

Palu 2018 – Science and surprise behind the earthquake and tsunami

October 8, 2018

On September 28, 2018, a powerful 7.5-magnitude earthquake and an unexpected tsunami shook the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, leaving behind catastrophic results and open questions among geoscientists. How come this event is having such an impact on the scientific community?   What we know so far On Friday afternoon (at around 5pm Western Indonesian Time) the Minahassa Peninsula on Sulawesi i ...[Read More]

SM
Seismology

WOMEESA (Women in Earth & Environmental Science Australasia)

October 8, 2018
WOMEESA (Women in Earth & Environmental Science Australasia)

The condition of women in the workplace has not always been easy. Even though the mentality of the people is changing towards inclusion and equality, it is a long way before things really change. We always observe unbalanced number of women versus number of men, unbalanced competition among colleagues for career promotion and responsibility and unequal wages between women and men in many places. M ...[Read More]

NH
Natural Hazards

Earthquake-induced landslides and the ‘strange’ case of the Hokkaido earthquake

October 8, 2018

The population of many countries in the world is exposed to earthquakes, one of the most destructive natural hazards. Sometimes, consequent triggered  phenomena can be even worse than the earthquake itself. In this context, earthquake-induced landslides often concur in life and economic losses. To better understand these induced phenomena, updated catalogues of their types and location of occurren ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Greenland’s fjords: critical zones for mixing

October 5, 2018
Image of the Week – Greenland’s fjords: critical zones for mixing

One of the most challenging research questions to address in the Arctic is how freshwater discharge from Greenland’s largest glaciers affects the biogeochemistry of the ocean. Just getting close to the calving fronts of these large marine-terminating glaciers is difficult. Fjords, hundreds of kilometers long and full of icebergs which shift with the wind and roll as they melt, make the commute a l ...[Read More]

SSP
Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology

Glacial grooves from the Laurentide Ice Sheet (Québec, Canada)

October 3, 2018

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]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Oh Sheet!

September 28, 2018
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]

SM
Seismology

What’s Shaking? – Facts and figures of latest earthquakes

September 27, 2018

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]

CL
Climate: Past, Present & Future

What can artificial intelligence do for climate science?

September 26, 2018
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]