In April 2018, an eruption of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii started. The activity continued for months, with impressive lava flows that cut roads and even covered houses and entire neighbourhoods (Figure 1), forcing the evacuation of thousands of people. Fortunately, it did not take any life. Some weeks later, on June 3rd, Fuego volcano, in Guatemala, shocked the international community with a sh ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – On thin [Arctic sea] ice
![Image of the Week – On thin [Arctic sea] ice](https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/wp-content/blogs.dir/17/files/2018/10/kayak-700x400.jpg)
Perhaps the most enduring and important signal of a warming climate has been that the minimum Arctic sea ice extent, occurring each year in September, has declined precipitously. Over the last 40 years, most of the Arctic sea ice has thus been transformed to first-year ice that freezes in the winter and melts in the summer. Concern about sea ice extent and area is valid: since sea ice i ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
Oceans on Mars: the geodynamic record
Apart from our own planet Earth, there are a lot of Peculiar Planets out there! In this series we take a look at a planetary body or system worthy of our geodynamic attention, and this week we are back to our own solar system, more precisely to our neighbour Mars. In this post, Robert Citron, PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about the links between oceans, shorelines, ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
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]
Geodynamics
It’s just coding … – Scientific software development in geodynamics
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]
Seismology
Palu 2018 – Science and surprise behind the earthquake and tsunami
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]
Seismology
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]
Natural Hazards
Earthquake-induced landslides and the ‘strange’ case of the Hokkaido earthquake
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]
Cryospheric Sciences
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]
Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology
Glacial grooves from the Laurentide Ice Sheet (Québec, Canada)
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]