Last week was the Fall APECS International Polar Week, designed to promote and celebrate the great collaborative science that goes on around the world to further our understanding of the polar regions. Part of this celebration was a figure competition, to find the most “eye-catching, informative and inspiring” figures that illustrate aspects of polar science. What better, we thought, t ...[Read More]
“SEISMIC ANISOTROPY AND MANTLE DEFORMATION: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED FROM SHEAR WAVE SPLITTING?” (M. K. SAVAGE, 1999) commented by Dr. Jessica Johnson Jessica Johnson from the University of East Anglia (UK) is our guest author of the PoM blog series of this month! She has chosen to comment on the paper “Seismic Anisotropy and mantle deformation: what have we learned from shear wave ...[Read More]
Fabrizio Storti Chief Executive Editor of Solid Earth Università degli Studi di Parma The importance of publishing open access is increasing every year in Scientific Institutions worldwide and is becoming mandatory in several research funding programmes. Many funding institutions, including ERC, are financially supporting publishing in open access journals. EGU and Copernicus launched open access ...[Read More]
The 2nd TIDES training school! About 60 ECSeismologists (42% women, 58% men; 67% PhD students, 33% others) gathered in Sesimbra (Portugal) from 19th to 23th Sep 2016 to be trained on seismic noise, from the physics of noise generation to seismic interferometry. Two of us had the opportunity to attend the school and we are happy to share our experiences in the blog! But first, what is TIDES? Ok, ap ...[Read More]
“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]
