EGU Blogs

Divisions

TS
Tectonics and Structural Geology

Mind your head #2: The importance of time management in academia

June 20, 2018
Mind your head #2: The importance of time management in academia

Mind Your Head is a blog series dedicated towards addressing mental health in the academic environment and highlighting solutions relieving stress in daily academic life. An important struggle of people working in academia is how to complete all the different tasks in the limited time available. Even though time management is important for almost any type of career, the degree of freedom in academ ...[Read More]

NH
Natural Hazards

Volcanic tourism, in between fascination and hazard awareness. Episode 1: the volcanologist prospective.

June 19, 2018

  Volcanoes are often located in stunning and fascinating places of the world. Some volcanoes are in areas already heavily populated, like Popocatépetl in Mexico or that thanks to tourism become highly or more populated during certain times of the year, like Agung in Indonesia. In addition to the charm, volcanoes can be and have been harmful to both lives and properties. The hazards posed by ...[Read More]

SSP
Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology

When lava meets water…

June 19, 2018
When lava meets water…

Pillow-palagonite complex forming as a result of hot lava entering a former river channel or lake in the Columbia River Flood Basalt Province, Washington State, USA (c. 15 My). Individual sediment packages were picked up from the bottom of the water body and trapped within the lava complex (see white arrow). Orange-brown palagonite is a type of clay which forms through the break-down of volcanic g ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week — Orange is the new white

June 15, 2018
Image of the Week — Orange is the new white

On 22 March 2018, large amounts of Saharan dust were blown off the Libyan coast to be further deposited in the Mediterranean, turning the usually white snow-capped Mountains of Turkey, Romania and even Caucasus into Martian landscapes.  As many people were struck by this peculiar color of the snow, they started documenting this event on social media using the “#orangesnow hashtag”. Instagram and t ...[Read More]

ST
Solar-Terrestrial Sciences

The average magnetic field and polar current system (AMPS) model

June 15, 2018
The average magnetic field and polar current system (AMPS) model

In this month’s post, Karl Magnus Laundal explains a newly developed empirical model for the full high latitude current system of the Earth’s ionosphere, AMPS (Average Magnetic field and Polar Current System). The model is available and documented in python code, published under the acronym pyAMPS. The community is invited to download and explore the electric currents and magentic fiel ...[Read More]

GD
Geodynamics

Remarkable Regions – The Kenya Rift

June 13, 2018
Remarkable Regions – The Kenya Rift

Every 8 weeks we turn our attention to a Remarkable Region that deserves a spot in the scientific limelight. After looking at several convergent plate boundaries, this week the focus lies on part of a nascent divergent plate boundary: the Kenya Rift. The post is by postdoctoral researcher Anne Glerum of GFZ Potsdam. Of course an active continental rift is worthy of the title “Remarkable Region”. A ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

What’s on at POLAR18?

June 13, 2018
What’s on at POLAR18?

Next Tuesday (19th June) the POLAR18 Open Science Conference kicks off in Davos, Switzerland. We have put together a quick guide about events that might be of interest to you during the week! Conferences are about the science, of course, but the social side is just as important :) What is POLAR18? The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that the POLAR18 conference is, in fact, a collection of d ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Icy expedition in the Far North

June 8, 2018
Image of the Week – Icy expedition in the Far North

Many polar scientists who have traveled to Svalbard have heard several times how most of the stuff there is the “northernmost” stuff, e.g. the northernmost university, the northernmost brewery, etc. Despite hosting the four northernmost cities and towns, Svalbard is however accessible easily by “usual-sized” planes at least once per day from Oslo and Tromsø. This is not the case for th ...[Read More]

GD
Geodynamics

The art of the 15-minute talk

June 7, 2018
The art of the 15-minute talk

We’ve all attended conferences with those dreaded 15-minute talks and we have no problem picking out which talks were amazing and which talks were abysmal. However, when it comes to our own talks, it’s hard to judge them, find out how they can be improved or break away from long-established habits (such as our layout or talking pace). This week, Matthew Herman, postdoc at the Tectonoph ...[Read More]

CL
Climate: Past, Present & Future

Levoglucosan, the witness of past fires

June 6, 2018
Levoglucosan, the witness of past fires

Name of proxy Levoglucosan Type of record Biomass burning Paleoenvironment Lake and marine sediments and ice cores Period of time investigated Present to approximately 130,000 years ago How does it work? Levoglucosan is a molecule that is exclusively formed during the combustion of vegetation at low-temperature. It is therefore considered to be a source-specific tracer for biomass burning. During ...[Read More]