With the progress in the digital world there are more and more e-tools available for research and teaching. What are smart ways to make use of new techniques in teaching? For inspiration and learning, Hans de Bresser, Janos Urai and Neil Mancktelow convened a PICO session at the EGU 2017 General Assembly to showcase present-day e-learning opportunities to improve the efficiency and quality of teac ...[Read More]
The Greenland ice sheet flows from the interior out to the margins, forming fast flowing, channelized rivers of ice that end in fjords along the coast. Glaciologists call these “outlet glaciers” and a large portion of the mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet is occurring because of changes to these glaciers. The end of the glacier that sits in the fjord is exposed to warm ocean water that can me ...[Read More]
At the EGU ESSI division meeting, Christoph Stasch was elected as the new representative of the early career scientists in the ESSI division following Jennifer Roelens. Christoph works as research associate and consultant at 52°North, a non-profit research organisation in the field of applied geoinformatics. His focus is on simplifying the integration of sensors and processing modules (e.g. enviro ...[Read More]
– written by James Tempest (University of Cambridge), Larissa A. Naylor (University of Glasgow), Tom Spencer and Iris Möller (University of Cambridge) – Extreme storm and flood events are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity across the globe causing significant geomorphic change throughout many landscapes often with detrimental impacts on local populations. In 2014 an int ...[Read More]
They come in all shapes, sizes and textures. They can be white, deep blue or brownish. Sometimes they even have penguins on them. It is time to (briefly) introduce this element of the cryosphere that has not been given much attention in this blog yet: icebergs! What is an iceberg? Let’s start with the basics. An iceberg, which literally translates as “ice mountain”, is a bit of fresh ice that brok ...[Read More]
Why are glaciers important? Glaciers cover around 10% of the global land surface. This includes the large ice sheets (e.g. in Greenland and Antarctica) as well as smaller ice caps and valley glaciers (e.g. in Iceland, Norway and New Zealand). Figure 1 shows the current distribution of glaciers around the world. Figure 1 – The global distribution of glaciers around the world from the GLIMS glacier ...[Read More]
Today’s Image of the Week shows annual ice flow velocity mosaics at 1km resolution from 2005 to 2016 for the Antarctic ice sheet. These mosaics, along with similar data for Greenland (see Fig.2), were published by Mouginot et al, (2017) last month as part of NASA’s MEaSUREs (Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments) program. How were these images constructed? The mosaics s ...[Read More]
John G. Ramsay1 wrote his seminal textbook on the folding and fracturing of rocks in 1957, almost 20 years before I was born (and I don’t count myself as young!). So why did I co-convene a session at EGU in 2017 to celebrate the book? Because the book, in many ways, expresses the legacy that John has given to structural geology. He followed it with a series of books of the same ilk – Ramsay ...[Read More]
The 2017 edition of the EGU general assembly was a great success overall and for the cryospheric division in particular. We were for instance thrilled to see that two of the three winning photos of the EGU Photo contest featured ice! To mark the occasion we are delighted to use as our image of this week, one of these pictures, which shows an impressive rapid in the Pite River in northern Sweden. ...[Read More]
Name of the proxy Ostracoda Type of proxy Paleoenvironment proxy Paleoenvironment All types of aquatic environments but here we will focus on marine waters Period of time investigated Phanerozoic How does it work? Ostracoda are crustacean of millimetre size which have inhabited all types of marine environments from the Ordovician to today (e.g. Salas et al. 2007) and colonized continental water bo ...[Read More]
