Dr. Anouk Beniest, an Assistant Professor in Tectonics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdamat, is an interdisciplinary earth scientist, bringing together geology, geophysics and geodynamics to help us understand complex geological problems. Her research revolves predominantly around plate tectonics, with a focus on extensional systems and she has kindly put together this blog post to convince you t ...[Read More]
Hydrological Sciences
Inclusive fieldwork: issues to care about
Imagine it is your first time going on a field trip. After spending hours in the lecture theatre, you are excited to get outside and see those environmental processes that so far you have only seen in graphs and figures. You get off the bus, and the first thing your professor says is: “people less comfortable with climbing on the rocks can just take the notes”, while looking at you and your femal ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
The Sassy Scientist – Clean Your Toilet
As academics, a lot of our time is invested in activities that are not seemingly related to our research. Teaching, organising seminars, writing EGU blog posts, reviewing papers. While I don’t deny the time consumingness of it, reviewing papers is a necessary and useful activity, at least as long as the publishing system works the way it currently does (that’s a topic for another post) ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Hidden beneath the surface – what can we learn from an ice sheet’s internal stratigraphy?
Hidden beneath the surface of ice sheets lies an intricate structure carrying a unique fingerprint of past ice flow and climate conditions. Disentangling the drivers of an ice sheet’s enigmatic stratigraphy could theoretically unravel the ice sheet’s past evolution and provide a much clearer picture of things to come in the future. One way to detect this mysterious stratigraphy is to use ice-penet ...[Read More]
Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences
How climate change can possibly increase the intensity of tornadoes in Europe
On October 23 2022, a tornado outbreak occurred in France, causing extensive damages. Tornadoes in France are a relatively rare phenomenon, even more so in the second half of October. This weather phenomenon is linked to intense thunderstorms, and it is difficult to predict because it is very localized. Will global warming make this weather more frequent or intense? A thundercloud that grows visib ...[Read More]
Biogeosciences
The sedaDNA scientific society, a collaborative network of international researchers working with sedimentary ancient DNA
Emergence of the field of molecular paleoecology Sequencing DNA of organisms that died a long time ago sounds like the synopsis of the movie Jurassic Park (1993). Let’s make it clear right now, dinosaur DNA has never been collected by humans. To date, the oldest DNA recovered is more than one million years old and comes from mammoths. In addition to the DNA recovered from fossils, aquatic and terr ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
Unravelling the geological past of the Sierra del Nevado, in South Andes, Argentina
Have you ever wondered to learn more about the geological setting of the Nevado volcano in Central-West Argentina? In this week’s blog, we have Georgina Rubiano Lorenzoni, a Ph.D. Geologist student from the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa in Argentina, who will guide us through her thesis aims, which are the identification and investigation of the petrogenesis and geochronology of the mountain ra ...[Read More]
Natural Hazards
Let’s begin the recovery before the disaster
Every natural event that causes damage to the built environment must be followed by recovery; however, this phase of disaster risk management has received less attention from academics than the others [1]. In all its aspects, disaster recovery has remained a contentious topic, with experts debating its definition, approaches, objectives, activities, and even when it should begin and finish [2–4]. ...[Read More]
Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology
International Continental Scientific Drilling Program Workshops – How they work and why they provide fascinating experiences and perspectives, especially for early career scientists
Thanks to the novelty and potential of my research focus (a paleothermometer for lacustrine environments based on the application of the carbonate clumped isotope technique on small crustacea shells (ostracods)) that provides insights into atmospheric temperatures of the past, I was selected by the committees of three International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) workshops. The aim ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
The Global Arctic, a personal perspective on interdisciplinary research
Around the summer solstice of 2022, a small group of twenty young researchers met in Svalbard, a small island lost between Norway and the North Pole. The Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research wanted to bring us together around the theme of “The Global Arctic“. The scope of this summer school was to “produce a better understanding of the significance of the concept of Gl ...[Read More]