“Tsunami“ is a word that became world famous after the so-called Christmas tsunami in 2004, when enormous waves hit the shores around the Indian Ocean with disastrous consequences for countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Somalia and many others. But did you know that tsunamis can be icy? An ice tsunami is one of the many names associated with ice shoves (or ivu, shore ice override, i ...[Read More]
Minds over Methods is the second category of our T&S blog and is created to give you some more insights in the various research methods used in tectonics and structural geology. As a numerical modeller you might wonder sometimes how analogue modellers scale their models to nature, or maybe you would like to know more about how people use the Earth’s magnetic field to study tectonic processes. ...[Read More]
The Scorpion and the Frog. This old tale, which was first documented by the movie Mr. Arkadin by Orson Welles, reports a scorpion that wants to cross a river… and asks a frog for a ride. Embarking on a lose-lose situation, both the frog and the scorpion are doomed in the tale. Dramatic, this fable severely resembles how humans conduct their quest for resource extraction. Surface mining, a pa ...[Read More]
Sea ice is an important part of the Earth’s climate system. When sea ice forms, it releases heat and salt. When sea ice melts, it takes up heat and adds freshwater to the salty ocean water. It is also important for the exchange of energy between the atmosphere and the ocean surface, and for the ocean currents that transport warm and cold water from the equator to the poles and back. The main route ...[Read More]
Polar surface water, circumpolar deep water, dense shelf water, North Atlantic deep water, Antarctic bottom water… These names pop in most discussions about the ice-ocean interaction and how this will change in a warming climate, but what do they refer to? In our second “For Dummies” article, we shall give you a brief introduction to the concept of “water mass”, explain how to differentiate water ...[Read More]
As mountain glaciers melt and recede, they often leave behind large glacial lake that are contained by the glaciers’ old terminal moraines. These glacial lakes are found throughout the world and can pose a significant flood hazard to downstream communities and infrastructure. The image of this week focuses on Lake Palcacocha, a large glacial lake located in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca at an elevation ...[Read More]
Normally, September is not people’s favorite month as it goes with the end of the summer holidays, the beginning of the academic year and that of autumn. Not much to be happy about. Thankfully, space and planetary science is here to help you overcome this difficult period with lots of exciting events. Fly me to Bennu Asteroïds and comets were formed at the same time as the other planets, at the be ...[Read More]
When events such as the Aug 28 2016 Amatrice earthquake occur, we seismologists are asked to answer scientific questions and to give an immediate judgment of the situation. Such questions may be asked by media officers during formal interviews or by friends and family members in person or even on the social networks in informal settings (sometimes only a few seconds after the earthquake’s occurren ...[Read More]
You remember last winter, when everything was white and you had so much fun building a snowman with your friends? What you see on this image above, is what you would see, if you took a tiny tiny piece of your snowman and put it under a low-temperature scanning electron microscope (SEM). The colours are called “pseudo colours”, they are computer generated based on the number of electron ...[Read More]
The amount of digital data per person is rising with a geometric progression since 2009. According to the latest report of Oyster IMS, the digital universe will grow by a factor of 300 between 2005 and 2020: from 130 Exabytes to 40,000 Exabytes, or 40 trillion gigabytes (more than 5,200 gigabytes for every person in 2020). Earth sciences is one of the domains where huge volumes of data are collect ...[Read More]
