What does an insect eye, Saturn’s North pole, beeswax, and a rock formation called columnar basalts all have in common? They are all hexagonal in shape. Why is this the case? Hexagons are the most efficient way to fill a space with the least amount of material The science of bubbles and bubble sculptures is very interesting and I do encourage you to go check out some other blogs that talk ab ...[Read More]
The EGU Tectonics and Structural geology Early Career Scientist representative team continues to grow, and as it grows, the activities it conducts during and between GAs also grows. In the lead up to EGU 23 here we show some of those activities. We are also looking for the next member of the ECS representative team! If you are interested in applying, see the details below the team updates. The gen ...[Read More]
Ireland is famous for retaining a rich heritage of folk tales, which are thousands of years old. They tell stories about great heroes, wars and loves, fantastic creatures such as leprechauns, fairies, banshees, giants and so on. Among them, there is a Middle Earth time myth, concerning a “small” giant, named Finn McCool, who built a great stone way connecting Northern Ireland with the western Scot ...[Read More]
For the first time in 2006 Cannat and co-workers described a smooth seafloor type in the mid-ocean ridge located in the SW Indian Ocean (SWIR). The 660-km-long off-axis bathymetry, gravity, and magnetic dataset presented in the study lies near the Rodrigues triple junction (RTJ in Fig. 1). The must read paper expanded the previous conceptual models that considered mid ocean ridges as primarily vol ...[Read More]
Cowie et al. (2005) is an exciting “must-read” for any geologist interested in rift systems. It examines strain accumulation and extension within a rift basin and scrutinizes model predictions with field observations. The authors highlight two sets of models, the first set of models uses brittle deformation to explain extension (e.g., King et al., 1988; Kusznir et al., 1991; Ter Voorde et al., 199 ...[Read More]
The must read paper Wortel & Spakman (2000) uses seismic tomography models showing the three-dimensional upper mantle velocity structure of the Mediterranean-Carpathian region to hypothesize lithospheric processes related to slab detachment, and particularly, the lateral migration of the detachment along plate boundaries (Fig. 1). The paper defends that this process is a key control in the lit ...[Read More]
“Strangers, who are you? Where do sail from? Are you traders, or do you sail the as rovers, with your hands against every man, and every man’s hand against you?” … “Stranger, you are a fool, or else you know nothing of this country. Talk to me, indeed, about fearing the gods or shunning their anger? We Cyclopes do not care about Jove or any of your blessed gods, for we are ever so much ...[Read More]
Yin and Harrison (2000) puts together an exhaustive review of three decades of geological and geophysical investigations on the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen. This research supports the orogenesis started during the Cenozoic between 70 and 50 Ma ago as a consequence of the Indo-Asian collision following the closure of the Tethys ocean between Laurasia and Gondwana. Yin and Harrison (2000) underlines th ...[Read More]
Why is a fork actually called fork? And why are volcanoes actually called volcanoes? While I do not have any reply for the first question, I have one for the second… and with a quite interesting story. The Earth currently has around 1350 potentially active volcanoes, aside from the volcanoes along the spreading centres (USGS faq); all of them are named after a single volcano, called Vulcano. Vulca ...[Read More]
As member of the EGU Tectonics and Structural Geology (TS) Early Career Scientist (ECS) Representative team, and with the outlook of the first hybrid EGU General Assembly (GA), I take the opportunity to highlight some of the activities and news of the ECS TS team. The ECS TS team has been very active all year round between last year’s #vEGU21 and the upcoming #EGU22 General Assembly. The activitie ...[Read More]
