Paris, 2000 ya. Claude is sweating all over. It’s mid-July and the sun is burning on his skin. With his hammer and shovel he is digging up grey and white stones. The faults and fractures in the rock help him to get the rocks out easily. But still, it’s hot and humid and his shift isn’t over yet. Luckily he can’t complain about the view. Lutetia, one of the new Roman settlements lies right in front ...[Read More]
Professor Tamsin Mather, a volcanologist in Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences reflects on her many fieldwork experiences at Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, and what she has learned about how they effect the lives of the people who live around them. Over the years, fieldwork at Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, has revealed many secrets about how volcanic plumes work and impact the environment, ...[Read More]
Glacier erosion happens at the interface between ice and the ground beneath. Rocks are ground down to dust and landscapes shaped by the flowing ice. While these might be hotspots for erosion, the dark and nutrient-poor sites are unlikely environments for biological activity. However, experiments suggest there may be novel sources of energy powering subglacial microbial life… Where there is water, ...[Read More]
Maintaining a good work-life balance is essential for a steady career and happy life in academia. However, like with all good things, it is not easy. In this new Wit & Wisdom post, Jessica Munch, PhD student at ETH Zürich, explores how to achieve a good work-life balance. Research is a truly amazing occupation, especially in geodynamics (okay, that might be a bit biased…). However, disre ...[Read More]
Geoscientists do not have to deal only with technical matters, but have to think also about the ethical implications related to their discipline. To increase the awareness of researchers on the ethical aspects of their activities, it has been created the International Association for Promoting Geoethics (IAPG). To better understand what geoethics and the IAPG are, we interviewed Silvia Peppoloni, ...[Read More]
Solmaz Mohajder is a researcher at the Earth System Dynamics Research group of University of Tübingen in Germany. She has published an online database and an interactive map for active faults in Central Asia (Mohajder et al., 2016). More recently, Solmaz and her colleagues have compiled fault slip rates to investigate whether deformation rates from GPS and from geologic observations provide consi ...[Read More]
Much like our Planet Earth, Mars has polar ice caps too, one for each pole: the Martian North Polar Ice Cap (shown on our image of the week) and the Southern Polar Ice Cap. Yet, their composition and structure reveals these ice caps are quite different from those of Planet Earth… Mars refresher As a refresher, here are some Mars facts: Mars is the 4th planet from the sun. Its equatorial dia ...[Read More]
The Geodynamics 101 series serves to showcase the diversity of research topics and methods in the geodynamics community in an understandable manner. We welcome all researchers – PhD students to Professors – to introduce their area of expertise in a lighthearted, entertaining manner and touch upon some of the outstanding questions and problems related to their fields. For our first ‘101’ ...[Read More]
Our closest star, the Sun, is constantly emitting hot gas in all directions as its upper atmosphere, the corona, expands. This is known as the Solar Wind, also carrying with it an embedded magnetic field, the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF). The IMF originates at the Sun and forms an enormous spiral throughout the solar system as the solar wind escapes radially, while the magnetic field-line ...[Read More]
The Arctic is changing rapidly and nothing indicates a slowdown of these changes in the current context. The Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) report published by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) describes the present situation and the future evolution of the Arctic, the local and global implications, and mitigation and adaptation measures. The report is base ...[Read More]
