TS
Tectonics and Structural Geology

EGU Guest blogger

This guest post was contributed by a scientist, student or a professional in the Earth, planetary or space sciences. The EGU blogs welcome guest contributions, so if you've got a great idea for a post or fancy trying your hand at science communication, please contact the blog editor or the EGU Communications Officer to pitch your idea.

San Francisco: Where the Plates Meet

November 30, 2020
San Francisco: Where the Plates Meet
View on the Golden Gate Bridge from the Presidio of San Francisco, showing the serpentine bluffs on the foreground, Fort Point under the arch of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands on the far side. Credit: William Elder.

San Francisco has been a natural gathering place for people across the millennia. It is not a coincidence that this city, situated at the entrance to the largest estuary on the U.S. West Coast, owes its dramatic setting to active geology on the North American plate margin. The first people of the San Francisco Peninsula, the Ramaytush Ohlone, cared for the land here for thousands of years before E ...[Read More]

Mind your head: Overcoming Anxiety

November 18, 2020
Mind your head: Overcoming Anxiety
Credit: Suzy Hazelwood. Distributed via Pexels

This Mind Your Head blog post is a follow-up from Jean Holloway’s talk during the online short course on mental health that aired during the last EGU General Assembly, where she discussed overcoming anxiety. Anxiety is excessive worry or fear, and is a normal part of life, until it becomes frequent or debilitating. This post is written by someone with lived experience as an academic who struggled ...[Read More]

Zürich: surrounded by a geologist’s playground

Anna Gülcher March 4, 2020
Zürich: surrounded by a geologist’s playground
View on the centre of Zurich, its lake and the Swiss Alps. Credit: Zurich General view by Zürich Tourismus, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Zürich, with its lake stretching towards the foot of the Swiss Alps in the South, is currently a charming city full of watersides, lively bars, students and bankers. In Switzerland, you’ll find a wide variety of landscapes and geological features over a relatively small area – from the Alpine mountain range in the South to the low-lying plateau and the Jura Mountains in the North. Located in close ...[Read More]

Sendai, living on the edge!

January 22, 2020
Sendai, living on the edge!
View of Sendai from Hirose river. Credit: Daniel Pastor-Galán.

Sendai and its people live on the edge. The city and its citizens learned to live over a subduction zone. Sendai has survived 500 years of hazards; it is a resilient and industrious city. People know disaster will strike again, but also that they will rise up when it does. Japan, ‘the sunrise country’, would be much better named ‘the land of sinking tectonic plates’. Above the point where the Paci ...[Read More]

Trieste, where the word Karst originates

October 16, 2019
Trieste, where the word Karst originates
The Gulf and city of Trieste viewed from the Strada Napoleonica. Credit: Simon Blondel.

The city of Trieste lies in north-eastern Italy along the border with Slovenia. It is positioned at  the corner point between the Romance, Germanic and Slavic worlds and serves as an important seaport in the region. It is fascinating for both its history and geology. My relationship with Italy’s town of Science, as Trieste is often referred to, started about a year ago. I got the opportunity to st ...[Read More]

Minds over Methods: Dating deformation with U-Pb carbonate geochronology

August 16, 2019
Minds over Methods: Dating deformation with U-Pb carbonate geochronology
Cathodoluminescence image of calcite vein in background, with 100 micron laser ablation spots overlain top right and U-Pb isochron overlain left. Image credit: Nick Roberts

For this edition of Minds over Methods, we have invited Nick Roberts, a research scientist at the British Geological Survey, working within the Geochronology and Tracers Facility (GTF) running a LA-ICP-MS laboratory. Nick has a background in ‘hard-rock’ geology, incorporating geochemistry, geochronology, and magmatic and metamorphic petrology across a wide range of tectonic settings, and is now in ...[Read More]

Minds over Methods: Virtual Microscopy for Geosciences

July 23, 2019
Minds over Methods: Virtual Microscopy for Geosciences
Information that can be extracted from a thin-section scan using the Virtual Microscope. All micrographs represent the same area within the thin section. From the upper left side: plain polarized light, crossed polarizers rotated by 0°, crossed polarizers rotated by 45°; from the lower left side: colour intensity map, colour saturation map, phase map. Credit: Liene Spruženiece

The next “Minds over Methods” blogpost is a group effort of Liene Spruženiece (left) – postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen and her colleagues Joyce Schmatz, Simon Virgo and Janos L. Urai. The Virtual Microscope is a collaborative project between RWTH Aachen University and Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (Schmatz et al., 2010; Virgo et al., 2016). In the ...[Read More]

From Mountains to Modernists: the geological foundations and inspirations of Barcelona

July 17, 2019
From Mountains to Modernists: the geological foundations and inspirations of Barcelona
Sunset view from Barcelona harbour over the city with the Collserola mountains in the backdrop. Credit: Aleksandar Pasaric via Pexels

Barcelona is a vibrant city on the Mediterranean coast, nested snugly between the sea and the Collserola Ridge of the Catalan Coastal ranges. The story of Barcelona starts around 2000 years ago as an Iberian settlement, owing to its strategic location on the coastal route connecting Iberia and Europe. The combination of easily defendable ground and the fertile soils of the Besos and Llobregat delt ...[Read More]

Minds over Methods: The faults of a rift

June 5, 2019
Minds over Methods: The faults of a rift
Looking south along the Malawi rift, with escarpment to the right and Chilwa Intrusions in the valley floor. Credit: Åke Fagereng

Do ancient structures control present earthquakes in the East African Rift?  Åke Fagereng, Reader in Structural Geology, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University For this edition of Minds over Methods, we have invited Åke Fagereng, reader in Structural Geology at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University. Åke writes about faults in the Malawi rift, and the seismic ha ...[Read More]

Features from the field: Boudinage

May 19, 2019
Features from the field: Boudinage
Boudins of amphibolite layers (metamorphosed basalts) that were stretched within quartz schists (Norway). Photo credits © Haakon Fossen.

The Features from the Field series is back! In our previous posts, we have shown how rocks can deform during ductile deformation, producing folds. Folds very commonly develop in rocks when rock layers are shortened by tectonic forces in a specific direction. On the other hand, when layers are extended, we develop boudins. Boudins – the term comes from the French word for ‘sausage’ – are frag ...[Read More]