Kerry Leith from the Engineering Geology Department at the ETH Zürich set up a post on their latest publication and the backstory behind it. As they announced on their own website (www.stressdriven.com) review comments ranged from “mediocre or poor” to “[…] provocative, potentially revolutionary (if correct) analysis”. It surely contains interesting thoughts. – written by …[Read More]
Division blogs
Tectonics and Structural Geology
Paris: From quarry to catacombs
Paris, 2000 ya. Claude is sweating all over. It’s mid-July and the sun is burning on his skin. With his hammer and shovel he is digging up grey and white stones. The faults and fractures in the rock help him to get the rocks out easily. But still, it’s hot and humid and his shift …[Read More]
Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Petrology & Volcanology
Living with volcanic gases
Professor Tamsin Mather, a volcanologist in Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences reflects on her many fieldwork experiences at Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, and what she has learned about how they effect the lives of the people who live around them. Over the years, fieldwork at Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, has revealed many secrets about how …[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – Microbes have a crush on glacier erosion
Glacier erosion happens at the interface between ice and the ground beneath. Rocks are ground down to dust and landscapes shaped by the flowing ice. While these might be hotspots for erosion, the dark and nutrient-poor sites are unlikely environments for biological activity. However, experiments suggest there may be novel sources of energy powering subglacial …[Read More]
Geodynamics
Work-life balance: insights from geodynamicists
Maintaining a good work-life balance is essential for a steady career and happy life in academia. However, like with all good things, it is not easy. In this new Wit & Wisdom post, Jessica Munch, PhD student at ETH Zürich, explores how to achieve a good work-life balance. Research is a truly amazing occupation, especially …[Read More]
Natural Hazards
Ethics and Geosciences: discovering the International Association for Promoting Geoethics
Geoscientists do not have to deal only with technical matters, but have to think also about the ethical implications related to their discipline. To increase the awareness of researchers on the ethical aspects of their activities, it has been created the International Association for Promoting Geoethics (IAPG). To better understand what geoethics and the IAPG …[Read More]
Seismology
SeismoChat: How to disarm earthquakes
Solmaz Mohajder is a researcher at the Earth System Dynamics Research group of University of Tübingen in Germany. She has published an online database and an interactive map for active faults in Central Asia (Mohajder et al., 2016). More recently, Solmaz and her colleagues have compiled fault slip rates to investigate whether deformation rates from GPS …[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – Ice caps on Mars?!
Much like our Planet Earth, Mars has polar ice caps too, one for each pole: the Martian North Polar Ice Cap (shown on our image of the week) and the Southern Polar Ice Cap. Yet, their composition and structure reveals these ice caps are quite different from those of Planet Earth… Mars refresher As …[Read More]
Geodynamics
Rheological Laws: Atoms on the Move
The Geodynamics 101 series serves to showcase the diversity of research topics and methods in the geodynamics community in an understandable manner. We welcome all researchers – PhD students to Professors – to introduce their area of expertise in a lighthearted, entertaining manner and touch upon some of the outstanding questions and problems related to their fields. …[Read More]
Solar-Terrestrial Sciences
How do we study the magnetosphere?
Our closest star, the Sun, is constantly emitting hot gas in all directions as its upper atmosphere, the corona, expands. This is known as the Solar Wind, also carrying with it an embedded magnetic field, the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF). The IMF originates at the Sun and forms an enormous spiral throughout the solar system …[Read More]