Magnets are cool, who does not like them? And the planet that we live in, the Earth, itself is a huge magnet. Not only does the Earth’s magnetic field protect us from harmful radiation from space, but it can also help us reveal some of the secrets of our planet. Local variations in the magnetic field can be used to probe the subsurface of the Earth from crustal to mantle depths. Although there is ...[Read More]
The Earth’s climate has been rapidly changing in the last decades. That’s a fact! Virtually, every one of us has been experiencing those changes in person, but how do we know that Earth’s climate has changed in the past beyond the instrumental data of the last ~200 years? From ancient manuscripts to geologic records, there are many “archives” one might consider “reading” to infer or reconstruct pa ...[Read More]
Schematic illustrating core components of G-ADOPT, an Australian based cross-NCRIS project, principally developed at the Australian National University (ANU), with partners at the University of Sydney and Imperial College London. G-ADOPT is supported by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), with co-investment from AuScope, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and Geosciences Aust ...[Read More]
In high-school, I learned in a textbook that glaciers are melting. My teacher said that what was written in that textbook was right, and that was it. There was no proof, no explanation, no scientist’s testimony. All of that, I discovered much later during my studies in the geosciences. Yet as the global temperatures keep rising, and our politicians apply rigorously the “keep calm and carry on” mod ...[Read More]
As I already mentioned in the past, anonymity can lead to bad reviews. A state of namelessness can empower younger scientists to criticize manuscripts from potential future employers. But it also allows unaccommodating reviewers to stall a perfectly good submission for…reasons? Meia has encountered, or heard of such buffoons, and wonders: How to deal with an anonymous unreasonable reviewer? ...[Read More]
Weather extreme events in the year 2022 are really hitting the Mediterranean basin very hard. Since the beginning of the year we are observing a widespread drought, heatwaves but also severe thunderstorms. Few days before the COP meeting in Sharm-el-sheik we discussed one of the experts of Mediterranean climate, Federico Grazzini, to unveil whether these events can be linked to climate change. Fe ...[Read More]
For us humans, the world, before it is lived, has to be imagined. There is, however, something wrong with the way we have imagined the world if we consider where we are today, in particular in the face of global climate change. Let’s review how we have imagined water from the point of view of critical geography. How we have imagined water so far So far, we have imagined water through the lens of t ...[Read More]
What is the role of fluids in seismic cycles ?
Both the uncertainty inherent in scientific data, and the background and ethics of the communicators who report such data to any given audience, can sow doubt about the science of climate change. The perception of this duality is engrained in how the human mind works, whereby we tolerate lies but are always ready to condemn hypocrisy. We illustrate this through a personal experience that is connec ...[Read More]
In my blog post last year, I talked about the escalation of extreme events in Brazil, and one of the main questions was whether the scientific community would need new methods and technologies to deal with extreme events aggravated by climate change. This year, during one of the Innovations (WG05) working group meetings of the International Network on Landslide Early Warning Systems (LandAware), I ...[Read More]
