EGU Blogs - Recent Division Posts

Sudden Temperature Change in a Warming World: Why Future Temperature Swings Are a Global Tug-of-War?

Ceren Moral — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:00:01 +0000

Berlin just went through a brutal heatwave, and then out of nowhere, the temperature crashed between June 28 and 29. The daily mean temperature dropped from nearly 33°C to 25°C—a dramatic drop of about 8°C in just 24 hours (based on ERA5 reanalysis data structure accessed via Open-Meteo). Scientists call these abrupt shifts temperature volatility: rapid transitions from unusually cold to warm conditions—or vice versa—from one day to the next (Hamal & Pfahl, 2025). These sudden temperature changes can have serious consequences. They are linked to increased risks of heat stroke, respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, particularly among older adults and young children; they can damage crops during sensitive growth stages and may even slow economic growth (Kotz et al., 2021; Zou et al., 2024). When we talk about climate change, we usually focus on rising average temperatures. Yet changes in day-to-day temperature variability receive far less attention. That is precisely the gap our research aims to address. Not One Story, but a Global Tug-of-War It is tempting to assume that a warmer world will simply bring more temperature swings everywhere. More heat, more extremes—it sounds intuitive. Our recent study, published in Weather and Climate Dynamics, shows that the reality is more complicated. Future changes in temperature volatility resemble a global tug-of-war: some regions are projected to experience weaker extreme day-to-day temperature swings, while others will see them intensify (Figure 1). To understand why, we need to look at the physical processes that drive these rapid temperature changes. The first is advection—the horizontal movement of air masses. Think of cold Arctic air surging south into Berlin or Chicago, or warm subtropical air pushing poleward. The second is an adiabatic process, which occurs when air moves vertically. Rising air expands and cools, while sinking air compresses and warms. The third is a diabatic process, which involves energy exchanges at the Earth's surface and atmosphere. Cloud cover, soil moisture, evaporation, and incoming sunlight can all influence how quickly temperatures rise or fall from one day to the next. Climate change affects all three processes, but not equally everywhere or in every season. As a result, there is no single global story of future temperature volatility. Instead, the changes form a patchwork of regional responses driven by different physical mechanisms. [caption id="attachment_5722" align="alignleft" width="484"] Figure 1. Day-to-day temperature (DTDT) variability in the (a, b) historical climate (His) and (c, d) projected future changes (Fut-His). Blue colours indicate regions where temperature swings are projected to weaken, while red colours indicate regions where they are projected to strengthen. Results are shown for December- February (DJF) and June- August (JJA). Cross-hatching indicates statistically significant changes (Figure adapted from (Hamal & Pfahl, 2026)).[/caption] The Extratropics: A Calmer Winter One of our most striking findings is that many mid- and high-latitude regions—including North America, northern Europe, and northern Asia—which currently experience some of the largest extreme day-to-day temperature swings, are projected to see those swings weaken during winter (Figure 1a, c). The main reason is Arctic amplification. The Arctic is warming much faster than the global average. As a result, the source region of many cold-air outbreaks is becoming substantially warmer (Screen, 2014). In the past, an Arctic air mass moving southward could produce a dramatic temperature shock. In the future, that same air mass will still be cold relative to its surroundings, but it will not be as cold as it once was. In other words, the temperature contrast between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes is shrinking, reducing the intensity of winter temperature swings. Summer tells a more complicated story. Some extratropical regions also show declining temperature volatility during summer (Figure 1b, d), but the patterns are less coherent and no single mechanism dominates. Instead, changes arise from a combination of advection, diabatic, and adiabatic processes, with their relative importance varying between regions and individual events. The Tropics and Subtropics: Moving in the Opposite Direction In many tropical and subtropical regions, the tug-of-war pulls the other way. During Southern Hemisphere summer, areas such as the Amazon Basin, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa are projected to experience stronger extreme day-to-day temperature swings, despite currently exhibiting relatively low temperature volatility (Figure 1a, c). Here, the changes are driven less by advection and more by local atmospheric processes. Rapid transitions between cloudy, rainy conditions and clear skies can dramatically alter the amount of solar energy reaching the surface, producing large temperature differences between consecutive days. At the same time, changes in vertical air motion associated with convection can amplify cooling events. In the subtropics during Northern Hemisphere summer—including parts of the Sahel, central Europe, Central America, and southern Asia (Figure 1d)—changes in diabatic heating play a particularly important role. As soils become drier in a warmer climate, less energy is used for evaporation, and more is converted into sensible heat—the heat we directly experience as warmer air temperatures. This shift can amplify temperature fluctuations from one day to the next, increasing temperature volatility. So, will summers in Berlin become more unpredictable? The answer is likely yes. But increasingly, the uncertainty may come from summer rather than winter. Why This Matters for Adaptation The central message of this research is that global warming does not affect temperature variability uniformly. While extreme day-to-day temperature swings are projected to weaken across many northern mid- and high-latitude regions, they are expected to intensify across parts of the tropics and subtropics—regions that are often among the most vulnerable to climate-related health, agricultural, and economic impacts (IPCC, 2023). Understanding the physical drivers behind these changes—from Arctic amplification to drying soils—can help move climate adaptation beyond one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, adaptation strategies can be tailored to the specific risks facing different regions. Because in this global tug-of-war, knowing where the rope is pulling hardest is the first step toward preparing for what comes next. Read the full open-access study in Weather and Climate Dynamics here.

This post has been edited by the editorial board

References:
1. Hamal, K., & Pfahl, S. (2025). Physical processes leading to extreme day-to-day temperature change – Part 1: Present-day climate. Weather Clim. Dynam., 6(3), 879-899. https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-6-879-2025
2. Hamal, K., & Pfahl, S. (2026). Physical processes leading to extreme day-to-day temperature change – Part 2: Future climate change. Weather Clim. Dynam., 7(2), 1009-1032. https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-7-1009-2026 
3. IPCC. (2023). Climate Change 2022 – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844
4. Kotz, M., Wenz, L., Stechemesser, A., Kalkuhl, M., & Levermann, A. (2021). Day-to-day temperature variability reduces economic growth. Nature Climate Change, 11(4), 319-325. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-00985-5
5. Screen, J. A. (2014). Arctic amplification decreases temperature variance in northern mid- to high-latitudes. Nature Climate Change, 4(7), 577-582. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2268
6. Zou, Z., Li, C., Wu, X., Meng, Z., & Cheng, C. (2024). The effect of day-to-day temperature variability on agricultural productivity. Environmental Research Letters, 19(12), 124046. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad8ede

Using Generative Modelling to Downscale Climate Data for Ice Sheets

Leah Muhle — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:50:52 +0000

Greenland's ice sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by over 7 meters, but predicting how much it will actually shrink remains challenging due to the massive computational cost of traditional models. Our latest research introduces machine learning-based downscaling that generates high-resolution climate fields orders of magnitude faster than conventional regional climate models. Inspired by AI image generators, our model takes coarse climate output, and learns to fill in realistic fine-scale details that capture local variability. This allows for fast and efficient downscaling of coarse fields from many climate models, ultimately reducing uncertainties related to sea level rise.

What will happen to the Greenland ice sheet in the future?

Greenland’s ice sheet has the potential to raise the global sea-level up to 20 cm until the end of this century and more than 7 m if it would melt completely. But how can we estimate how much the ice sheet will actually shrink in the future? The fate of the Greenland ice sheet is mostly determined at its surface. Low temperatures and snowfall let the ice sheet grow while high temperatures at the surface lead to melt and shrinkage of the ice sheet. Now, we all know that it is getting warmer and hence we expect more melt at the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. However, it is hard to know how much more it will melt in the future. First, there is considerable uncertainty on how much more global temperatures will rise and second, we do not know how exactly this translates to the local climate in Greenland.

To predict the shrinkage of the ice sheet that is caused by melting, we usually run different climate models, but unfortunately, they are computationally expensive. In our recent paper, we show a new fast machine learning-based method that allows us to skip one of the most expensive steps in projecting Greenland’s sea-level rise contribution and enables us to downscale a large amount of global climate model output. This allows us run large ensemble simulations which can ultimately decrease uncertainties.

From coarse climate models to high-resolution ice sheet modelling

Global climate models provide projections of how the climate may change in the future, but these models and their output usually have a relatively coarse spatial resolution, typically around 50–100 km. However, ice-sheet modelling needs much higher resolutions of climate information. Specifically, we need the surface temperature and mass balance at surface from the climate model on a resolution of around 1–16 km to obtain reliable estimates of how much ice will melt. This finer resolution is necessary to resolve the small-scale spatial variability that substantially influences the ice sheet, particularly along the margins, where the majority of melt occurs.

One way to generate such high-resolution fields is to take the low-resolution climate model output and feed it into a specialized regional climate model. These models simulate the climate over a smaller domain, such as Greenland, and produce high-resolution output. This output can then be used by ice-sheet models to estimate the future evolution of the ice sheet. However, this approach has several limitations. One problem is that the model chain is often “offline”: the surface mass balance is calculated independently of changes in the ice sheet itself. This matters because the geometry of the ice sheet can strongly influence the surface mass balance. As the ice sheet thins and its elevation decreases, surface temperatures rise locally, leading to increased melting, a process known as the melt-elevation feedback. A second problem is that regional climate models are computationally expensive. They simulate the climate at high spatial resolution and often use sub-daily time steps, which requires substantial computational resources.

[caption id="attachment_17558" align="alignnone" width="1537"] Figure 1. Workflow of our method. The model is trained on high-resolution climate data and learns to remove artificial noise from low-resolution input, thereby filling in the missing spatial details. [Credit: Bochow et al., 2026][/caption]

How can machine learning help us?

In our new paper, we propose an alternative approach to tackle the second problem: generative-modelling-based downscaling, which is inspired by AI-based image generation methods that have emerged in recent years. The basic idea behind generative-modelling-based downscaling is to add artificial noise to the coarse climate model output (input for our model) and let the generative model remove the noise (denoise) again while filling in fine spatial details, that it learned beforehand from high-resolution regional climate models (Figure 1).

But why do we add noise at all? The reason is that downscaling is not a one-to-one translation problem. The same coarse climate pattern can correspond to many different fine-scale outcomes. A model that is asked to predict only one fine-resolution map often learns an average of all these possibilities, which can look unrealistically smooth. By adding noise and training the model to remove it again, we give it a way to generate one realistic fine-scale realization among many possible ones. The denoising process guides the model to keep the large-scale climate information from the coarse model while filling in small-scale details that resemble those learned from high-resolution regional climate simulations.

Specifically, we train a so-called consistency model that directly learns a mapping from a noised image to a clean image. In theory, only one evaluation of the model is needed and it is therefore extremely fast. This offers an advantage over other approaches such as diffusion models, which often need several hundred or thousand evaluations to generate realistic output. By deciding how much noise is added to the coarse input, it is possible to control how much pairing or similarity between in- and output there is. In other words, the noise is a knob that controls how much information we want to retain from the coarse fields. When we add minimal noise, the output stays very close to the original coarse climate data, keeping those large patterns intact but missing the small-scale details we care about. Adding a lot of noise gives minimal pairing and the generative model basically does not retain any information from the coarse input. By testing different noise levels, it is possible to determine an 'optimal' noising strength that fills in fine details while still having reasonable pairing with the input fields. This balance is important because we do not want the model to simply create realistic-looking fields. We want it to generate fields that are both realistic and physically consistent with the large-scale climate signal from the original climate model.

Once trained, our method can generate high-resolution climate fields much faster than a regional climate model. This makes it possible to explore more climate scenarios, more model combinations, or larger ensembles of projections and helps us to better estimate uncertainties related to the sea-level rise contribution of the Greenland ice sheet.

The future of ice sheet modelling

More and more data-driven and machine-learning methods are explored in the context of ice sheet modelling but process-based models will likely remain the backbone of the field in the near future. It is also important to note, that most machine learning based methods need some training data to learn from, and these are usually coming from process-based models. Machine learning, therefore, will not make classical climate modelling obsolete but rather is a complementary tool.

Read the paper

Bochow, N., Hess, P., and Robinson, A.: Physics-constrained generative machine learning-based high-resolution downscaling of Greenland's surface mass balance and surface temperature, The Cryosphere, 20, 1841–1866, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-1841-2026, 2026.

References

Fox-Kemper et al., 2021. Ocean, Cryosphere and Sea Level Change. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Morlighem et al., 2017. BedMachine v3: Complete Bed Topography and Ocean Bathymetry Mapping of Greenland From Multibeam Echo Sounding Combined With Mass Conservation.
Goelzer et al., 2020. The future sea-level contribution of the Greenland ice sheet: a multi-model ensemble study of ISMIP6.
Feenstra et al., 2025. Role of elevation feedbacks and ice sheet–climate interactions on future Greenland ice sheet melt.
Hess et al., 2025. Fast, scale-adaptive and uncertainty-aware downscaling of Earth system model fields with generative machine learning.

Edited by Christina Draeger and Leah Sophie Muhle

HydroTalks: Prof. Thom Bogaard on Water and Landslides, Early Warning Systems, and IAHS-HELPING Decade

Archita Bhattacharyya — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:00:23 +0000

For episode 11 of HydroTalks, we welcomed Prof. Thom Bogaard of Delft Technical University and visiting professor at Kasetsart University, Bangkok. His research explores the intersection of hydrology, geomorphology, ecology, and natural hazards. We discussed his work on understanding how water triggers landslides, improving regional early warning systems, and developing practical solutions that reduce disaster risk. We also touched on Prof. Bogaard’s role as the chair of IAHS-HELPING Hydrological Decade. You can check out the podcast episode here or read the interview summary in this blog!

How does water contribute to landslides?

Water is the primary trigger for many landslides because rising groundwater increases pore water pressure and reduces soil strength. This weakens the connection between soil particles, making slopes less stable and more likely to fail.

How do hydrology, ecology and geomorphology together contribute to triggering a slope failure or preventing it?

Landslides are inherently interdisciplinary. Vegetation reinforces soil through roots and affects infiltration, evapotranspiration and water storage. Geology and geomorphology also matter because slope angle, soil thickness, permeability and rock type control how water moves and how much strength a slope can maintain. Human activity can further destabilize slopes, especially in the Anthropocene.

How does water chemistry play a part?

Water chemistry helps trace where water comes from within a slope because different rocks leave different chemical signatures. It also affects soil strength. In marine clay deposits for example, freshwater infiltration can change the internal structure of the clay and reduce its strength, allowing failure after only a small trigger.

Is it possible to predict landslides? And how challenging is it to predict?

To some extent, yes. Landslide prediction is difficult because failures are rare, extreme events. For individual slopes, engineers use models, lab tests, rainfall thresholds and monitoring-based early warning systems. At regional scales, rainfall, antecedent hydrology and susceptibility maps estimate probability. The biggest challenge is reducing false alarms.

How is weather radar used for land slide early warning systems?

Weather radar converts raw reflectivity signals into rainfall intensity. This is especially useful in places like Southeast Asia, where intense local rainfall cells trigger flash floods and landslides. Corrected rainfall fields can forecast where heavy rainfall may move over the next 3 to 6 hours, supporting early warning and evacuation.

Is rainfall location enough and how accurate are predictions?

Rainfall location helps, but it is not enough. I use high-intensity rainfall cells to identify risky sub-catchments rather than exact slope failures, because that would need heavy physical models. Often, warnings are issued with caution and it turns out to be a false alarm.

What are the biggest gaps in reducing major losses due to landslide disasters?

The key challenge is not only scientific knowledge, but communicating risk so society can act. Landslides, floods and flash floods cannot be fully prevented, but susceptibility maps, remote sensing, spatial planning, rainfall thresholds and impact-based forecasts can reduce exposure and improve warnings.

How will climate change affect landslides?

Climate change is increasing landslide risk because landscapes are no longer in equilibrium with ‘new’ changed climate conditions. Overall, we see stronger hydrologic cycles increasing hazard in many regions. At the same time exposure is rising as more people and infrastructure are located in high-risk areas.

What are nature based solutions and some challenges in using those solutions?

Nature-based solutions work with natural conditions while providing ecological and social benefits such as biodiversity, cooling and well-being. I strongly support them, but their long-term performance is still uncertain. Ecosystems evolve over decades, and we do not fully understand how these systems co-evolve with hydrological conditions or what feedbacks may emerge.

What are the main objectives of the HELPING Hydrological Decade?

In hydrology especially, I notice a clear tendency from a fundamental scientific focus toward work that is intended to be used directly by society. For me, the core task is working with stakeholders to co-develop solutions and develop scientific methods how to do that, because every hydrological problem is locally expressed but globally driven.

What are your achievements since you've become the chair in 2025?

Definitely not for my own contribution, but I'm super proud for the energy and the grassroots culture and achievements of my predecessors. For example, if you now come up with a new initiative and you write a small proposition for it, you can create in EGU session on it. That type of dynamic is fantastic.

What is the biggest breakthrough in hydrological research in the last 10 year? And what do you think are the trends for the next 10 years?

The biggest breakthrough in the last 10 years, is that hydrology has become truly multidisciplinary. For the next 10 years, I think the priority is improving uncertainty quantification and being careful about overpromising results. I also see major challenges in understanding the unknown effects of climate adaptation and response of how water systems to climate change and society.

Could you share the best and worst piece of career advice that you've ever received?

The worst advice I received was that I should strictly focus my scientific career in a narrow direction. The best advice is to have the guts to follow your heart and work with people where you really have a click, because science is about humans, not only careers. Check out the full episode.

Can the Ocean Explain Why Climate Models Struggle with the Indian Monsoon?

Jacqueline Behncke — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:54:50 +0000

Few climate phenomena affect as many people as the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM). Between June and September, it delivers most of the annual rainfall over the Indian subcontinent, supporting agriculture, water resources, and livelihoods for more than a billion people. Yet predicting how the monsoon will respond to climate change remains a major scientific challenge because it is shaped by complex interactions between the atmosphere and the surrounding oceans. Among these, the Indian Ocean plays a particularly important role. The ISM is driven by southwesterly winds that originate near the Mascarene High in the southern Indian Ocean and travel northward toward the Indian subcontinent (Figure 1). As these winds cross the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, they gain moisture and are influenced by sea-surface temperatures, upwelling, and other oceanic processes before making landfall over India. Climate projections from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) generally suggest a stronger monsoon by the end of the century, but the underlying mechanisms remain debated. While some studies propose that a warmer Arabian Sea enhances atmospheric moisture and rainfall, others suggest that it weakens the monsoon by reducing the land–sea thermal contrast. Moreover, many CMIP6 models continue to exhibit substantial regional biases, raising an important question: could ocean biases be contributing to errors in monsoon simulations? A recent study published in Environmental Research Letters provides new insight into this question. The study shows that CMIP6 models exhibit a pronounced cold sea-surface temperature (SST) bias in the northern Arabian Sea, alongside reduced rainfall over the west coast and northeast India. Using a regional coupled atmosphere–ocean numerical model and targeted sensitivity experiments, the study demonstrates that this cold SST bias can delay the monsoon onset over Kerala by 6-7 days, weaken low-level monsoon winds, reduce moisture transport, and suppress rainfall (Figure 2). It also slows the northward progression of monsoon rainfall, influencing the timing of active and break phases. These findings highlight how SST biases in the northern Arabian Sea can strongly affect monsoon onset, progression, and rainfall variability, emphasizing the need to reduce regional ocean biases to improve future monsoon projections. [caption id="attachment_3793" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Figure 2 Schematic illustration of the influence of the NAS cold SST bias on ISM characteristics. (a) ISM characteristics under conditions of a pronounced NAS cold SST bias, and (b) ISM characteristics after correction of the NAS cold SST bias. Dashed (solid) arrows indicate weaker (stronger) winds, while smaller clouds (larger clouds with lightning) represent reduced (enhanced) precipitation. The numbered sequence illustrates the chronology of the processes, which are described in detail alongside each panel (source: Lahiri and Pant 2026).[/caption]

References:

Lahiri, S. P., & Pant, V. (2026). Role of the northern Arabian Sea cold SST bias in delaying monsoon onset and weakening Indian summer monsoon circulation. Environmental Research Letters (2026). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae8460
Roxy, M., Ritika, K., Terray, P. et al. Drying of Indian subcontinent by rapid Indian Ocean warming and a weakening land-sea thermal gradient. Nat Commun 6, 7423 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8423
Sharmila, S., Joseph, S., Sahai, A. K., Abhilash, S., & Chattopadhyay, R. (2015). Future projection of Indian summer monsoon variability under climate change scenario: An assessment from CMIP5 climate models. Global and Planetary Change, 124, 62-78.
Sulochana Gadgil. 2003. The Indian Monsoon and Its Variability. Annual Review Earth and Planetary Sciences. 31:429-467. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.earth.31.100901.141251.

From the Lab to the Open Air: The Struggle of Making Sensors That Don't Lie

Joseph T. Almazan-Valencia — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 03:36:19 +0000

In scientific papers, measuring gases in the atmosphere sounds like a straightforward task: you buy a sensor, you calibrate it, and you let it collect data. However, anyone who worked on this knows that the real atmosphere is a hostile environment for delicate electronics and precision optics. Among humidity saturating your circuits, brutal temperature swings, and the natural drift of components over time, getting a sensor to tell the truth is a monumental challenge. On this blog, we are stepping away from the flawless charts of peer-reviewed papers to get our hands dirty with hardware and measurement physics thanks to two experts: the first from the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Change (ICAyCC) and the second from the Institute of Physical Science (ICF), both in Mexico, who dedicate their days to the vital (and sometimes deeply frustrating) task of designing, calibrating, and deploying the instruments that let us eavesdrop on our planet’s atmosphere.

Information About the Interviewees

Dr. Wolfgang Stremme, Researcher at ICAyCC

Research Line: Measuring trace, reactive, and long-lived gases that impact public health, radiation, and climate change.
The Sensors He Masters: Spectroscopy systems, infrared solar absorption optical instrumentation, and automated solar trackers.

Dr. Andrea Cadena, Researcher at ICF

Research Line: Analyzing the processes, sinks, origins, and lifespans of atmospheric gases, with a special emphasis on formaldehyde and compounds linked to wildfires.
The Sensors She Masters: FTIR (Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy) systems based on Michelson interferometry, PANDORA ground-based spectrometers, and satellite data like TROPOMI (Sentinel-5P).

The Heart of the Hardware: Fingerprints and Solar Absorption

To understand how these machines work, you have to visualize the atmosphere as one giant, dynamic filter. Dr Stremme breaks it down fundamentally: these systems are designed to measure trace gases (both highly reactive pollutants that immediately impact human health and long-lived greenhouse gases that trap radiation and drive climate change) by evaluating columns in the atmosphere. Dr Cadena explains that technologies like FTIR use solar absorption to generate interferograms via Michelson interferometry. This catches a highly specific signal, a literal spectral fingerprint unique to each gas. By running these through algorithms and radiative transfer models (like HITRAN), the team simulates a theoretical spectrum. They then tweak it using least squares to figure out the actual composition: the exact number of molecules per square centimeter in an atmospheric column, giving us a highly detailed look at the troposphere. This rounds out the technical explanation perfectly right before they dive into the challenges of keeping that hardware stable. Everything else is ready to roll!

What’s the Technical Challenge That Gives Most Trouble?

Keeping these systems stable in the wild is a non-stop battle against entropy. For Dr Stremme, the ultimate headache is the sheer number of critical components that must play nice together in perfect sync: "Working with solar absorption in the infrared requires extreme stability and alignment. We don't have an instrument with an absolute intrinsic value, so we need highly stable systems to get reliable measurements over all kinds of background noise. From keeping a remote connection alive to running the solar tracker, cooling the detector with liquid nitrogen, and calibrating the Fourier transform laser... the real challenge is making everything work at the exact same time. Sometimes you fix one part and another one breaks. Without that synchronicity, your data is compromised." Dr Cadena agrees that ground alignment is everything if you want high-quality spectra, highlighting a historical nemesis: solar tracking automation. "Automated sun-tracking is a massive engineering hurdle. In the summer, the sun rides high in the sky, and in the winter, it's much lower. When the zenith angle is very high, you lose the signal much more easily. If your automation system lags or runs faster than the sun actually moves, you lose the track, lose the signal, and you're left with zero spectra."

Ground Sensors vs. Satellites: Allies or Rivals?

One of the most common misconceptions in atmospheric observations is that satellite measurements have replaced ground-based instrumentation. In reality, as both researchers emphasize, the two approaches are complementary rather than competing: it is the ultimate tag team. Satellites offer incredible global coverage, like TROPOMI’s sun-synchronous polar orbits, but they often suffer from low spatial or temporal resolution, usually taking a snapshot of a single spot just once a day. That’s where ground instrumentation saves the day. Earth-bound FTIR and PANDORA sensors offer vastly superior temporal resolution, allowing us to track the diurnal cycle of gases and spot long-term trends with insane spectral resolution. The secret sauce here is validation. Ground sensors are used to calibrate space data, cross-check systematic biases, and make sure satellite algorithms aren’t lying to us.

Field Panics and Eurekas in the Wild

Behind every 10- or 20-year dataset is a collection of field stories that define entire scientific careers. For Dr Stremme, a core memory happened during his postdoc in Mexico while taking measurements at Altzomoni, a volcanic station managed by ICAyCC in Popocatepetl volcano. The sheer contrast of switching from measuring crisp, clean mountain air to directly capturing a massive volcanic plume and Mexico City's urban plume was an unforgettable scientific milestone that proved the raw power of in situ optical instrumentation. Meanwhile, Dr Cadena remembers the "Eureka!" moment of her own postdoc while crunching a 10-year wildfire database in Mexico. By correlating the data with biomass, she managed to track down the exact sources of the fires and estimate how much gas (like formaldehyde) was being pumped into the atmosphere depending on the season. Her data showed critical peaks in April and May that vanished the moment the summer rains rolled in. This scale of spatio-temporal air quality analysis had never been done in the country with that methodology before.

What Data or Gas Are We Ignoring Today That Will Be Critical in 5 Years?

Looking ahead, both experts point to massive data gaps in the carbon cycle. Dr Stremme warns about our urgent need to get a grip on carbon dioxide and methane emissions and sinks, particularly in regions where ground-monitoring coverage is practically non-existent, like Central America, South America, or southern Mexico (where dense spots like the Calakmul jungle serve as vital forest sinks for the planet). Dr Cadena is also focusing her radar on the continuous monitoring of air quality and compounds coming from agricultural burning and wildfires. She plans to expand her formaldehyde research into key areas like the Mexican state of Morelos to anticipate and soften the blow on public health and the climate.

A Word of Advice for EGU GI's Early Career Scientists

To wrap up, the interviewed scientists left us with two golden nuggets of wisdom centered around persistence and the very soul of our division: hardware development. "There are countless ways to retrieve information using algorithms when processing data, but there will be days when your gear simply refuses to work in the field. The key is persistence. When you're chasing big scientific breakthroughs, giving up is not an option. Today, we have way more resources and learning tools than we used to; you've got to make the most of them." - Dr. Andrea Cadena "In our field, it's easy to just rely on commercial, off-the-shelf instruments and completely ignore custom hardware development. But when you design and build your own optical and mechanical components, you truly understand the system inside out. My advice is to walk both paths: use existing tech to get your results, but never abandon developing your own instrumentation. That's where the real learning happens." - Dr. Wolfgang Stremme At the end of the day, keeping the eyes of science wide open and ensuring our sensors tell the truth in a chaotic world takes a mix of heavy mathematical rigor and old-school engineering ingenuity.

Information from the researchers

Dr. Wolfgag Stremme ORCID: 0000-0003-0791-3833 Mail: stremme@atmosfera.unam.mx Web: https://www.atmosfera.unam.mx/ciencias-ambientales/espectroscopia-y-percepcion-remota/wolfgang-stremme-2/ Dr. Andrea Cadena ORCID: 0000-0003-3274-9115 Mail: andrea.cadena@icf.unam.mx Web: https://www.fis.unam.mx/directorio/1973/andrea-juletsy-strong-cadena-strong-caicedo

TopoToolbox webinar recap & resources

Emma Lodes — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:38:56 +0000

Our TopoToolbox webinars on June 2 and 3 were a success with ~90 participants! The webinars covered the functionalities of TopoToolbox 3 and its integration into both MATLAB and Python, and highlighted tools including GraphFlood and TRANSECT. Be sure to check out the TopoToolbox gallery, which hosts example workflows contributed by TopoToolbox users and developers. Thanks again to the conveners, Wolfgang Schwanghart, Dirk Scherler, William Kearney, Boris Gailleton, and Bastien Mathieux. In case you missed it, here are the recordings: Session 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REHzGt1XT6w Session 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXWCELPCK_s

Ada Lovelace’s spirit at Lake Seč

Editorial Team 2 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:00:20 +0000

From 21 to 26 June, the 2026 Ada Lovelace Workshop on Modelling of Mantle and Lithosphere Dynamics brought together the geodynamics community in Seč, Czech Republic. In this week's blog post, Vojtěch Patočka, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geophysics at Charles University in Prague and a member of the organising committee, offers an offbeat take on the workshop.

Every two years, a group of mantle and lithosphere dynamics modelers gathers at an isolated venue in Europe. Two weeks ago, the meeting was organized in Czechia, where it returned after more than two decades. Warm greetings from the arriving participants, not unlike those in the Love Actually movie introduction, made me wonder how many Ada Lovelace workshops I have attended already. Well, almost all of them, as the official name comes from 2018 only, but the series started in 1987 in Neustadt, the year I was born. I did not attend that year. In fact, nobody was present at both the 1987 and 2026 meetings, the series matadors Bernhard Steinberber, Anne Davaille, and Neil Ribe recall. Bernhard arrived to ALW2026 with a bag he had packed several months ago while getting ready to board the deep-ocean research vessel “Sonne”, departing from San Diego. After cruising to Japan he traveled to Czechia mostly on land and sea via China and Kyrgyzstan, and only leapfrogging Azerbaijan – some people just do what it takes to get to the Ada Lovelace meetings :)

[caption id="attachment_43350" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Participants of the 2026 Ada Lovelace Workshop, hotel Jezerka, Lake Seč[/caption] While no 3D numerical models were presented in 1987 in Neustadt, already in 1993, the first ALW in Czechia, Paul Tackley featured “The effects of phase transitions in 3D spherical models of mantle convection”. By comparing other abstracts from that year, e.g. “The effects of phase transition kinetics on subducting slabs” (Daessler, 1993), with those from ALW2026, such as “Effects of mineral phase transitions on mantle dynamics and heat flow in Venus” and “Beyond equilibrium: kinetic thresholds and rheological feedbacks create a potentially complex 410 in slab regions”, it may seem that scientists like to run in circles. Indeed, some researchers have been spotted jogging around lake Seč repeatedly. When looking into the abstract booklets in detail, however, it is obvious that significant progress has been made not only in terms of the available methods, but also that the questions posed decades ago have acquired quite different flavors. Importantly, funding has skyrocketed many projects away from Earth, with a clear increase of interest in planetary science. The number of presentations about icy moons has multiplied by a factor of infinity compared to the early 90s meetings, and even Venus seems hotter than it used to be. The program started with an ice-breaker on Sunday. Despite several experts from the field, ice rheology was surprisingly little discussed, with most people contemplating the karaoke songs list instead, knowing that the upcoming social events are endangered in the absence of well established pop-stars from ETH Zurich (the department being evaluated during that week). On Monday, after exciting keynotes by Susanne Buiter, Oğuz Göğüş, Denise Degen, Anthony Jourdon, and Sebastian Wolf, the early career researchers plucked up the courage at students-speakers meeting, discussing dripping continents and vertical tectonics, and held onto the microphone also throughout the aforementioned karaoke later that night. Both actively singing and aside standing seniors were proudly observing that the geodynamic community shows no stage fright. After Tuesday, another busy day of keynote talks by Adina Pusok, Tobias Keller, Agnes Kiraly, Arne Spang, and Christian Sippl, the schedule finally became more relaxed and only then most participants suddenly realized that they were accommodated in a wellness hotel. The exception was a group of highly motivated workaholics who signed up for the geological field trip and then continued straight to the MAGEMin and Geodynamic World Builder hands-on lectures, spending their late evening by coding. On Thursday, the recharge of batteries powered the last but not least enthusiastic talks, both by early career as well as by very very experienced scientists Julian Lowman, Diogo Lourenço, Madeleine Kerr, Martin Kihoulou, and Christophe Sotin. Many have learned about the fascinating geological activity of icy worlds for the first time. During plenary discussion, however, sensitive minds could already hear the live music in the air, and some were thinking about their dance moves for the farewell party. Carrying on the legacy, the last evening was memorable, with jazz & blues musician and our former colleague Ondřej Šrámek leading the tunes. For some mysterious reason, the local house owners at Lake Seč are still singing about West Virginia in their dreams, and wondering what the fox says. [caption id="attachment_43354" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Organizing team (Department of Geophysics, Charles University)[/caption] With everyone hopefully getting more sleep now, and with the lead organizer and our department head Hana Čížková slowing down from ten emails per second, it is time to thank everyone for their contributions. The geodynamic family has assimilated several new members and the tradition is about to continue in the Netherlands in 2028. Country roads, take me there.

GMPV Early Career Scientist Network 2026-2027

PIYAL HALDER — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:36:55 +0000

Hi, The 2026 General Assembly is over. Now it's time to introduce our existing ECS Network, which has been enriched by a few new members.

Let's meet our ECS Network members-

ECS Representatives (2025-2026)

(1) Piyal Halder

Hello my GMPV brothers and sisters, I am the ECS Representative of the GMPV division, EGU, for 2025-2027. I am presently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Deep Earth and Crustal Evolution Studies Group of the Petrology & Geochemistry Division at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, India (an autonomous Research Institute under the Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India). I have completed my PhD in Geochemistry and Tectonics from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (An Institute of National Importance, Govt, of India) & Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow (DST., Govt. of India). I have also served as a Project Scientist in the Scientific Deep Drilling Program at the Koyna Intraplate Seismic Zone, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India. My doctoral research delves into the intricate dynamics of fluid-rock interactions at shallow crustal faults within the granitoid basement beneath the Deccan Traps, and its implications for seismicity at the Koyna-Warna region of Western India. The Koyna-Warna is a small intraplate area surrounded by the Koyna and Warna dams and has been recognised as a hotspot of reservoir-triggered seismicity owing to seismic recurrences over the last six decades. I have been associated with the EGU-GMPV division since 2022 as an ECS member, blog editor and LinkedIn manager. Besides dealing with spatulas, vials, conical flasks, centrifuge tubes, acids, chemicals, etc., I love to read books, especially detective stories. I am a hardcore food lover. Testing foods and cooking them in my own style is one of my hobbies. Find me on X: @PIYAL_HALDER_, on BlueSky: @piyal-halder.bsky.social, on LinkedIN: Piyal Halder and email: piyalhalder.org@gmail.com;

(2) Bartosz Puzio

Hi! Nice to meet you all! I’m Bartek, a senior lab specialist at AGH University of Krakow, Poland, with a strong passion for geochemistry at the core of my work. As an early career scientist and GMPV co-representative, my research focuses on experimental mineralogy, particularly in apatite-group minerals and their thermodynamics. I'm passionate about understanding mineral behavior under near-surface conditions and how these insights can be applied in both geoscience and environmental contexts. Beyond the lab, I'm eager to foster international collaboration between universities, helping to build stronger, more connected scientific communities. When I’m not immersed in science, you’ll likely find me climbing, running, or hiking – always exploring, whether in the field or on the trail. Find me on: LinkedIn: Bartosz Puzio

Former ECS Representative (2023-2025)

Simona Gabrielli

Hello everyone! I’m Simona, a researcher at INGV in Rome, working on tomographic imaging in volcanic and tectonic settings, looking for magmatic chambers and/or fluid-fault interactions. As the Outgoing ECS GMPV Rep I wanted to increase the visibility of our community. Now, as a new GMPV Science Office, I hope to do the same, with a representation of ECS in the GMPV community. I’m also the vocal of the ECS EDI Task Force, and part of the EDI Committee. So feel free to contact me if you have any ideas or suggestions regarding EDI topics @ EGU! When I’m not looking at seismograms, I annoy my neighbours by singing musical theater songs with my four cockatiels and relaxing by doing yoga. If you want to join the committee, you can contact me on Instagram (@simo.gab).

Blog Editor-in-Chief

Agata Poganj

Hello to all! I am Agata, the EGU GMPV Blog Editor-In-Chief. I obtained my PhD in Geophysics and Volcanology from University of Strasbourg. In my research, I investigate the influence of hydrothermally altered rocks on the stability of volcanic structures. My research entails climbing up volcanoes, measuring physical rock properties, and subsequently returning some of the rocks to the laboratory for measurements in a more controlled environment. My background is based in petrology and mineralogy of ore deposits, and my scientific interests are all things volcano-related! When I’m not trying to understand volcanoes, I read, sew, diy, hike, climb and explore! Bluesky: @justapoganj LinkedIn: Agata Poganj

Blog Editors

(1) Guto Paiva-Silva

2024 Best Blog Winner (Public Vote)

My research focuses on petrochronology of high-pressure metamorphic rocks and the tectonic evolution of accretionary terranes. I integrate petrology, geochemistry, geochronology, isotope systems, and high-resolution imaging to reconstruct pressure–temperature–time–fluid histories recorded durin g subduction and exhumation. My current work centers on the Raspas Metamorphic Complex in southwestern Ecuad or. Beyond my research, I serve as vice-coordinator of Petrochronics, an international network dedicated to fostering collaboration and training in petrochronology. I am also engaged in science communication, for which I receive d the public vote award in the 2024 EGU Blogs Competition. As a scientist from Latin America and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I am committed to promoting a more inclusive, diverse, and accessible geoscience community. Outside academia, I enjoy cooking, writing poetry, spoiling my cat, and exploring museums and cafés.

(2) Aretì Angeli

Hello people! I’m Aretì, an under-construction volcanologist finishing my MSc in University of Bologna, in Italy. I’m Greek, and I hold a BSc in Physics, which eventually led me to understand how climate change and extreme weather can trigger volcanic hazards like lahars and landslides. Thus, I study these processes to improve early warning systems and protect communities near active volcanoes. I love field work, and that’s why you will usually find me collecting beautiful rocks around volcanic areas. And I also love history and mythology, which combined with volcano/climate research makes me feel more like a historian of Earth than a traditional geophysicist. If I am not hiking, dancing, traveling or fighting for a better world, you can find me at: Areti Angeli (3) Samira Yalla

(With additional charge of Facebook & Instagram Manager)

Hi there! I am Samira, I hold an MSc in Geology of Mineral Resources, Geomaterials, and Environment, and currently I work as a part-time Geology Instructor at the University of AMOUB, Algeria. My research focuses on circular geological structures as part of the AFIPS projects. Besides, I’m a geology content creator, community manager and editor at “L’astronomie Afrique” magazine, and I like playing around with basic programming stuff in my free time. Find me on: LinkedIn: @samira-yalla Bluesky: @Samirayalla

LinkedIn manager

Pierre Bouygues

Hi, I’m Pierre, a third-year PhD student at ISTerre, in Chambéry.My research focuses on the long-term monitoring of volcanic eruptions using satellite-based data. More recently, I have been working on the evolution of volcanic topography and surface deformation through time, with the aim of better understanding volcanic processes at andesitic volcanoes in Indonesia. I am also interested in developing methods to detect anomalies in spatio-temporal datasets. In future projects, I would like my research to contribute more directly to operational volcano monitoring, by helping to build stronger links between space agencies and volcano observatories. I grew up in the Massif Central in France, so volcanoes have always been part of my landscape and imagination. This fascination eventually became my career path: I completed my bachelor’s degree at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, then my master’s degree at Université Grenoble Alpes. Email: pierre.bouygues@univ-smb.fr Linkedin: Pierre Bouygues

Campfire Organizer

Chief Organizer

Marine Boulanger Hi everyone! I am Marine, and I am an associate professor at Université de Montpellier in France. I am an igneous petrologist and geochemist, and my research focuses on the behavior and evolution of crystal mush. I study the impact of melt migration processes on the type, location, and kinetics of magmatic processes. When I am not looking at rocks or in the experimental petrology lab, I spend a lot of my time rowing, and I love traveling around (especially wherever I can try new culinary specialties). You can find me on Bluesky (marineboulanger.bsky.social) and LinkedIn (Marine Boulanger).

Organizers

(1) Fernanda Torres

Hello everyone! I’m a third-year PhD candidate at Ruhr Universität Bochum in Germany. My research focuses on constraining the petrogenetic processes involved in the formation of early continental crust, with an emphasis on mafic and ultramafic rocks, where I aim to characterize the role and source of fluids during partial melting by integrating a multi-scale and multi-tool approach. My background is based in petrology and geochemistry on Phanerozoic orogenic settings. When I’m not clung to my computer or in the lab, I like to go climbing, hiking, playing video games, wandering around and drinking a good pint of craft beer. And, if possible, travel somewhere. You can reach me via mail (maria.torresgarcia@rub.de), LinkedIn (@Fernanda Torres) or X (@Fernanda_TTG).

(2) Metwally Hamza

Hello, everyone. I am Metwally Hamza. I currently work as a field and mining geologist. Also an M.Sc. candidate in economic geology at Benha University's Faculty of Science (Egypt). Have international research and book publications. I am a science writer on the global platform Medium. A science communicator with 9 years of expertise explaining and communicating sciences to the public, at several global and local venues, such as the American University in Cairo, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and the Global Science Forum in the UAE. LinkedIn: @MetwallyHamza X (Twitter): @MetwallyHamza Research Gate: Metwally-Hamza Email: metwallyhamza45@gmail.com

Short courses/future careers Organizer

Chair

Veronica Peverelli Hi everyone! I am a postdoc at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). I am a geochemist interested in the role of fluids in petrological processes, and in the deep volatile cycle. I am a huge fan of high-initial Pb U-Pb geochronometers, halogens, and of isotope systems tracing element cycling in the continental crust and in the mantle. I enjoy combining bulk and in-situ techniques to study processes at multiple levels of detail and from multiple perspectives. I am a strong supporter of mental health awareness, equal opportunities and representation in science. I enjoy hiking, baking, reading books, traveling, and spending time with cats.

Member

(1) Catherine R. Tapalla

Hello, everyone! I am Catherine R. Tapalla, a second-year MSc student in Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (Applied Remote Sensing for Earth Sciences) at the Faculty ITC, University of Twente, The Netherlands. I am also a licensed geologist from the Philippines with more than 12 years of professional experience at the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, where I have worked on geological mapping, geomorphology, geohazard assessment, karst investigations, mineral resource evaluation, and environmental geology. My current research focuses on the application of reflectance spectroscopy for the characterization of Pb-Zn mineralization in carbon-rich drill cores. My broader research interests include geomorphology, remote sensing, geohazards, karst systems, landscape evolution, geological mapping, environmental geology, geochemistry, and mineral exploration. I am passionate about understanding Earth's processes and applying geoscience to address environmental and societal challenges. I enjoy collaborating with fellow geoscientists, learning new analytical techniques, and exploring interdisciplinary approaches to Earth science research. Outside academics and work, I enjoy going for walks, working out at the gym, watching movies and series, spontaneous travel adventures, and a little retail therapy. These activities help me recharge, stay balanced, and maintain a positive outlook while navigating the challenges of graduate studies and professional life. I look forward to connecting with fellow geoscientists, exchanging ideas, and contributing to the vibrant EGU community! LinkedIn/Instagram/Facebook: Catherine Rodriguez Tapalla Email: c.tapalla@student.utwente.nl / tapallacatherine@yahoo.com

Geomythology. Neotectonics and Monasticism

Filippo Carboni — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:00:14 +0000

With today’s post, I would like to temporarily leave (geo)myths behind and enter (geo)history. I was first introduced to the following historical account by Professor Francesco Brozzetti of the University of Chieti (Italy), whose extensive knowledge of the Apennines of Central Italy extends well beyond geology.

Geological Origins of Monasticism

This is the brief history of how monasticism spread through the occidental world from a small deposit of Pietra Sponga, whose natural caves formed near the village of Preci, in Central Italy (Fig. 1). Pietra Sponga is the traditional term used in Central Italy to identify porous carbonatic rock deposits, nowadays classified as either calcareous tufa or porous travertine. [caption id="attachment_13276" align="alignleft" width="1478"] Fig.1. Geological map showing: i) the location of Preci and Nottoria villages, which give the name to the Nottoria-Preci fault section pertaining to the Norcia Fault System (NFS); ii) the location of the S. Eutizio Abbey; iii) the Vettore Fault System (VFS); iv) the carbonate and siliciclastic rocks, as well as continental Quaternary deposits.[/caption] Travertine and calcareous tufa are terrestrial carbonate deposits whose precipitation occurs from bicarbonate-rich saline waters emerging at thermal springs. Their formation is driven by the degassing of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from carbon-rich waters, according to the reaction: H₂O + CO₂ + CaCO₃ ↔ Ca(HCO₃)₂ Degassing occurs due to (i) fluid pressure drop, (ii) turbulent fluid flows, and (iii) biological activity (e.g., Brogi and Capezzuoli, 2009). These processes are controlled by the geological environment hosting the springs, which in turn influences the facies and morphologies of the deposits (e.g., Mancini et al., 2021). In particular, the rise of bicarbonate-rich thermal waters from relatively deep-seated reservoirs may be influenced by interconnected brittle structures (i.e., faults and fractures) developed within carbonatic rocks, which increase rock permeability (Fig. 2). However, such permeability is limited in time because of voids infilling and sealing. Consequently, prolonged hydrothermal activity can be maintained only by continuous faulting and fracturing, promoting the (re)opening of fluid conduits (Brogi et al., 2012). Travitonics is the term coined to highlight the strong connection of travertine and tufa deposition with faulting (Hancock et al., 1999). [caption id="attachment_13280" align="alignleft" width="1600"] Fig.2. 3D sketch illustrating the geological relationships between normal faulting, hydrothermal circulation, and travertine fissure-ridge, idealized from the case study in Terme S. Giovanni (Italy). Modified after Brogi and Capezzuoli (2009).[/caption] A few kilometres south of Preci (Fig. 1), travertine and/or calcareous tufa deposits crop out in proximity to a major fault that likely acted as conduits for fluid migration over a relatively long time. This fault, known in literature as the Nottoria – Preci Fault, is a major tectonic seismogenic structure, pertaining to the Norcia Fault System (NFS, Fig. 1). The NFS has been seismically active since the late Pleistocene (ca. 30 ka) with a minimum slip rate of ca. 0.8 mm/yr, and an average recurrence time (time passed between two different earthquake sequences) of ca. 1.8 kyr, promoting up to 6, Mw ≥ 5.7 events (Galli et al., 2018). The southern portion of the same system also moved during the last destructive 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquake sequence, following the activation of the Monte Vettore Fault System (VFS, Fig. 1). In this context, the tectonically controlled formation of caves associated with a spring, still spilling today, in the surroundings of Preci, attracted the attention and sensibility of a Syrian monk, whose name was Spes. Those natural caves, formed over thousands of years by geological processes, would eventually become the birthplace of monasticism in the Occident.

Historical Origins of Monasticism

During the fifth century, the Italian Apennines witnessed an important hermitic movement thanks to the arrival of Syrian monks, who fled the theological controversies, as well as political and ecclesiastic conflicts that followed the Christological councils in the Orient. Around 450 CE, the monk Spes remained apparently captivated by the natural wonders of the Apennines, and in particular by tufa caves, where he eventually founded a first hermitage. Around it, a broader hermitic community raised through the building of new monasteries, where hermits lived in isolation, poverty, meditation, and prey. The first hermitage and monasteries, although described as monasterium by S. Gregorio the Great in his Dialogorum (Nel silenzio delle abbazie, 2004), were actually simple caves and/or huts. According to S. Gregorio the Great’s Dialogorum (Book IV, Chapter 10), Spes was preserved from eternal perdition by God himself, who had Spes undergo blindness; at the same time, God granted him extraordinary grace and deep interior peace. After 40 years, shortly before his death, God miraculously restored his sight and instructed him to preach the importance of the soul’s spiritual light to his disciples. Following the death of Spes, his devoted disciple Eutizio became the spiritual leader of the hermitic community. Under his guidance and following his death, a monastery was established over his tomb and named after him. Only a few fragments remain of the original monastery. The present-day Abbey of S. Eutizio is the result of several phases of construction and expansion spanning from ca. 1000 CE to the 17th century. Before the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquake sequence, the original hermits' caves could still be seen beneath the bell tower (Fig. 3). [caption id="attachment_13259" align="alignleft" width="1600"] Fig.3. (a) S. Eutizio Abbey before the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquake sequence (Giulia Sampi via Wikimedia Common); (b) inset over the belltower showing the travertine/tufa deposit and underlying caves (Dino Michelini via Wikimedia Common); (c) S. Eutizio Abbey after the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquake sequence and before the ongoing reconstruction (extracted frame from a video of the Vigili del Fuoco).[/caption] The importance of Spes and Eutizio lies in their role in spreading early monasticism throughout the central Apennines and in influencing a devout Christian named Benedict. Benedict of Norcia accepted the lifestyle and ideologies of the monastic community and established his Benedictine monastic tradition, based on the famous Rule of S. Benedict: ora et labora. Unfortunately, following the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquake sequence, the S. Eutizio Abbey was severely damaged, and it is now under reconstruction. Although I consider myself an atheist, I find this history and its connection with geology deeply fascinating. For better or worse, it is remarkable to think how the activity of a seismogenic normal fault, by influencing the circulation of a carbonate-rich thermal water and the consequent precipitation of travertine and/or tufa deposits, may have contributed to the establishment and spreading of monasticism in the Occident. I would like to thank Professor Francesco Brozzetti again for introducing me to this historical account.

References

Brogi, A., Capezzuoli, E., 2009. Travertine deposition and faulting: the fault-related travertine fissure-ridge at Terme S. Giovanni, Rapolano Terme (Italy). Int. J. Earth. Sci. (Geol. Rundsch) 98, 931–947. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00531-007-0290-z. Brogi, A., Capezzuoli, E., Buracchini, E., Branca, M., 2012. Tectonic control on travertine and calcareous tufa deposition in a low-temperature geothermal system (Sarteano, Central Italy). Journal of the Geological Society 169, 461–476. https://doi.org/10.1144/0016-76492011-137. Hancock, P.L., Chalmers, R.M.L., Altunel, E., Çakir, Z., 1999. Travitonics: using travertines in active fault studies. Journal of Structural Geology 21, 903–916. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8141(99)00061-9. Galli, P., Galderisi, A., Ilardo, I., Piscitelli, S., Scionti, V., Bellanova, J., Calzoni, F., 2018. Holocene paleoseismology of the Norcia fault system (Central Italy). Tectonophysics 745, 154-169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tecto.2018.08.008. Mancini, A., Della Porta, G., Swennen, R., Capezzuoli, E., 2021. 3D reconstruction of the Lapis Tiburtinus (Tivoli, Central Italy): The control of climatic and sea-level changes on travertine deposition. Basin Research 33(5), 2605–2635. https://doi.org/10.1111/bre.12576. Nel silenzio delle abbazie: Proposte di visita al patrimonio abbaziale del territorio della provincia di Perugia. Provincia di Perugia, Assessorato al Turismo, 2004. Gregorio the Great’s Dialogorum, Book IV, Chapter 10. https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gregory_04_dialogues_book4.htm. Last visited on 26.06.2026.

Help us shape the GD programme for EGU General Assembly 2027

Constanza Rodriguez Piceda — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:00:51 +0000

The Geodynamics programme of the General Assembly starts with your ideas. With the call for session proposals for the 2027 EGU General Assembly approaching, the Geodynamics Division President Laetitia Le Pourhiet shares her thoughts on what makes a successful session proposal, and how to help shape next year's scientific programme. Dear GD community, It is already time to start thinking about the Geodynamics programme for the EGU General Assembly 2027. The programme is built from the ideas, energy, and scientific curiosity of the community, so this is the moment to ask yourself: what topic should we discuss next year? What emerging direction needs more visibility? Which communities should talk to each other more?

We are especially looking for new session ideas, refreshed session descriptions, and new co-conveners who would like to help build an exciting, inclusive, and well-balanced GD programme.

what topic should we discuss next year? What emerging direction needs more visibility? Which communities should talk to each other more?

Convening a session is a great way to bring people together around a scientific question. It can help structure a community, create space for new collaborations, and make sure that important topics are visible at the General Assembly. But a good EGU session should not be too narrow. A useful rule of thumb is that a session should be able to attract around 20 abstracts. This is important because the number of abstracts strongly influences whether a session can receive an oral block, or whether it needs to be merged with another session.

So, before proposing a session, please ask yourself a few simple questions. Is the topic broad enough to attract contributions from several groups and countries? Does the convener team reflect the diversity of the community, in terms of career stage, geography, gender, methods, and scientific background? Is there already a similar session in the programme that could be joined or refreshed instead of duplicated? And, very importantly, are you proposing a session to serve the community, rather than to create a speaking slot for yourself? At EGU, conveners and co-conveners cannot be presenting authors for oral presentations in the session they convene, and solicited presentations also come with specific restrictions.

For EGU General Assembly 2027, the GD programme will be organised around five broad programme groups:

GD1 – Earth and Planetary Dynamics, Structure, Composition and Evolution

For sessions on the dynamics, structure, composition, and evolution of the Earth and other planetary bodies. This includes mantle and core dynamics, planetary interiors, deep Earth evolution, geochemical reservoirs, and links between structure, composition, and dynamics.

GD2 – Plate Boundary Dynamics, Structure and Evolution Across Timescales; Conceptual and Regional Perspectives

For sessions on plate boundaries across timescales, from long-term tectonic deformation, rifting, subduction, collision, transforms, and mountain building to transient deformation, seismic-cycle processes, and links with earthquake dynamics. This group welcomes both conceptual and regional approaches.

GD3 – Rheology, Rock and Mineral Physics, and Multiphase Materials in Geodynamics

For sessions on the physical properties and deformation of Earth and planetary materials across scales. This includes rheology, deformation mechanisms, rock and mineral physics, high-pressure and high-temperature behaviour, seismic anisotropy, state of stress, ab initio and experimental constraints, and multiphase systems such as partially molten rocks, magma-rich regions, and fluid-bearing materials.

GD4 – Geodynamics across the Earth System: Surface Processes, Climate, Life and Feedbacks

For sessions linking geodynamics with the broader Earth system, including surface processes, erosion, sedimentation, climate, sea level, the carbon cycle, life, biogeodynamics, and long-term feedbacks between the solid Earth, surface environments, and planetary habitability.

GD5 – Modelling, Inversion, Data Assimilation, Multiscale and Multiphysics Methods for Geodynamics

For sessions focused on methodological and technical developments in geodynamics. This includes numerical and analogue modelling, inversion, data assimilation, computational methods, workflow development, model coupling, and multiscale or multiphysics approaches.

These groups are meant to help structure the programme, not to put walls between communities. Many good session ideas will naturally sit at the boundary between several topics. That is fine. If your session connects plate dynamics with rheology, or mantle convection with surface processes, or modelling with observations, please do not hesitate to propose it. Cross-disciplinary sessions are often the ones that generate the most interesting discussions.

These groups are meant to help structure the programme, not to put walls between communities.

We also warmly encourage early career scientists to join convener teams. You do not need to have convened before to contribute. If you have a good idea, or if you would like to help refresh an existing session, contact colleagues, contact the GD programme team, and start the discussion. A strong convener team usually combines experience, fresh ideas, and a real willingness to advertise the session broadly.

In short: think broad, think community, think diversity, and think ahead. A good session is not only a title and a description. It is a small scientific meeting within the General Assembly, and it works best when the conveners actively help build the audience around it.

We look forward to receiving your ideas and to building, together, a lively and ambitious GD programme for EGU General Assembly 2027.

NB: Do not hesitate to comment and let us know your thoughts on how to build the GD program for the next GA

EGU Campfire Geodesy – Share Your Research – 20th Edition

Fikri Bamahry — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:48:39 +0000

We are excited to announce the 20th edition of Geodesy Campfire – Share Your Research in July. The Geodesy EGU Campfire Events “Share Your Research” give (early career) researchers the chance to talk about their work. We have two exciting talks by our guest speakers, Pierre Sakic and Iwona Kudłacik. Below, you can find the details of the topics awaiting us. We will have time to network after the presentations. Please join us on Zoom on 16th July 2026 from 14:00 to 15:30 (CEST). Register for this webinar here. Pierre Sakic @Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris:

Enabling seamless geodetic processing through multi-purposes tools: the examples of geodezyx & autorino.

Pierre Sakic gives coordinates to the Earth, on land, in space, and under the sea. He obtained his PhD in 2016 on precise seafloor positioning methods applied to monitoring tectonic deformations at the University of La Rochelle. Between 2017 and 2021, he was a researcher at GFZ, Potsdam, Germany, where he was responsible for operational GNSS processing as part of the Galileo Geodetic Service Provider. Since 2022, he has been a research engineer at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, where he manages the processing, archiving, and dissemination of geodetic data from the volcanological and seismological observatories that monitor the four active volcanoes on French territory (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, and Mayotte). Given the specific nature of Mayotte's underwater volcanism, he regularly participates in oceanographic campaigns, as well as in prospectives aimed at ensuring the sustainability of these observations through a permanent underwater observatory. Iwona Kudłacik @Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences – Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformatics:

High-rate GNSS data from shaking-table experiments for seismological applications.

Iwona Kudłacik is a geodesist, specializing in satellite geodesy and high-rate Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). She is an Assistant Professor at the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences, Poland. Her research focuses on high-rate GNSS observations applied to seismology, specifically developing innovative time-series analysis procedures to detect and monitor natural and anthropogenic seismic events. Currently, her work concentrates on HR-GNSS and seismic data integration within the EPOS and TRANSFORM² frameworks, as well as investigating PGD & PGV scaling laws for GNSS and seismic data. [caption id="attachment_4753" align="alignleft" width="293"] Image credit Baptiste Gombert (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)[/caption] Time to connect! After the presentations, we invite everyone in the audience to turn on their camera and microphones, if possible. Participation via the chat is of course also possible. We will start with a short introduction round to get an idea of who is in the room. So if you like to, you can already think about how to summarise your research in a few words so that mortals can also understand it! We’re also open to hear about your favourite dinosaur, your latest burnout, or the 4th element on your tasks list today. Just be there and be talking, we guarantee for the awkwardness. We are always looking for speakers for upcoming Geodesy EGU Campfire Events “Share Your Research”. Are you interested in giving a talk? Then, please express your interest by filling out this form. If you have any questions about the Geodesy EGU Campfire Event, please contact the Geodesy ECS Team via ecs-g@egu.eu. We look forward to seeing you at the Campfire!

Meet Samuel Badman, the 2026 Outstanding Early Career Scientist Awardee of the Solar-Terrestrial Division!

Guram — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:31:13 +0000

Congratulations on receiving the EGU 2026 ST Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award for your outstanding contributions to our understanding of solar wind physics through observations from the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter. What does this recognition mean to you personally, and how does it impact your work in this fascinating field? It is an incredible recognition which I am extremely grateful for, both to my nominators and the EGU-ST selection committee, and to all of my incredible colleagues, collaborators and mentors who I have been able to work with to get to this point in my career. It is especially meaningful to be recognised for my work on these specific space missions, which launched during my PhD and have subsequently shaped my entire career. It has been an incredible experience contributing to their early scientific results and working with data that prior generations could only have dreamed of. Looking forward, I am excited to keep building on this work and recognition, and to help others, especially those younger than me, advance in their careers. Could you share some information about your background and what sparked your interest in your research field? I come from a fairly rural area in the south west of the UK and grew up living just around the corner from my grandparents, who were secondary school science teachers. I give them a lot of credit for giving me space and physics-related books and games growing up, which made me generally interested in astrophysics for as long as I can remember. However, my journey into solar and heliophysics as a specific topic in astrophysics was more recent and more serendipitous! When I was in my second year of undergrad, I was going to spend the summer break in Dublin, Ireland, with my other grandparents, and I decided I wanted to find a research internship. I reached out to a couple of groups in Dublin. Although both responded positively, one offered me a stipend for my work that summer, and that just so happened to be a solar physics group, a field I honestly had not intersected with up until that point. Although this may seem like a whimsical decision point, I do think it’s incredibly important to have funded internship programs to enable equitable access to research experiences.

I do think it’s incredibly important to have funded internship programs to enable equitable access to research experiences.

The rest is history, but suffice it to say I loved every minute of the internship, examining and extracting signals from incredibly high-resolution videos of the Sun’s chromosphere (even if I had to use IDL!), presenting a poster at locally hosted conferences, and getting to hang out with the PhD students in the group. After this, I was hooked, and the following summer, I actively sought out internships in the field and eventually applied for PhD programs with research in solar and heliophysics. That landed me at UC Berkeley, where my career ended up on a collision course with Parker Solar Probe. Could you tell us some of the key challenges you have encountered in your scientific career, and how have you navigated them? I have always considered myself an introverted and socially awkward person, so for me, the hardest personal challenges have all come down to the realisation that physical science is not just doing maths or coding or writing, but is really a social endeavour where you need other people to succeed. I’ve had to push myself out of my comfort zone to connect with people, to get used to repeated public speaking, and to realise my need to improve my communication skills. One particular challenge was when I was first starting my Ph.D., not having a huge community I knew, especially at conferences, and at times I felt quite isolated. My biggest turning point in this regard was when I started applying for some of the space weather and heliophysics summer schools in the US and met other students who were in the same boat as me. It was really easy to bond and become friends, and the step-change when I next went to conferences and immediately was among people I felt comfortable around is hard to overstate.

... realisation that physical science is not just doing maths or coding or writing, but is really a social endeavour where you need other people to succeed.

However, I do not want to miss this opportunity to also say that as much as I have faced challenges, I am equally conscious of experiences that I have had easier than others. In particular, as a native English speaker and a white man, and as I have gotten to know others from diverse backgrounds, I have become increasingly aware that it can require less effort on my part to be heard, credited or assumed to be correct compared to others around me. A challenge for me is to recognise and act when I see this dynamic playing out in my own environments, and I implore anyone else reading this with my privileges to try and be conscious of this as well. Your research expertise is exceptionally diverse and wide-ranging. Could you share a brief overview of the key discoveries or milestones that have shaped your career and brought you to this point? The first big milestone came halfway through my PhD with the launch of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. With my PhD advisor, Prof. Stuart Bale, as the PI of the FIELDS instrument onboard, I was privileged to be able to participate in the first results push of the mission, seeing data taken somewhere in the solar system and that humans had never been before. Simultaneous to that, I was introduced to open-source software with the public release of the Python package pfsspy by Dr David Stansby. This code meant I was able to learn how to run simple but powerful models of the Sun’s coronal magnetic field. Combining this with the new FIELDS data led to my first paper, which showed that we could associate the spacecraft measurements with specific solar wind sources and even investigate optimal parameters for the coronal models. Not only did this combination of circumstances get me started in my own research, but it also equipped me with a set of tools that meant I was able to contribute to a great many other studies from early Parker Solar Probe data, providing connectivity context. This exposed me to a fantastic breadth of research in heliophysics, providing me with a broad perspective of the field.

The first big milestone came halfway through my PhD with the launch of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.

The second big milestone was beginning my postdoctoral position at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, where I started to work with my new group there, led by Dr. Michael Stevens. Most critically, I began to collaborate with my then-fellow postdoc, Dr. Yeimy Rivera. Here, my research pivoted: jointly with Yeimy, I began exploring the radial evolution of the solar wind. This led to an enormous early-career milestone of writing a paper that we published in Science in 2024. In that work, we found evidence that the energy flux of magnetic switchbacks was a significant term in the near-Sun energy budget and could explain the evolution from Parker Solar Probe to Solar Orbiter. My contribution to this work included producing an open-source code for producing “Iso-poly” solar wind radial profiles (pioneered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Dakeyo and Dr. Chen Shi), which was my way of “paying it forward” from my experience with pfsspy, but has also shaped the direction of all my subsequent research to date. As with everything else in science, my milestones and success are the result of having so many talented people around me. In your experience, what are the most pressing scientific questions in your field, which ones are likely to be solved soon, and why do you believe they hold such urgency? Something I am personally most excited about is one of the priorities listed in the recent US National Academy of Sciences Heliophysics Decadal Survey, which proposed sending spacecraft with imagers and magnetographs into solar polar orbits for the first time. As someone who has worked with coronal models, I am keenly aware of how important it is to have complete boundary conditions - knowledge of what the Sun looks like all over its surface at any given instance in time. Earth is stubbornly stuck near the Sun’s equator, so we are always missing half the Sun, and we never see it from above or below. I am very excited for this to change with future missions and to see the impact of getting new vantage points of the Sun on our prediction capability for space weather events. I am also convinced that we have only just scratched the surface of the physics that Parker Solar Probe will reveal in the future, specifically since it has only recently started to dive properly deeply into the open field solar corona. We are now routinely getting back data where the plasma temperature around the spacecraft is truly coronal (Millions of Kelvin), and so we are in an unprecedented position to directly measure the physical processes which are sustaining this “coronal heating”, at least in open field regions!

I am also convinced that we have only just scratched the surface of the physics that Parker Solar Probe will reveal in the future ...

How do you envision your research developing over the next 5-10 years, and what major challenges or opportunities do you expect to encounter? I am interested in both starting to synthesize what we have learned from snapshots over the last 8 years with Parker Solar Probe to start to investigate solar-cycle level trends. I am also keen to connect more with the stellar physics research communities to try to translate what we learn about our star into the broader scope of stellar physics. Beyond that, I hope to work with students more and more, transitioning into a supervisory role rather than always pursuing the nitty-gritty implementation. A challenge for me in this 5-10 year timeframe comes with the transition of Parker Solar Probe from its prime mission, which has provided me stability spanning my entire career to date, essentially, into an extended mission. At some point, I will need to move beyond my comfort zone to begin focusing on what comes next. I also hope to obtain a permanent position in this timeframe!. Do you participate in outreach efforts to promote awareness of solar-terrestrial science? If so, what are your preferred ways to share your research with the public? Yes, I do! There are a few different recurring events I participate in in the Boston area, most notably Cambridge Explore the Universe and NASA’s STEMday@Fenway, and I’m always looking for others to get involved with! Primarily, these are family- or children-oriented, which I think is really important to convey the exciting opportunities and career paths that science, physics and maths can lead to. [caption id="attachment_4687" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Samuel Badman at STEMDAY@Fenway, Fenway Park, Boston in April 2026. Credit: Yeimy Rivera.[/caption] I lean particularly into the organisational and logistical side of these kinds of events. While I enjoy engaging and directly talking to the audiences, I do still sometimes feel nervous or self-conscious that I am not articulating very well, so I try to lean into my strengths of planning and making events happen to support a bigger team, which includes really strong communicators. What advice would you give to Early Career Scientists seeking to succeed in this field, and is there a particular skill or mindset you believe is crucial for success in solar-terrestrial research? I can think of several, but I believe the most important one is developing a network and community. Science in the 21st century, and especially in space science, is not done by individuals; it is the result of huge teams, collaboration, sharing open-source tools and building on others' insights. Surrounding yourself with people you work well with, have complementary skills to you, and support you is so important to achieving that. And it’s not only in the service of doing excellent science, but it is critical to being resilient. Being a scientist can at times be really hard psychologically, with tough reviews, proposal rejections and sceptical questions, and we all experience feelings of failure of some description. Having people around you to build yourself back up, talk through things, provide positive feedback and see other perspectives is truly essential to bouncing back and learning from the experience.

Science in the 21st century, and especially in space science, is not done by individuals; it is the result of huge teams, collaboration, sharing open-source tools and building on others' insights.

I would advise early career scientists to take advantage of networking events at conferences, to apply for any summer schools they see, and to seek out connections with your cohort wherever you study or work.

Five ways to improve your interdisciplinary communication skills

Lucia Layritz — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:28:34 +0000

Oh, but you should know that…

It is a short sentence, often spoken with good intentions. Yet in interdisciplinary conversations, it can bring a discussion to a complete halt. The moment someone says, “Oh, but you should know that,” they assume that what is obvious in their discipline must be obvious to everyone else. Hearing this phrase repeatedly in scientific discussions made me realise how much harder than what we often anticipate interdisciplinary communication may be. The challenge is not a lack of expertise, but quite the opposite. Researchers from different disciplines bring valuable but distinct perspectives to the same problem. Like in the well-known story of the blind men and the elephant, each person experiences only part of the whole. One feels the trunk, another the leg, another the tail—and each describes something different. Only by bringing these perspectives together can they recognise the elephant for what it is.

Interdisciplinarity sits at the heart of biogeosciences. Even the name itself — bio-geo-sciences — reflects the need to connect different disciplines to understand the Earth system as a whole. This integration is becoming increasingly important as the challenges we face, from climate change to biodiversity loss, are deeply interdisciplinary by nature. For example, understanding how carbon cycles through ocean, land and atmosphere helps us better understand the consequences of climate change – but this includes biological, chemical and physical processes that act jointly. Understanding how plants and animals interact with each other and their physical environment helps us understand how we as humans impact biodiversity – this again includes ecological, physical and even social dimensions. Understanding these problems and finding solutions requires us to work across disciplinary boundaries.

To combine expertise, the first step is communication.

Sometimes the challenge is language itself. A single word can mean completely different things depending on the field. Take the term particle: for a biogeochemist, a particle may refer to sinking organic matter transporting carbon into the deep ocean through the biological carbon pump, a key pathway for carbon storage in the ocean. For a Lagrangian modeller, a particle may simply be a virtual, often massless tracer transported by currents. Same word, entirely different concept. But the issue goes beyond terminology. Every discipline also brings its own assumptions, standards and research culture. Different disciplines often approach uncertainty, evidence and interpretation in distinct ways. Ask an environmental physicist and a field ecologist what counts as a “good correlation”, and you may receive very different answers…

So how can we communicate more effectively across these boundaries? Here are five practical ways to strengthen interdisciplinary communication skills in scientific collaborations. This is not about outreach science communication, but communicating across different disciplines in the geoscientific context.

Know your limits – and state them openly

Successful interdisciplinary collaborations are not built on everyone knowing everything. The strength of interdisciplinarity comes precisely from bringing together different areas of expertise. A useful way to think about this is as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Each collaborator contributes their own specialised knowledge, while sharing enough common ground to communicate effectively. The broader the combined expertise, the greater the overall potential of the collaboration. This means that not having the same knowledge on a topic as the other person is not a weakness but an advantage. It means the other person has spent their time gathering experience in a different topic than you bring to the table – so the answer should not be “Oh, but you should know that!” (see above), but a concise summary.

Being open about the limits of your own knowledge can help create a more constructive working atmosphere. It also reminds us that concepts we consider central in our own discipline may not play the same role in another field. Explicitly acknowledging these boundaries, especially as a more senior researcher, can encourage others to do the same and make conversations more open and productive.

Create psychological safety

Admitting “I don’t know” does not always come naturally in academia. Yet interdisciplinary collaboration depends on people feeling comfortable enough to ask questions, clarify concepts and challenge assumptions. This requires psychological safety: an environment where participants feel able to speak openly without fear of being judged for gaps in knowledge. Sometimes small changes can make a big difference. At the start of a meeting or workshop, it can help to explicitly acknowledge that everyone brings different expertise to the table, especially if you are a senior person in the room. What may seem obvious to one person may be completely unfamiliar to someone else — and vice versa.

[caption id="attachment_4125" align="alignleft" width="300"] Venn diagram of optimal background expertise for efficient interdisciplinary communication. Too little or too much overlap leads to inefficient interdisciplinary communication. Best effects result from a common core understanding, and added expertise knowledge. Source: own.[/caption]
Practise active listening

In interdisciplinary discussions, people can sometimes talk past each other for quite a while without realising it, especially when they use the same terminology with different meanings behind it. This is where active listening becomes incredibly valuable. Originally originating from work with patients in hospitals, active listening involves paying close attention, asking open questions and making sure you genuinely understand the other person’s perspective. One particularly useful technique is paraphrasing: repeating back what someone said in your own words to confirm understanding.

Be specific — even at the sentence level

Specialists within the same discipline often communicate efficiently through shorthand, abbreviations and jargon. What is needed to make communication efficient within one discipline can quickly become confusing in an interdisciplinary setting. Acronyms are a classic example. Every field has them, and may sometimes overestimate how common these acronyms are. When communicating across disciplines, clarity matters more than speed.

A few simple habits can help:

Use fewer abbreviations whenever possible. Yes, even the ones that you think are standard.
Explain your reasoning step by step rather than assuming shared background knowledge.
Define important concepts explicitly.
Provide context for information, such as “this finding was a revolution in the field because…”, “back then, our methods did not allow to…”, “this is relevant/surprising/interesting because…”
Provide structure when you speak, i.e. “there are three main reasons why this hypothesis was put forward, first…second…third”, or “there are pros and cons for this method,…”

Build connections and explore unfamiliar topics

Interdisciplinary communication becomes much easier when people share a common goal and develop personal connections over time. But you do not need to start with a large collaboration project to broaden your perspective. Conferences such as the European Geosciences Union General Assembly offer excellent opportunities to step outside your usual research area. Try attending a session that initially seems unrelated to your work. Listen for unfamiliar concepts, methods or perspectives, and ask yourself whether there might be unexpected connections to your own research.

A worthwhile investment

While it may take time to invest in improving interdisciplinary communication skills, it is worth it. When becoming stuck in a research problem, a change of perspective can bring unprecedented insights. Improving interdisciplinary communication starts with our own approach: our language, our openness and our willingness to engage with perspectives outside our expertise. A closer look on how we communicate across disciplines teaches us humility, curiosity and the ability to see problems through someone else’s perspective — skills that are valuable not only in science, but also beyond it.

Written by Sinikka Lennartz, edited by Lucia Layritz

Melting ice shelves in ocean models: an idealised model intercomparison project

Leah Muhle — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:57:45 +0000

Antarctic ice shelves melt from beneath where they contact the ocean, but how well do ocean models simulate this process? Building on several decades of model development, a recent model intercomparison study compared ice shelf-ocean models from modelling groups around the world with the same, idealised benchmark configuration. From this effort, we can learn how current models perform, and how we can still improve them in the future.

Why do we need ice shelf-ocean models?

The Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass through the ice shelves fringing the continent, contributing to global mean sea level rise. The warm ocean brings heat towards the floating ice shelves and into the ocean beneath them, called ice shelf cavities. The ocean heat melts the ice from beneath, which then allows the ice sheet to slide forward into the ocean and raise sea levels. However, the processes that happen at and below ice shelves are complex and involve both small and large spatial and temporal scales. They are also hard to observe due to their remote nature (if you are curious about observing the interface between ice and ocean, check out this post). Therefore, it is important that we invest in developing robust and reliable models of ice shelf processes to accurately predict their influence on future climate and sea level.

[caption id="attachment_17525" align="alignnone" width="1600"] Figure 2. The Denman Glacier ice front (Antarctica) as observed from the RSV Nuyina, March 2025. The ice extends to a depth nine times the visible height! [Credit: Claire Yung][/caption]

An idealised model intercomparison project

In the ISOMIP+ project (the second Ice Shelf Ocean Model Intercomparison Project), published earlier this year in The Cryosphere, we evaluated one aspect of modelling ice sheet mass loss: how ice shelves melt in ocean models. Modelling ice shelf melt in ocean models was technically challenging in the past as many models weren’t originally designed to allow for hundreds of metres of ice on top of the ocean. Now, fortunately, many ocean models can simulate ocean flows beneath ice shelves, which allows different teams around the world to use these ocean models to study ocean circulation near Antarctica and make predictions about future ice shelf melting. However, model codes and infrastructures used by these teams can differ greatly, so it is important to compare these models.

We compared twelve different model configurations with the same, idealised setup (Figure 3). This simple setup uses a smooth bottom topography and ice shelf shape and simplified ocean temperature and salinity conditions. Whilst not a real Antarctic ice shelf cavity, this setup allowed us to systematically assess the similarities and differences between models and see how the system responds to warm or cold ocean conditions. The ice shelf shape was fixed in time for simplicity (in reality, we would expect it to evolve as it melts and the ice sheet moves), but there is a parallel intercomparison experiment that explores the coupled ocean-ice sheet response: how the ice shape changes in response to the ocean and vice versa (MISOMIP1, Asay-Davis et al. 2016). [caption id="attachment_17528" align="alignnone" width="1600"] Figure 3. Temperature profiles through a cross-section of the ice shelf cavity, showing the twelve different model configurations. [Credit: Figure 2 of Yung et al., 2026][/caption]

Similarities in ice shelf circulation

In one of the modelled experiments, warm water flows into the ice shelf cavity at depth and enhances the ice shelf melting near the grounding zone, conditions that are similar to many ice shelves in West Antarctica. Since meltwater from ice is fresher and less dense than the salty seawater, a buoyant meltwater current rises upwards along the ice shelf until it exits the ice shelf cavity, creating an overturning circulation (Figure 4). The models simulate similar overturning circulation strength in response to the warm ocean forcing: we show that the relationship between melt rate and overturning circulation at each time during the spin-up of this circulation produces a shared linear relationship across models (Figure 4). This result gives us confidence that the models represent the same physical processes, even if they vary a little in the finer details.

[caption id="attachment_17531" align="alignnone" width="1600"] Figure 4. Left: Idealised schematic of ice shelf basal melt and overturning circulation [Credit: Claire Yung]. Right: Model overturning circulation and melt rate during the spin-up of the model, where each scatter point is a different model at a different time [Credit: Fig. 13 of Yung et al. 2026].[/caption]

Models differ near the ice shelf-ocean interface

One ongoing challenge for ice shelf-ocean models is modelling the boundary layer between ocean and ice, where the ice shelf basal melting happens. This basal melting is driven by small-scale processes like turbulence which can be as small as millimetre-scale. These processes are much smaller than the grid-boxes of our ocean models, typically 1 to 20 m in vertical thickness and hundreds of metres to kilometres in the horizontal. Making the grid-boxes small enough while still simulating a regional or global domain would require immense computational resources. Since we can’t resolve the small-scale processes, we instead make approximations of what the melt should have been according to the ocean conditions that we can simulate, such as the temperature in each grid box. These methods are called parameterisations. In our model intercomparison, we tuned the melt rate parameterisation so that the models had the same total melt rate (in parts of the ice shelf deeper than 300 metres below sea level, where melt rates are greatest) and could be fairly compared. To achieve the same melt, the tuning parameters varied significantly (by an order of magnitude!) between models.

Some of the variability in tuning parameters can be explained by the choices of vertical coordinate in the different ocean models. Some ocean models are built using horizontal layers, whereas others have tilted layers that follow the ice shelf and bottom topography more smoothly (Figure 1). How these layers are defined is known as the vertical coordinate. The vertical coordinate (as well as the total number of layers) controls the vertical size of the grid boxes near the ice and how the meltwater and the warm, ambient ocean mix within this layer (see Gwyther et al. 2020 for more details). However, the choice of vertical coordinate does not explain all of the variability between models. Additionally, there is still work to be done to make the boundary layer parameterisations more accurate, such as incorporating more complex physical processes into the parameterisations that have been recently observed beneath real ice shelves (Rosevear et al. 2025), and making the parameterisations less sensitive to model choices or coordinates.

What’s next?

Our model intercomparison showed good agreement between models in many aspects, but since our configuration is idealised, we cannot validate the models against observations. It is important that future model intercomparison efforts also use realistic model configurations with real Antarctic topography and ocean and atmospheric conditions (as well as we know them – we still have a scarcity of observations beneath Antarctic ice shelves!) so that the models can be compared to observations and assessed in future climate scenarios. Some of these intercomparison efforts have already been performed (Galton-Fenzi et al. 2025) or are ongoing (De Rydt et al. 2024) and will also include coupling with dynamic ice sheet models to fully represent the Antarctic ice sheet mass loss processes.

ISOMIP+ has demonstrated that idealised model intercomparison projects are very useful for assessing the state of our models in a standardised way. The project was also a catalyst for model development across the world, as well as sensitivity studies that have allowed us to better understand ice shelf-ocean interactions. It is important that our community continues to work together to improve ice shelf-ocean models and produce more accurate future sea level projections.

Read the paper: Yung, C. K., Asay-Davis, X. S., Adcroft, A., Bull, C. Y. S., De Rydt, J., Dinniman, M. S., Galton-Fenzi, B. K., Goldberg, D., Gwyther, D. E., Hallberg, R., Harrison, M., Hattermann, T., Holland, D. M., Holland, D., Holland, P. R., Jordan, J. R., Jourdain, N. C., Kusahara, K., Marques, G., Mathiot, P., Menemenlis, D., Morrison, A. K., Nakayama, Y., Sergienko, O., Smith, R. S., Stern, A., Timmermann, R., and Zhou, Q.: Results of the second Ice Shelf–Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (ISOMIP+), The Cryosphere, 20, 2053–2088, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-2053-2026 , 2026.

Further references and reading

Asay-Davis et al., 2016. Experimental design for three interrelated marine ice sheet and ocean model intercomparison projects: MISMIP v. 3 (MISMIP +), ISOMIP v. 2 (ISOMIP +) and MISOMIP v. 1 (MISOMIP1)
Gwyther et al., 2020. Vertical processes and resolution impact ice shelf basal melting: A multi-model study
Rosevear et al., 2025. How Does the Ocean Melt Antarctic Ice Shelves?
Galton-Fenzi et al., 2025. Multi-model estimate of Antarctic ice-shelf basal mass budget and ocean drivers
De Rydt et al., 2024. Experimental design for the Marine Ice Sheet–Ocean Model Intercomparison Project – phase 2 (MISOMIP2)

Edited by Mirjam Paasch and Leah Sophie Muhle

From Quasars to Coordinates: How VLBI Measures Earth’s Shape and Motion

Radosław Zajdel — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:30:18 +0000

Imagine determining the position of a point on Earth with millimeter precision using radio signals from celestial objects billions of light-years away. This may sound like science fiction, but it is exactly what Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) allows scientists to do.

What is VLBI?

Long before satellites and digital maps, people looked to the sky and used celestial objects—most commonly the Sun during the day and selected stars at night—along with simple instruments to determine their position on Earth. Over time, modern techniques such as VLBI have emerged as highly precise extensions of this concept, using celestial objects to achieve accurate navigation and positioning. The origin of this system lies in radio astronomy, which was established in the 1930s. Scientists began observing very distant celestial objects called quasars, which emit radio waves. In the mid-1960s, a method called interferometry was introduced, where multiple receivers observe the same signal at the same time. At first, these receivers were only a few kilometers apart and connected by cables. Later, this method was expanded to stations separated by thousands of kilometers. VLBI combines signals from widely separated telescopes to create a “virtual telescope” as large as the distance between them, called the baseline. This lets scientists see much finer details than with a single telescope. In general, a telescope’s ability to see small details (its angular resolution) depends on its size and the wavelength of the signal it observes. Larger telescopes and shorter wavelengths yield better resolution. However, building extremely large telescopes is difficult, and the wavelength cannot always be changed. By using two or more telescopes that are far apart, VLBI effectively overcomes this limitation. Because longer distances between telescopes provide better resolution, VLBI depends on stations distributed across the globe. By linking telescopes on different continents, as illustrated by the global VLBI network shown in Fig. 1, scientists can form very long baselines. [caption id="attachment_5922" align="alignnone" width="1544"] Fig.1: The distribution of VLBI sites around the world. (Credit: T. Krichbaum, MPIfR; https://geodesy.hartrao.ac.za/site/en/geodesy-equipment/radio-telescope-vlbi.html).[/caption]

Why is VLBI important?

VLBI plays a fundamental role in both geodetic and astronomical applications due to its high-precision measurement capabilities. In the following, two main applications of VLBI in geodesy will be discussed.

Terrestrial reference frame and geodynamics

[caption id="attachment_5929" align="alignright" width="400"] Fig. 2: Comparison of VLBI-derived velocities with modeled velocities from NUVEL-1A and GSRM2.1. Black, red, and blue arrows indicate GSRM2.1, geodetic VLBI, and NUVEL-1A velocities, respectively (Credit: [1]).[/caption]VLBI provides precise measurements of long baselines between radio telescopes located on different continents. By monitoring how these baselines change over time, scientists can determine station coordinates and velocities, track tectonic plate motion, and support the realization and maintenance of global terrestrial reference frames. A particularly important contribution of VLBI is its role in defining the scale of these frames. In [1], European VLBI observing sessions were analyzed to estimate station coordinates and velocities across Europe. As shown in Fig. 2, the motion of the Eurasian plate exhibits a northeastward trend, consistent with velocity fields derived from the GSRM2.1 and NUVEL-1A plate motion models.

Celestial reference frame

VLBI also plays a unique role in realizing the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS) through the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), the fundamental radio reference frame based on observations of distant quasars. Therefore, unlike other space geodetic techniques such as Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) and GNSS, VLBI provides a stable and highly precise inertial reference frame essential for Earth orientation parameter estimation and astrometric applications. [caption id="attachment_5923" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] Fig. 3: Sky distribution of the 303 ICRF-3 defining sources (Credit: [2])[/caption]Figure 3 shows the sky distribution of the 303 defining sources of the ICRF-3, which establish the orientation of the celestial reference frame. In summary, VLBI is a powerful technique that combines signals from widely separated telescopes to achieve exceptional precision, making it crucial for both Earth science and astronomical research.

How does VLBI work?

Imagine we use two radio telescopes separated by a very large distance that simultaneously observe the same quasar. Because the telescopes are located at different positions on Earth, the radio signal from the quasar reaches each station at slightly different times. Extremely precise atomic hydrogen maser clocks are used at each VLBI station to record the arrival time of the signal with high accuracy. The recorded signals are then compared using a processing method, which reveals the small time difference between their arrivals. This time delay is the fundamental observable in VLBI [3]. By knowing the speed of light ( m/s) and the relative geometry of the two telescopes, this measured time difference can be used to infer the projection of the baseline (b) between the stations; see Fig. 4. In this way, VLBI enables extremely precise determination of inter-station distances at the millimeter level [3,4]. [caption id="attachment_5897" align="aligncenter" width="453"] Fig. 4: Schematic of the fundamental VLBI principle (Credit: Mina Rahmani)[/caption] Due to the large distance between the two receivers, a time difference in the arrival of the wavefront emitted by a quasar at the two stations is expected. However, this calculated delay also includes contributions from other sources, including Earth orientation, the atmosphere, and instrument-related effects. Interested readers can find more details in [4]. Nevertheless, the majority of the measured delay is caused by the large separation between the two stations and is referred to as the geometric component.

The next generation of VLBI

To meet the strict performance targets established by the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS), namely global accuracies of 1 mm in station positions and 0.1 mm/year in station velocities, space-geodetic techniques such as VLBI are being advanced toward next-generation observing systems. These stringent requirements are driven by the need to detect and monitor extremely subtle but geophysically significant changes in the Earth system, including sea-level rise, tectonic plate deformation, glacial isostatic adjustment, and mass redistribution within the Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and solid Earth. GGOS serves as the global framework that integrates multiple space-geodetic techniques into a consistent and stable reference system, ensuring that observations from different methods are inter-comparable and physically consistent. Within this framework, VLBI plays a fundamental and unique role by providing the realization of the celestial reference frame and contributing to the definition of the scale of the terrestrial reference frame. In combination with complementary techniques such as GNSS and SLR, VLBI helps to maintain the long-term stability and accuracy of the global geodetic reference system. To achieve these requirements, VLBI systems are evolving toward next-generation designs, called the VLBI Global Observing System (VGOS), characterized by increased automation, reduced infrastructure complexity, and faster slewing antennas, typically with diameters below 12 m. The next-generation VGOS-style systems use smaller, faster antennas because they can slew quickly and observe many sources across the sky, improving geometry and reducing systematic errors. However, this is not necessarily a contradiction of the point mentioned earlier that larger telescopes are better, as VLBI works on the concept of a virtual telescope whose size is given by the distance between the two involved telescopes.

Why does VLBI need modernization?

For VLBI, the original system was designed and constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, aging antennas, increasing radio frequency interference (RFI), obsolete electronics, and high operating costs have created strong incentives for upgrading the VLBI system. These upgrades are essential to achieve the required levels of accuracy, reliability, and timeliness, including reducing the time interval between conducting observations and delivering initial geodetic results to less than 24 hours [5].

Final thoughts

VLBI shows how observations of distant quasars can help us understand our own planet. By measuring tiny differences in the arrival times of radio waves, scientists can determine station positions with millimeter accuracy and monitor tectonic plate motion. As next-generation VLBI systems are developed, this technique remains vital for understanding Earth’s dynamics and maintaining the global reference frame used for navigation, mapping, and space science. References

[1] Rahmani, M., Nafisi, V., Böhm, S., & Asgari, J. (2022). Evaluation of the GSRM2.1 and the NUVEL1-A values in Europe using SLR and VLBI-based geodetic velocity fields. Survey Review, 54(385), 349–https://doi.org/10.1080/00396265.2021.1943633
[2] de Witt, A., Charlot, P., Gordon, D., & Jacobs, C. S. (2022). Overview and status of the international celestial reference frame as realized by VLBI. Universe, 8(7), 374; https://doi.org/10.3390/universe8070374
‏[3] Takahashi, F. (ed) (2000). Very long baseline interferometer. Ohmsha, Tokyo. ISBN 978-1-58603-076-6
[4] Sovers, O. J., Fanselow, J. L., & Jacobs, C. S. (1998). Astrometry and geodesy with radio interferometry: Experiments, models, results. Reviews of Modern Physics, 70(4), 1393. https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.70.1393
[5] Petrachenko, W. T., Niell, A. E., Corey, B. E., Behrend, D., Schuh, H., & Wresnik, J. (2011). VLBI2010: next generation VLBI system for geodesy and astrometry. In Geodesy for Planet Earth: Proceedings of the 2009 IAG Symposium, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 31 August 31-4 September 2009 (pp. 999-1005). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20338-1_125

Further reading
For those interested in learning more about VLBI, the following resources provide a good starting point:
 
https://plus.nasa.gov/video/using-quasars-to-measure-the-earth-a-brief-history-of-vlbi/ 
https://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ 
https://youtu.be/XcSZjT3oDSY?si=LyekXES5JSt_w755

- Edited by: Radoslaw Zajdel

Introducing the new blog team!

Editorial Team 2 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:05:32 +0000

Hello blog readers!

It’s Jean-Baptiste and Alexis. With EGU26 now behind us and summer approaching fast, we wanted to announce the start of the 9th blogging season for the Geodynamics division and introduce the team for the 2026–2027 year.

We both have the privilege and the daunting challenge of succeeding Constanza and Michael as Editors-in-Chief of the Geodynamics Blog. Over the past three years, they have done a remarkable job with tremendous talent and kindness. Luckily for all of us, they will still be part of the team this year.

Both old timers and newcomers will contribute to take you to wonder(geo)lands! The team now consists of 2 new Co-Editors-in-Chief, 14 regular editors, 2 illustrators, one (or more?) sassy scientist(s), and 3 media communicators.

We are always looking to involve new community members as new regular editors, guest writers, illustrators, or media communicators, so do not hesitate to reach out if you want to contribute and learn new skills! Also let us know if you have any studies or ideas you would like to read more about or researchers you think have a story to share. We look very much forward to another exciting blogging year together and hope you enjoy the journey as much as we do! See you on the blog!

This year's blog team

[caption id="attachment_43116" align="alignleft" width="115"] jeanbaptiste.koehl@gmail.com[/caption] Jean-Baptiste Koehl Hello, I am Jean-Baptiste, a researcher in tectonics, founder of Hilsen Geological & Psychological Teaching & Training Services (GeoPS), multi-divergent, and new co-editor-in-chief of the blog with Alexis. I am also EGU TS Division’s EDI Officer and part of EGU’s EDI Taskforce, hoping to help our communities becoming more diverse and inclusive, i.e., fairer. My research focuses on global and planetary tectonics (e.g., supercontinent cycle, orogens, structural inheritance, transform margins, structural fieldwork, geochronology, and seismic interpretation). I have notably worked extensively with Arctic regions and the San Andreas fault in California. I use psychological tools to maximize productivity while preserving mental health and apply psychology to solve both geological and interpersonal problems. I enjoy running, hiking, yoga, cooking, and reading. I am happy to hear from you about scientific works you find exciting, individual stories you feel inspiring, or even anecdotes, so do not hesitate to reach out to me by email! [caption id="attachment_43161" align="alignleft" width="115"] alexis.gauthier@sorbonne-universite.fr[/caption] Alexis Gauthier I’m Alexis, a PhD candidate at Sorbonne University in Paris. I love subduction zones and am interested in them across all spatial and temporal scales. In my PhD, I mainly investigate the links between long-term deformation, operating over geological timescales, and the seismic cycle in subduction zones, with a particular focus on accretionary prisms.To address this question, I am developing a method to inform the initial conditions of seismic cycle simulations using information extracted from geodynamic models. I believe that doing a PhD is about much more than focusing on your own research. I love learning about the questions other members of our community are asking. That is one of the reasons why I enjoy being involved with the Geodynamics Blog : I think it provides a unique overview of the ideas that drive our community. That’s why this is my third consecutive year on the blog team, and I am especially excited to serve as Co-Editor-in-Chief alongside Jean-Baptiste this year! Here is my email. Please contact me if you would like to contribute to the blog ! Michaël Pons Hi everyone! I am Michael Pons, former co-Editors-in-Chief of the EGU Geodynamics Blog, now passing the torch to our new Editors-in-Chief. This is my 5th year with the blog, and it has been a great opportunity to meet people, discover new topics, and highlight inspiring researchers and individuals. I am excited to see the blog continue with fresh ideas from our new multidisciplinary team, and I will still contribute occasional posts. I recently moved from GFZ Potsdam to Roma Tre University in Italy, where I will work on my new MSCA postdoctoral project, SPHERE (Surface Processes driving sHifts in platE tectonic Regimes on Earth). My research focuses on numerical modelling of subduction, orogenic processes, global plate tectonics, and planetary tectonic regimes (check for update here!). I also enjoy discovering new places, camping, and taking night-sky pictures. You can contact or follow me at LinkedIn, Bluesky, or X. [caption id="attachment_43147" align="alignleft" width="115"] allemand@ipgp.fr[/caption] Adélaïde Allemand My name is Adélaïde Allemand, I come from Paris (France) and I live and work there. I am a PhD student in the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, where I am using numerical modelling to look at the interaction between long-term deformation and seismic cycles on continental strike-slip faults. But this is only for the scientific part.... Besides, I also enjoy listening to music and playing music, spending time with friends, making jokes, swimming, reading and doing art & crafts. I have been a regular editor for two years now and I really love reading about new topics in geoscience and in the academic world. You can reach me by email and LinkedIn. [caption id="attachment_43120" align="alignleft" width="115"] lhirche@gfz.de[/caption] Luisa Hirche Hi everyone! :) I am Luisa, a PhD student at the GFZ in Potsdam, Germany. My research focuses on CO₂ degassing at continental rifts and how it may have influenced Earth's past climate – tackled through field measurements, numerical modeling, and plate reconstruction. I love working in interdisciplinary environments, drawing on the expertise of different research fields. What excites me most is diving into the mathematical and physical descriptions that capture our complex, dynamic Earth across different scales. Outside of research , I love traveling and discovering new places and cultures. I am a nature enthusiast and happiest in the mountains, on a yoga mat, or enjoying a good cup of coffee. Excited to join the GD blog team and explore the diversity of the community with you! Feel free to contact me via email.

Arijit Chakraborty

Hey there! I am Arijit Chakraborty, a PhD student at Durham University, UK. My research focuses on numerical modelling of mantle melting and how that governs the broader thermochemical evolution of mantle. I am interested in processes leading to the formation and preservation of mineral deposits in relation to long-term craton dynamics. Alongside that, I am also working on some neural network surrogates for thermodynamic phase equilibria to track compositional changes due to melting in the mantle lithosphere (Check here for updates). When I am not buried under the weight of the lithosphere, I can be found exploring the rolling hills of Bag End, or with an X-wing trying to bring the Empire down! Really excited to join the EGU GD blog team as an editor and contribute to spreading knowledge and having fun along the way! [caption id="attachment_43144" align="alignleft" width="115"] l.mantiloni@exeter.ac.uk[/caption]

Lorenzo Mantiloni

I am Lorenzo Mantiloni, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. I moved to England three years ago after finishing my PhD in GFZ/University of Potsdam, Germany. My research interests focus on the dynamics and stability of magma mush reservoirs, as well as numerical and analogue modelling of crustal stress and pathways of magmatic dykes - so not strictly Geodynamics, or very short/small-scale, both in time and space. Though most of my work is done through monitor and keyboard, I take part in fieldwork whenever I get the chance. I have been a regular Editor of the GD blog since 2023 and it's been a fantastic opportunity to meet new people, learn a few things here and there, read amazing posts, and have fun. You can reach me via e-mail and LinkedIn. Manel Ramos Hello there! I’m Manel, a PhD student dividing my time between the sunny vineyards of Pau in France and the rainy, dramatic landscapes of Bergen, Norway. Most of my days revolve around running numerical models of salt tectonics, trying to understand what’s happening inside a diapir (yes, salt is my favourite rock), but I’m also passionate about sharing science with others—especially trying to merge science and culture, from the volcanology of Mount Doom to the dunes of Dune (for Lisan al-Gaib). Originally from Barcelona, I enjoy running (in real life, not only geomodels), hiking like a lame goat, watching movies like a critic, reading whenever I have time, and talking about salt tectonics (did I mention salt is my favourite rock?). I believe science should be for everyone, you can check out my science outreach in Catalan at @repedracat or find me on LinkedIn. [caption id="attachment_43134" align="alignleft" width="115"] garimashukla003@gmail.com[/caption]

Garima Shukla

Hi everyone! I am Garima Shukla, a National Postdoctoral Fellow (ANRF) at the Indian Institute of Geomagnetism (IIG), Navi Mumbai, India. I have been part of EGU Geodynamics Division since 2024 and have had the privilege of serving as the Early Career Scientist (ECS) Representative from 2024 to 2026. Over the years, I have also contributed to the Division's social media activities and continue to enjoy working as a regular editor for the Geodynamics Division Blog. My research focuses on understanding the origin and emplacement mechanisms of the Deccan Continental Flood Basalt Province. By combining geodynamics, rock and paleomagnetism, I explore questions related to magma transport, feeder systems, and the depths of magma reservoirs associated with Deccan volcanism. More recently, I have also developed an interest in environmental magnetism and the reconstruction of past climate and environmental changes from geological records. Outside of research, I enjoy spending time in nature through hiking, trekking, and exploring new places. I am passionate about coffee and love experimenting with different brewing methods, as well as cooking, photography, painting, and music. I enjoy learning new skills and finding creative ways to balance life inside and outside academia. I look forward to connecting with fellow geoscientists, sharing ideas and learning from the diverse and vibrant EGU community. You can reach me by email or LinkedIn. [caption id="attachment_43139" align="alignleft" width="117"] katherine.villavicencio@dst.unipi.it[/caption]

Katherine Villavicencio

Hi everyone! I am Katherine, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pisa, Italy. I spend most of my time running numerical simulations to investigate the interiors of icy moons and exoplanets, and to better understand the dynamic evolution of rock glaciers. Through computational simulations, I explore the physical processes that shape planetary bodies and cryospheric environments. When I am not working on simulations, I enjoy trying out new cooking recipes, traveling, and getting lost in a good science-fiction novel. Feel free to contact me by email. [caption id="attachment_43128" align="alignleft" width="115"] mondal.amrik07@gmail.com[/caption] Amrik Mondal Hi everyone! I am Amrik and I’m thrilled to join the EGU GD blog team as editor this year. I am a PhD student at IIT(ISM) Dhanbad, India. My research sits at a fascinating question — what makes Earth habitable? The answer lies in our magnetic shield, driven by convection deep in Earth's liquid outer core. I run numerical simulations of this geodynamo process to unravel how Earth's magnetic field works. I'm passionate about multidisciplinary approaches, science outreach, and making science accessible and fun for everyone. Outside academia, I love trying new things - currently learning German! I love spending time in nature, walking mountain trails, enjoying coffee and novels and capturing photos. I cherish connecting with new people, tasting local flavours and soaking in the history and culture of every place I visit. Feel free to reach out via email or LinkedIn –- always happy to connect! Andreia Hamid Olá! I'm Andreia, a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto in Canada. My research focuses on mountain building processes, combining both numerical modelling and geological field work to better understand the mechanisms driving curved mountain belts (oroclines). I'm passionate about plate tectonics, geodynamics, and making science accessible to broad audiences! I love doing science outreach, from engaging with young children to seniors. I also love teaching (!) and am currently a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto. I'm excited to be a part of the Geodynamics Blog team, meeting new people, and sharing their incredible work!

[caption id="attachment_43171" align="alignleft" width="115"] valeria.fedeli@unimi.it[/caption] Valeria Fedeli Ciao! I'm Vale, a third-year PhD student in Earth Sciences in Italy, at the Università degli Studi di Milano. My research focuses on the numerical modelling of subduction zone initiation in 2D and 3D. I have been passionate about geology in all its forms since I was a child, walking in the mountains and collecting small rocks. However, as I also enjoy mathematics and coding, it was a natural progression for me to end up in the world of geodynamic numerical modelling. Outside of my main area of research, I care deeply about the accessibility of research and education, so I read and discuss widely about scientific visualization and illustration, PhD and academic life and Open Science, and I serve as a PhD student representative in my university and as a tutor for my university inmate students at Bollate prison. In my free time, I like to relieve PhD stress and despair by climbing, gaming, playing music, obsessing with any new hobby my friends propose to me, or expressing my Italianness by producing huge and inappropriate quantities of tortellini, focaccia and pizza. Feel free to contact me via email!

[caption id="attachment_43152" align="alignleft" width="115"] PaulineGayrin@protonmail.com[/caption] Pauline Gayrin Salut! I’m Pauline, I come from the French Alps and I work as doctoral researcher in GFZ Potsdam, Germany. I’m a geologist who codes. I work on the development of new techniques to map and characterise fault networks in continental rift, but not only, allowing a better global understanding of regional dynamics. I like to study brittle motion in general using different approaches such as analogue modelling, satellite imagery for example. I’m a very enthusiastic and quirky person, I marvel at the beauty of planet Earth and love to discover again and again that we are far from understanding all the processes. I'm the editor in chief of the Tectonics and Structural geology blog and I publish here my geodynamics enthusiasm since 3 years. I’m queer and an active member of the EGU pride group since several years, neurodivergent and disabled. In my spare time, I like to play board games with my friends and team. I also enjoy art, all styles of music and knitting. I'm excited to share the beautiful work of the community and some fun science with you all! Feel free to drop me an email! I'm also active on LinkedIn.

The Sassy Scientist

Dear reader, it's me, Sassy! Still here after 5 amazingly years on EGU's Geodynamics Blog and ready to share my wisdom with you about the geoscience community, the academic labyrinth, and the jungle we live in (#democracy)! Unlike any other scientist, my thirst for knowledge is clenched: I know it all! Including the ugly truth about academia, invisible politics of institutions, research groups, and funding institutions, and anything there is to know about "good" research practices or how to become a "successful" researcher. So why not send me an e-mail with your burning questions here (thesassyscientist4real@gmail.com) ? But a piece of advice: brace yourselves for the ride! And let's face it, 'no matter how many fish in the see, it would be so empty without me!' :p

The team also includes two talented illustrators, Prachi Kar, who also is a regular editor, and Lea Pennacchioni. [caption id="attachment_32803" align="alignleft" width="115"] pkar4@asu.edu[/caption]

Prachi Kar

Hello, I am Prachi Kar, a PhD Candidate in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. My research focuses on understanding the structure, dynamics, and long-term evolution of Earth's deep interior using numerical modeling, with a particular interest in the lower mantle and Large Low-Velocity Provinces (LLVPs). I also investigate the interiors of other planetary bodies, including the Moon, to better understand their thermal and compositional evolution. Much of my time is spent developing and running mantle convection models and exploring the processes that shape planetary interiors over billions of years. Beyond research, I am passionate about painting and digital illustration. As part of the EGU Geodynamics Blog team, I contribute as an editor. You can reach me via email. [caption id="attachment_37037" align="alignleft" width="115"] lea.pennacchioni@uni-potsdam.de[/caption] Lea Pennacchioni Hello everyone!! I’m Lea a postdoctoral researcher working between the Mineralogy group in Potsdam University, Germany and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility ESRF in Grenoble, France. My research interest focus on the study of materials at extreme conditions. I enjoy sketching and making comics about what goes on around me and the (many) scientific challenges I face. I am very glad to be part of the blog team as illustrator!! If you wish to contact me, or are curious about my art, you can reach me via email or take a look at my website pennylee.art.

Our social media team consists of 3 members, Constanza Rodriguez Piceda, who is also our ECS representative and a part-time regular editor, Foteini Panagiotidou, and Duo Zhang.

[caption id="attachment_32389" align="alignleft" width="115"] ecs-gd@egu.eu[/caption]

Constanza Rodriguez Piceda

Hola! I’m Constanza. I’ve been around for quite some time as editor-in-chief of the blog, but this year I became the ECS representative of the division. I’m a geologist/geophysicist from Argentina, currently doing a postdoc at Roma Tre University in beautiful Rome. I use numerical tools to study the mechanics of earthquakes and their links with geodynamic-scale processes, which has led me to do research in some amazing places around the world, including the Andes, the Apennines, and the Sea of Marmara. In my free time, I enjoy hiking, landscape and macro photography, reading, watching movies, playing table tennis, and getting familiar with Roman and Italian food. You can contact me via email. Duo Zhang Hi, I’m Duo Zhang. I completed my PhD in Cardiff University. I used the open‑source numerical modelling code Fluidity to run 2D simulations, systematically exploring how different deformation mechanisms within a composite rheology affect plate dynamics, especially the back‑arc extension on the overriding plate. Currently I work as an engineer at an oil company in China. My research emphasis has shifted from the dynamics of back‑arc extension towards the internal tectonic evolution of back‑arc basins. I am particularly interested in their structural styles, deformation sequences, and the implications for hydrocarbon accumulation. Besides, I enjoy music and reading, and I love collecting various stories from people.

Meet your ECS Rep – Archita Bhattacharyya

Annegret Roessler — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:21:00 +0000

Archita Bhattacharyya is an Environmental Scientist and a research and development fellow at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural affairs, England. For 2026, she is the Early Career Scientist Representative for the Hydrological Sciences division.

Can you tell us about the focus of your research?

In my PhD, I focused on groundwater microbiology, especially how microbial communities change across space and time in different aquifer geologies. This involved studying the aquifer microbiology using flow cytometry and DNA sequencing and relating the microbiology data to aquifer type, and environmental factors like groundwater recharge and chemistry. After my PhD, I moved into a policy fellowship role, where I looked into the applications of engineering biology for sludge and soil remediation, particularly for emerging contaminants like plastics and PFAS. Recently, I have started another job where I’ll use my science skills to monitor, evaluate and report on the effectiveness of nature restoration policies. So although the research topic has changed, I am still interested in how science can help us better understand and manage environmental systems.

What originally inspired you to go into this field?

I first became interested in this field during my Master’s dissertation on groundwater quality, where I learnt about all the unknowns in the subsurface world. When I came across a PhD project on groundwater microbiology, I was immediately drawn to how novel it felt. I was excited by the idea of learning about subsurface life and combining my hydrogeological background with molecular biology methods.

Looking back, what was the most challenging aspect of your PhD and what was the most enjoyable?

The most challenging part was definitely the time management. It was a large project with several workstreams, and at times I pushed myself too hard trying to keep everything moving. The most enjoyable part was the fieldwork. I loved travelling to new places and towns, and making memories along the way. I also really enjoyed working with my datasets. Every time I learned a new piece of code or created a figure that clearly showed something meaningful, it gave me a real sense of accomplishment.

How was your experience of post-PhD life so far?

After PhD, I have been working in policy roles, quite different from a typical academic career trajectory. Straight after finishing the PhD, I started an R&D fellowship in the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, England, where I worked on a project involving engineering biology for sludge treatment, another very novel and exciting topic. After the end of this fellowship, now I am working on another policy role, where I’ll use my science skills to monitor and evaluate nature restoration policies. Overall, these roles allowed me to see how science translates into real-life decisions and shapes regional and national policies. [caption id="attachment_13957" align="aligncenter" width="534"] Feeling absolutely stoked by the Sludge-cake, customised by a colleague, on Defra R&D fellowship ending day.[/caption]

What advice would you give to an Early Career Researcher about the challenges they might face in academic life?

This is advice I also have to remind myself of: not every research career is linear. Everyone faces difficult phases. That is why celebrating small wins really matters. It will help you keep going. I would also say that science is not strictly limited to academia. The skills we develop as researchers are valuable in many other spaces, including policy and industry. My own move from academia into policy has been eye-opening, and it has made me think more openly and flexibly about what a scientific career can look like.

Why did you decide to become an Early Career Scientist Representative and how has being a part of the ECS team impacted you?

At first, I joined because I wanted to build my skills in organisation, project management, and team-management, while also becoming part of a wider scientific network. Over time, though, my motivation changed and I genuinely enjoy being part of the ECS team. It has given me opportunities to do creative things like podcasting and blog writing, and it has connected me with a wonderful group of people. It has also helped me grow in confidence, especially in communication. Coming from a non-English-medium school, that has been a very meaningful experience for me. [caption id="attachment_13958" align="aligncenter" width="508"] With the outgoing and incoming ECS reps at the Hydromeet event of GA 2025 (from left: Archita, Melissa and Christina)[/caption]

What do you plan to achieve as the ECS rep this year?

This year, I would really like to maintain and enhance the great work our team is already doing. We run a lot of valuable activities, so one of my priorities is to streamline processes and improve how we manage ongoing projects. I would like us to minimise workload where possible while still maximising the impact of what we produce.

What do you like about the role?

What I like most is the chance to work with talented, motivated, and genuinely inspiring people. The ECS team is full of brilliant scientists, but also kind and creative individuals. Through the podcast, I have had the opportunity to speak with many hydrologists about their research and career experiences, and I have found those conversations incredibly engaging.

What advice would you give to other early career scientists who perhaps want to contribute to the ECS network but are hesitant?

I would say: join us and contribute whatever you can. There is space for different kinds of involvement, from scientific blog writing and podcasting to more creative or organisational activities. You can be involved a little or a lot. It is a great way to build skills outside your own research, meet new people, and be part of a broader community.

Dialogue is essential for advancing hydrological science

Bettina Schaefli — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:00:14 +0000

A little over a decade ago, a group of us argued that “it takes a village to raise a hydrologist”. The skills and knowledge any hydrologist should be exposed to during their training goes far beyond what a single person can do and know. Even more, the experience of how water shapes and interacts with diverse landscapes all around the world cannot be obtained by a single person. This is true especially today, when human activity interacts with this landscape and the water cycle almost everywhere on our planet. But, you might argue, we also have more data than ever before – more satellites circle and observe the Earth, and more powerful AI methods and diverse models analyse, utilize and produce data at incredible speed. Our main knowledge repository, in which we record our hydrological experiences, meaning the papers we publish in our journals, is growing so rapidly that we now publish about 10,000 papers a year just in the main water journals.

Should we just rely on AI?

Some argue that knowledge accumulation alone equals scientific advancement, but it is increasingly difficult – and maybe impossible – to know what knowledge we jointly possess and where our knowledge gaps lie. If you think of our knowledge as pieces in a puzzle, then any new student of hydrology would typically start by finding the pieces that make up the edges of the puzzle. Once you have the outside frame of the puzzle, you slowly work inwards because now you can better see where further pieces belong – you have a frame of reference. In hydrology, our puzzle pieces have become so numerous that it is becoming impossible to find the edges. Certainly, for any single person. We can use AI to help us find and organize the puzzle pieces – e.g. Stein et al. used natural language processing to find and geolocate several hundred thousand papers on hydro-hazards out of a corpus of millions. But we are still figuring out how to do this, and it is not satisfying to have our knowledge organized and gaps identified by AI. At least not alone, among other reasons because current AI systems lack epistemic humility, meaning that they are confident even when they are wrong or when the existing database is insufficient.

Scientific dialogue is a complementary path

An important complementary path is dialogue. Scientific dialogue is essential for any scientific community, especially for hydrology where we deal with an incredibly diverse subject – water on our planet. What do I mean by scientific dialogue? Well, underlying all of science is a scientific method in which we use our current understanding to develop new theory, from which we derive testable hypotheses, which we compare with available evidence. If hypotheses and evidence are consistent, then the theory is corroborated, if not, then we have to modify the theory. Every scientific dialogue between two researchers is a small-scale application of this scientific method. In this way, we continuously debate whether our ideas and opinions withstand exposure to evidence. This is often not straightforward given the large uncertainties and biases in our observations. They leave room for debate on whether inconsistencies between hypotheses and evidence should be attributed to poor theory or poor data. Scientific dialogue is also a great equalizer in science. Standing at your poster at a scientific conference, it does not matter whether you are a first year PhD student or a senior professor – both must equally defend their work with reference to available evidence, not based on opinion or authority. Such dialogue within our community is key to identifying the puzzle pieces that make up the edges of our knowledge, and to decide where new pieces should go. It should help us to identify which puzzle pieces are truly new, which provide further corroboration for previous findings, or which synthesize multiple earlier puzzle pieces into a single new one. It is critically important that this dialogue happens across different generations of hydrologists. When I finished my PhD – about 25 years ago – the amount of literature was dramatically smaller. I could actually read a significant fraction of it and establish the edges of the puzzle I was trying to put together. Thus, adding new pieces was easier then, and it has remained easier for me since because of this original framing. It is vastly more difficult to achieve this framing today. Not because we were smarter then (of course not), but because the puzzle was so much smaller. So, dialogue is more essential today if we want to ensure that our community puzzle is becoming more and more complete, and more transparent to everybody. And finally, some words about the role of this dialogue beyond science. Outside of science, civilized dialogue is increasingly in decline. While this trend is depressing, I am encouraged by seeing that I can still have scientific dialogues even with people I strongly disagree with. Because we have a dialogue on the same terms. And maybe also because we have 'epistemic humility', which means we are aware of the limitations of our knowledge and that our 'truths' are tentative - they may be falsified in the future by the emergence of new evidence. I believe that this is an important message we should share with the public. A dialogue that is focused on testing ideas and opinions against evidence – as difficult as this is – is a way to communicate and maybe even advance joint knowledge. Acknowledgements: Some of these thoughts originate from my Dalton Medal Lecture at EGU 2026. Thanks to Francesca Pianosi for the reference to epistemic humility and critical comments on a previous draft of this blog entry.

Modeling the full spectrum of observed seismicity: Insights from friction laws, fault instability, and fault-zone mechanics

Editorial Team 2 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:44:53 +0000

Introduction

Despite advances in our understanding of rock mechanics, the frictional behavior of rocks, and the physics of instability in geological materials, the coexistence of slow and fast earthquakes, as well as various types of fault-zone seismic radiation such as tremor, remains enigmatic.

Can fault mechanics and friction laws reproduce the full spectrum of observed seismicity?

In this week’s blog post, Navid Kheirdast takes us through the fundamentals of fault mechanics and frictional behavior before introducing a simple yet powerful mechanical model composed of a main fault interacting with a population of off-fault fractures. Despite its simplicity, the model captures a remarkable range of behaviors observed in nature, reproducing the spectrum of fault slip from slow slip events to fast, dynamic earthquakes.

1. Faults and the Forces They Bear

Faults are interfaces in Earth's crust—boundaries between tectonic plates or between blocks within a plate—that are permanently subjected to background stress driven by plate tectonics and environmental loading (tides, fluid pressure, and so on). In response to this stress, the two sides of a fault slide past each other: this sliding motion is called slip.

To describe fault slip mechanically, we need two families of variables:

Dynamic variables — the traction (force per unit area) acting on the fault surface, including frictional resistance and pore-fluid pressure.
Kinematic variables — the relative displacement (slip) and slip rate across the fault.

The fault-slip problem is a boundary-value problem: knowing one set of variables (say, the background stress) allows us to solve for the other (slip rate). The relationship between stress and slip is governed by a friction law.

2. The Wide Spectrum of Fault Slip

Slip on natural faults spans an enormous range of speeds, from a few millimeters per year all the way to several meters per second. Three end-member behaviors stand out.

Creep

Creep is aseismic, quasi-static sliding at roughly the tectonic loading rate — that is, the fault slides continuously at the same speed that the two tectonic plates move relative to each other. No earthquakes occur on creeping faults. Famous examples include the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas Fault and parts of the North Anatolian Fault near the Sea of Marmara.

[caption id="attachment_43029" align="aligncenter" width="282"] Creep across the San Andreas Fault. Credit: Coffey et al. (2022).[/caption] [caption id="attachment_43030" align="aligncenter" width="322"] Creep across the North Anatolian Fault. Credit: Becker et al. (2023).[/caption]

Slow Earthquakes

Sometimes slip is faster than the tectonic loading rate but far too slow to radiate significant seismic waves in the classical seismic stations, and only very accurate GNSS stations can record them. Such events — slow earthquakes (also called slow-slip events or SSEs) — may unfold over weeks to months rather than seconds. They are commonly observed in subduction zones: Cascadia, Nankai, Mexico, and Chile all host periodic slow-slip events.

Regular (Fast) Earthquakes

At the other extreme, slip accelerates to meters per second in a matter of seconds, releasing energy as the seismic waves we feel as earthquakes.

The central question is: what controls which of these behaviors a given fault segment will exhibit?

3. Fault Stability

There exists a critical stiffness for any fault segment under tectonic loading. If the fault is "stiff enough," any small perturbation in slip rate dies out—the fault creeps stably. If the fault stiffness is below the critical value, perturbations grow, and an earthquake results.

Computing this instability threshold is an eigenvalue problem: the critical eigenvalue depends on the frictional properties of the fault surface. This insight was established experimentally by Brace & Byerlee (1966), who showed through triaxial rock-mechanics tests that laboratory rock samples under confining pressure produce stick-slip cycles — the laboratory analogue of repeated earthquakes.

4. Two Friction Laws for Fault Mechanics

Two friction laws dominate earthquake modeling, each capturing a different aspect of fault behavior.

4.1 Linear Slip-Weakening Friction

The simplest physically motivated friction law expresses resistance as a function of cumulative slip alone:

At the onset of slip, friction equals the static strength τ_s = μ_sσ.
As slip accumulates, resistance decreases linearly until it reaches a dynamic (residual) strength τ_d = μ_dσ after a characteristic slip distance D_c.
Beyond D_c, friction stays constant at τ_d.

[caption id="attachment_43033" align="aligncenter" width="351"] Slip-weakening diagram: τ vs. δ (slip), showing peak τs, linear weakening to τd over Dc, then flat residual.[/caption]

Limitations of the slip-weakening law:

No mechanism for friction recovery, or healing — once the fault has slipped past D_c, it cannot restore its previous strength.
No rate dependence — friction does not depend on how fast the fault is sliding. This means that on a fault at the brink of instability, any infinitesimal increase in slip rate immediately triggers an earthquake, with no intermediate regime. Laboratory experiments, however, show that real surfaces resist sudden speed changes — they do not break instantly.

4.2 Rate-and-State Friction

Rate-and-state friction (RSF), formulated by Dieterich (1979) and Ruina (1983) on the basis of laboratory experiments, addresses both limitations. It expresses the friction coefficient as a function of slip rate v and a state variable φ:

μ = f* + a ln(v/v*) + b ln(θ/θ*)

where a is a constant related to the direct strength increase due to a jump in velocity, v* is a reference slip rate, and θ encodes the history of contact. The state variable evolves with slip and time, providing the fault with memory.

Two evolution equations for θ are widely used:

Aging law — state evolves both with slip and with time (contacts strengthen even when stationary).
Slip law — state evolves only when slip occurs; no healing without motion.

[caption id="attachment_43035" align="aligncenter" width="421"] Velocity-step experiment: the top panel shows slip rate jumping from v1 to v2; the bottom panel shows the immediate increase in the friction coefficient μ, followed by gradual relaxation to the new steady-state value μss.[/caption]

Key insight from RSF: If you suddenly increase the slip rate, friction immediately increases (the "direct effect"), but then slowly decreases back to a new steady-state value as θ evolves. The long-term (steady-state) friction level at speed v is:

τ_ss(v) = μ_ss(v) · σ, where Δμ_ss = (a−b) ln(v₂/v₁)

If a − b < 0: steady-state friction decreases with increasing slip rate → velocity-weakening behavior → potentially unstable.
If a − b > 0: steady-state friction increases with increasing slip rate → velocity-strengthening behavior → inherently stable.

Limitation of RSF: It was calibrated in laboratory experiments at low slip rates (micrometers to millimeters per second), far below the meters-per-second speeds reached during large earthquakes. At coseismic rates, slip-weakening is thought to take over.

5. The Spring-Slider System — A Minimal Earthquake Cycle Model

The Burridge-Knopoff spring-slider is the simplest mechanical system that reproduces stick-slip cycles. A block rests on a frictional surface and is connected by a spring to a loading point that moves at a constant velocity v_pl, representing the far-field tectonic loading rate.

[caption id="attachment_43036" align="aligncenter" width="379"] Spring-slider diagram: block on frictional surface, spring of stiffness k, loading point moving at v_pl; arrows showing slip δ, slip rate v, normal stress σ.[/caption]

Two outcomes are possible:

Stable sliding (creep): If the spring is stiff enough, the block slides at exactly v_pl, smoothly and continuously.
Stick-slip (earthquake cycles): If the spring stiffness falls below a critical value k_c, the block sticks while the spring stretches, then suddenly lurches forward when the spring force exceeds static friction — mimicking an earthquake.

6. Critical Stiffness — Why Each Behavior Occurs

Linear Stability Analysis

To find the threshold between stable and unstable slip, Ruina (1983) performed a quasi-static linear stability analysis around the steady-state sliding solution of a slider on a rate and state surface. The method is to perturb the slip rate slightly away from steady state and ask whether the perturbation grows or decays. Details of this analysis is well explained by Segall (2010), therefore we recommend the interested reader to follow from the text book.

The critical stiffness gives:

k_c = σ(b − a) / D_c

Physical Interpretation

The critical stiffness k_c has a transparent physical meaning:

Parameter	Role
σ	Normal stress — higher confining stress makes slip harder to control
b − a	Net velocity-weakening tendency — larger means more destabilizing
D_c	Characteristic slip distance — larger D_c means the fault "forgets" its history more slowly, which is stabilizing

The Two Regimes at a Glance

Condition	Behavior	Geological analog
k > k_c (stiff)	Stable sliding	Aseismic creep
k < k_c (compliant)	Stick-slip	Earthquake cycles

7. Numerical Example — Pseudo-Dynamic Simulation

To see both regimes in action, we solve the spring-slider equations numerically, including a radiation-damping term ηv that approximates elastic wave effects without a full dynamic calculation:

σ(f* + a ln(v/v*) + b ln(v*θ/D_c)) = k(v_plt − δ) − ηv

with the aging law θ̇ = 1 − vθ/D_c.

With parameters chosen so that a/b = 0.9 (velocity-weakening) and k/k_c = 0.95 (the spring is just below the critical stiffness), the simulation produces periodic stick-slip cycles:

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eJFD_BW920[/embed]

Increasing the spring stiffness slightly so that k/k_c > 1 immediately switches the system to stable sliding:

[embed]https://youtu.be/6ZWbybQZwag[/embed]

These two simulations illustrate the core message: the same friction law and the same fault, but a single parameter crossing a threshold, separate creeping from seismogenic behavior.

8. Lack of Key Observations

The spring-slider model, which resembles a single fault, captures key features of seismic cycles, such as stick-slip and creep-like fault behavior, interseismic and coseismic phases, and periodic ruptures, but it misses some important features, such as the Gutenberg–Richter magnitude-frequency relation, the coexistence of slow and fast ruptures, aftershock sequences, and the localization of seismic activity. In a recent paper by Almakari, Kheirdast et al. (2026), the authors showed that considering the size distribution of off-fault fractures around a main fault produces all of these features.

[caption id="attachment_43069" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The fault-volume model as presented in Almakari et al. (2026). In this model, a main rough fault is embedded in a fault volume. Close to the main fault, there is a higher density of off-fault fractures; fracture density decreases with distance from the fault. The size distribution of off-fault fractures follows a power law. Off-fault fractures are oriented optimally with respect to the background stress loading, and all faults are strengthened by rate-and-state friction, with Dc scaling with fault length.[/caption]

The results of this model interestingly reproduce all statistical properties observed in real catalogs, including the Omori and inverse Omori laws, the Gutenberg–Richter law, and scaling of fast ruptures as M ∼ T³ and slow events as M ∼ T.

[caption id="attachment_43060" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Statistics of fault-volume seismicity from Almakari et al. (2026): (a) Omori-law decay in seismic activity after mainshocks, (b) Gutenberg–Richter magnitude-frequency distribution, (c) inverse-Omori increase in seismic activity prior to the main rupture, and (d) scaling of the magnitude and distribution of events produced in the fault zone lies between the M ∼ T³ and M ∼ T limits.[/caption]

An intriguing result of the fault-volume model is the migration of events in the fault zone as time approaches the main shock; after the main shock, events tend to return to background seismicity:

[caption id="attachment_43063" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Migration of seismicity: (a) prior to the main shock, off-fault events tend to migrate toward the future event's epicenter. (b) After the main rupture, activity returns to the fault volume, a process called delocalization (Ben-Zion and Zaliapin, 2020).[/caption]

9. Conclusion

Fault slip is one of the most unpredictable processes in nature. Yet, as this post has shown, much of its complexity can be traced back to a surprisingly compact set of mechanical ingredients.

The wide spectrum of observed fault behaviors — from quiet aseismic creep, through slow-slip events that unfold over months, to sudden earthquake ruptures — is not the result of fundamentally different physical processes. It emerges from the interplay between frictional properties and the elastic stiffness of the surrounding crust. Rate-and-state friction, calibrated from laboratory rock experiments, captures the two key ingredients: a fault's immediate resistance to speed changes (the direct effect) and its gradual loss or recovery of strength over time (the evolving state variable). When these are combined with a simple spring-slider geometry, a single dimensionless ratio — k/k_c — determines whether the fault creeps or earthquakes.

Yet the single-fault spring-slider model, elegant as it is, cannot explain the full texture of real seismicity: the statistical distribution of earthquake sizes, the complex migration of activity in space and time, the coexistence of slow and fast events on the same fault system. The fault-volume model of Almakari, Kheirdast et al. (2026) demonstrates that bringing in off-fault fractures with a power-law size distribution — each obeying the same rate-and-state friction, each interacting mechanically with the main fault — is sufficient to recover all of these features at once. The Gutenberg–Richter law, Omori-law aftershock decay, inverse-Omori foreshock acceleration, and the characteristic scaling differences between slow and fast ruptures all emerge naturally from a single, self-consistent mechanical framework.

The broader lesson is one of emergent complexity from simple rules: a friction law grounded in laboratory physics, applied consistently across a geometrically realistic fault zone, reproduces phenomena that have long resisted explanation. This suggests that the enigmatic coexistence of slow and fast earthquakes, and the apparently erratic migration of seismic activity, may not require exotic physics — only a more complete account of the fault's mechanical environment.

Understanding these mechanics has direct implications for seismic hazard assessment. If slow-slip events and tremors are governed by the same friction physics as regular earthquakes, they are not merely curiosities - they are windows into the stress state of fault zones, and potentially precursors to larger events. The migration patterns revealed by the fault-volume model, in particular, may one day inform operational monitoring strategies.

Much remains to be done. Validating model statistics against dense seismic catalogs are all open challenges. But the foundation laid by decades of friction experiments, stability theory, and increasingly realistic mechanical models gives good reason for optimism that a unified physical picture of fault-zone seismicity is within reach.

References

Almakari, M., Kheirdast, N., Villafuerte, C., Thomas, M. Y., Dubernet, P., Cheng, J., ... & Bhat, H. S. (2026). Fault volume digital twin to reproduce the full slip spectrum, scaling, and statistical laws. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 131(5), e2025JB032915.

Coffey, G. L., Savage, H. M., Polissar, P. J., Cox, S. E., Hemming, S. R., Winckler, G., & Bradbury, K. K. (2022). History of earthquakes along the creeping section of the San Andreas Fault, California, USA. Geology, 50(4), 516–521.

Becker, D., Martínez-Garzón, P., Wollin, C., Kılıç, T., & Bohnhoff, M. (2023). Variation of fault creep along the overdue Istanbul–Marmara seismic gap in NW Türkiye. Geophysical Research Letters, 50. [doi.org](https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL101471)

Zhang, H., & Li, F. (2024). A review of prediction methods for global buckling critical loads of pultruded FRP struts. Composite Structures, 329, 117752. [doi.org](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruct.2023.117752)

Brace, W. F., & Byerlee, J. D. (1966). Stick-slip as a mechanism for earthquakes. Science, 153(3739), 990–992.

Dieterich, J. H. (1979). Modeling of rock friction: 1. Experimental results and constitutive equations. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 84(B5), 2161–2168.

Ruina, A. (1983). Slip instability and state variable friction laws. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 88(B12), 10,359–10,370.

Rice, J. R. (1993). Spatio-temporal complexity of slip on a fault. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 98(B6), 9885–9907.

Cochard, A., & Madariaga, R. (1994). Dynamic faulting under rate-dependent friction. Pure and Applied Geophysics, 142(3–4), 419–445.

Ben-Zion, Y., & Zaliapin, I. (2020). Localization and coalescence of seismicity before large earthquakes. Geophysical Journal International, 223(1), 561–583.

Segall, P. (2010). Earthquake and volcano deformation.

Book Review: The Swarm by Frank Schätzing

Jacqueline Behncke — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:18:31 +0000

So far, our reading adventures have kept us close to reality with Blue Machine by Helen Czerski and Below the Edge of Darkness by Edith Widder. Now, we are turning to a work of fiction. The author did plenty of research and spoke with scientists, who even appear as characters in the book, resulting in the science-fiction eco-thriller The Swarm.

For centuries, humans have treated the ocean as a resource to exploit. From whale hunting and overfishing to noise pollution, oil spills, plastic pollution and increasing CO₂ emissions, humankind has endangered whole species and ecosystems. But what if the ocean could fight back? What if the deep sea hid an intelligence capable of retaliation? The Swarm, a science-fiction eco-thriller by German author Frank Schätzing, explores this scenario. First published in 2004, the novel tells the story of an unknown intelligent life form in the deep sea that strikes back against humanity’s exploitation of marine resources.

There’s plenty of life down there. The trouble is, it sees us coming and steps aside.

The first half of the book follows several scientists as they investigate unusual behaviors and anomalies in the world’s oceans. These include a new species of deep-sea worm with symbiotic bacteria colonizing the North Sea floor, destabilization of the Norwegian continental shelf, changes in whale behavior, and poisonous jellyfish. These strange phenomena observed worldwide accumulate into vividly described catastrophic natural events similar to the disaster scenes in movies like 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow.

The second half focuses on the formation of an international scientific task force, bringing together experts from multiple fields to identify the threat and attempt communication with the unknown deep-sea intelligence. This team includes biologists, behavioral scientists, geologists, sonar experts, and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists, all working together under the lead of the US Navy and CIA. They identify the origin and purpose of the alien life form in the deep sea: a swarm-intelligence, which is aggressively fighting back and threatening all of humankind.

They want us to know that we’re in the here and now, whereas they’re everywhere and forever.

In the following chapters, scientists use newly developed technologies and risk their lives to counter the attacks and mitigate their effects. Others focus on understanding the swarm intelligence while trying to establish communication. At the same time, conflicts emerge between the scientists and the military leading the mission, creating tension and complicating their efforts.

The Swarm is a thought-provoking and thrilling novel that explores environmental and ethical questions. It is both an entertaining read and a striking reminder of the importance of respecting and preserving our natural world.

Read more:

Interview with Gerhard Borhmann: https://up2date.uni-bremen.de/en/article/the-swarm-bremen-marine-geologist-gerhard-bohrmann-as-fictional-characte

When multiple hazards interact and the data doesn’t: The multi-hazard modelling problem nobody wants to talk about

Hedieh Soltanpour — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:06:45 +0000

There is a quiet contradiction at the heart of natural hazard science. The regions most exposed to multi-hazard events are precisely the regions where we know the least. The Global South (comprising lower- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean) is disproportionately affected by climate-related natural hazards, yet it is largely underrepresented in climate research and published literature [1]. Flood-exposed populations in the Global South are projected to be nearly five times greater than in the Global North (comprising, high-income countries in Europe, North America, and Australasia) by the end of the century [2], and compound hot-dry extremes are rising fastest in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, amplified by large populations, lower income levels, and socio-economic vulnerability [3]. Sparse gauge networks, coarse-resolution soil data, incomplete hazard inventories, and a lack of high-resolution topography data. And yet, climate extremes are intensifying in these regions faster than our data infrastructure can keep up. We have built sophisticated multi-hazard models. We just rarely have the data to run them with integrity.

The multi-hazard problem is not what you think

Multi-hazard modelling is often framed as a problem of complexity: how do you represent the interactions between hazards within a single coherent framework? That is a real challenge, and a well-documented one [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. But in data-scarce regions, the harder problem comes before the modelling even starts. Consider a post-wildfire catchment in coastal Chile (Fig. 1). The February 2024 mega-wildfire in the Marga-Marga catchment in Viña del Mar, one of the most destructive in Chilean history, burned through densely urbanised slopes and fundamentally altered the hazard setting [10]. A wildfire removes vegetation; changes soil hydrological and stability properties and dramatically alters infiltration and rainfall-runoff dynamics. The next rainfall event in the Marga-Marga catchment, increasingly intense under a changing climate, triggers erosion, shallow landslides, and hyper-concentrated flows simultaneously. These are not independent hazards. As described by [11] and [12], they interact in concurrent, compounding and cascading ways, amplifying their impacts when treated as single hazards. Treating them in isolation is not conservative; it is wrong. [caption id="attachment_11125" align="alignleft" width="310"] Figure 1 (left to right). The Marga-Marga catchment in Viña del Mar: the effects of wildfires on urbanisation and hillslope vegetation, and wildfire-affected settlements[/caption] But to model these multi-hazard interactions jointly (Fig. 2), you need to know when and where they occur. This requires spatially distributed multi-hazard models, which are inherently complex due to high data demands, parameterisation requirements, and the need to represent spatially and temporally interacting physical processes. Therefore, to assess post-wildfire multi-hazard interactions we need high-resolution topography, pre- and post-fire soil properties, sub-hourly rainfall, and a multi-hazard inventory for validation. In data-scarce regions, you typically have none of these at the quality multi-hazard models demand. You have a 30-metre Digital Elevation Model (DEM), ERA5 reanalysis at 9 km, SoilGrids estimates derived from Machine Learning (ML) models trained elsewhere, and a landslide inventory assembled after the disaster from satellite imagery and newspaper reports, if anything exists at all. In Chile, as across much of the Global South, official hazard records are often discontinued, incomplete, or simply absent. Acknowledging these limitations is not a reason to stop modelling. It is the first step toward transparent modelling. But recognising the data problem is only half the story. The other half is understanding what happens inside the model once you ignore it. [caption id="attachment_11129" align="aligncenter" width="530"] Figure 2. Conceptual representation of post-wildfire cascading hazards (landslide, debris flow, and flooding) and associated data requirements for integrated multi-hazard modelling. Illustration generated using ChatGPT (Open AI).[/caption]

The uncertainty cascade

The data problem in multi-hazard modelling is not only about gaps. It is also about how uncertainty propagates. Every step of the modelling process carries its own uncertainty: estimating soil properties, resampling spatial resolution, disaggregating daily rainfall to sub-hourly intervals, selecting the model structure and validating it against an incomplete hazard inventory. Crucially, these uncertainties do not simply add together; they multiply. In post-wildfire multi-hazard settings, where we want to understand the effects of hazard interactions on landslides, debris flows, and hillslope erosion, this uncertainty cascade misrepresents key processes such as infiltration, pore pressure, and shear strength, which are essential drivers of hydrology and slope stability, distorting both the predicted location and magnitude of each hazard and the interactions between them. [13] and [14] demonstrate that quantifying this rigorously requires an ensemble of simulations rather than a single model run, as formalised in the GLUE framework (Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation). That is, many different parameter sets can reproduce observed hazard behaviour equally well, a problem known as equifinality. In data-scarce regions, where observations are few and data are uncertain, this approach does not weaken the analysis; it is the only honest way to represent what the data actually tells us about the plausible range of hazard behaviour.

What honest multi-hazard modelling looks like in practice

A hazard map is a static product: a single model run and a single moment in time, with uncertainty hidden behind clean colour gradients.

The answer to the uncertainty cascade is not to abandon physically-based modelling in data-scarce regions. It is to structure the modelling workflow around it. [15] argues that uncertainty-aware modelling in data-limited environments requires explicit decisions at every step: which data sources are used and what uncertainty they carry, which parameter ranges are physically plausible given the available data, which model runs are retained as behavioural and which are rejected, and how the resulting ensemble is communicated to decision-makers. But this does not stop here. Climate change introduces an additional dimension: The rainfall events that trigger post-wildfire multi-hazard events are becoming more intense and frequent. This means that the set of behavioural parameters identified through GLUE are not only a tool for reproducing past observations but also provides a basis for evaluating how hazard behaviour responds to future rainfall extremes. The workflow itself becomes the scientific contribution: it makes the path from uncertain data to decision-relevant output transparent and reproducible decision-making. My own work on post-wildfire hazard in the Marga-Marga catchment has made this concrete. Building on research conducted at CIGIDEN (National Research Centre for Integrated Natural Disaster Management, Chile). I ran a physically-based multi-hazard model (OpenLISEM Hazard) across hundreds of parameter combinations. I varied soil cohesion, hydraulic conductivity, porosity and friction angle. I used Earth observation datasets as the best available proxy for unmeasured field conditions. The model produced hazard outputs that communicated confidence ranges rather than false certainty. This approach is more computationally demanding than a single model run, but it is the only defensible method given our current knowledge. This points toward a distinction the field rarely makes explicit. A hazard map is a static product: a single model run and a single moment in time, with uncertainty hidden behind clean colour gradients. What I am describing is different: geospatial hazard intelligence, which has the capacity to transform uncertain, spatially distributed data into honest, decision-relevant knowledge about where hazards occur, how they interact and how confident we are in that assessment. Confidence is not an afterthought; it is the core deliverable. The output is not designed for archiving, but for the person who has to decide whether to rebuild a school on a hillslope after a wildfire, or whether to evacuate a neighbourhood before the next one. In regions where data are scarce, that distinction is not academic. The mega-wildfire in the Marga-Marga catchment destroyed around 5,500 homes across the densely populated slopes of Viña del Mar and neighbouring municipalities, triggering a reconstruction process estimated to cost one billion dollars [16]. Decisions about where to rebuild, which slopes were safe to reoccupy and which sites posed an elevated risk of post-wildfire landslides and debris flows were made on the same burned terrain, with the same missing data and under enormous political and social pressure to act quickly. Most rebuilding was carried out through residents' self-reconstruction efforts, largely outside the scope of formal hazard assessment [10]. A multi-hazard assessment that communicated not just the level of risk, but also the reliability of the assessment, could have informed which sites were recoverable and which were not. Such an assessment did not exist. Honest communication of uncertainty is not a weakness; it is the most actionable thing a model can produce. Hiding uncertainty is what causes disasters to happen twice in the same place. The hazards compound. The data doesn't. Our methods must close that gap, and our outputs must reflect this.

References

[1] N. Communications, “Climate research in the Global South,” Nat. Commun., vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 3–4, 2025, doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-63884-3. [2] Q.Zhang et al., “Global South shows higher urban flood exposures than the Global North under current and future scenarios,” Commun. Earth Environ., vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2025, doi: 10.1038/s43247-025-02585-7. [3] J. Guo et al., “Rising compound hot-dry extremes engendering more inequality in human exposure risks,” npj Natural Hazards, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2025, doi: 10.1038/s44304-025-00119-x. [4] S. De Angeli, B. D. Malamud, L. Rossi, F. E. Taylor, E. Trasforini, and R. Rudari, “A multi-hazard framework for spatial-temporal impact analysis,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, vol. 73, p. 102829, Apr. 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.102829. [5] J. C. Gill and B. D. Malamud, “Hazard interactions and interaction networks (cascades) within multi-hazard methodologies,” Earth System Dynamics, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 659–679, 2016, doi: 10.5194/esd-7-659-2016. [6] S. Hochrainer-Stigler et al., “Toward a framework for systemic multi-hazard and multi-risk assessment and management,” iScience, vol. 26, no. 5, p. 106736, May 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106736. [7] M. Kappes, M. Keiler, K. von Elverfeldt, and T. Glade, “Challenges of analyzing multi-hazard risk: A review,” Nov. 31, 2012. doi: 10.1007/s11069-012-0294-2. [8] R. Š. Trogrlić et al., “Challenges in assessing and managing multi-hazard risks: A European stakeholders perspective,” Environ. Sci. Policy, vol. 157, no. August 2023, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103774. [9] A. Tilloy, B. D. Malamud, H. Winter, and A. Joly-Laugel, “A review of quantification methodologies for multi-hazard interrelationships,” Sep. 01, 2019, Elsevier B.V. doi: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2019.102881. [10] Martínez et al., “Incendios 02 y 03 de febrero de 2024, Viña del Mar (Región de Valparaíso),” 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.cigiden.cl/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CIGIDEN_2024_IncendiosVinadelMar_v04.pdf [Accessed: 3 June 2026]. [11] J. C. Gill and B. D. Malamud, “Reviewing and visualizing the interactions of natural hazards,” Reviews of Geophysics, vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 680–722, Dec. 2014, doi: 10.1002/2013RG000445. [12] J. Zscheischler et al., “A typology of compound weather and climate events,” Nat. Rev. Earth Environ., pp. 1–15, Jun. 2020, doi: 10.1038/s43017-020-0060-z. [13] K. Beven, “A manifesto for the equifinality thesis,” J. Hydrol. (Amst)., vol. 320, no. 1–2, pp. 18–36, Mar. 2006, doi: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2005.07.007. [14] K. Beven and A. Binley, “The future of distributed models: Model calibration and uncertainty prediction,” Hydrol. Process., vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 279–298, Jul. 1992, doi: 10.1002/hyp.3360060305. [15] K. Beven et al., “Epistemic uncertainties and natural hazard risk assessment – Part 2: What should constitute good practice?,” Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, vol. 18, no. 10, pp. 2769–2783, Oct. 2018, doi: 10.5194/nhess-18-2769-2018. [16] UNICEF, “Chile Humanitarian Flash Report No.2 (Wildfires),” 2024. [Online]. Available: https://reliefweb.int/report/chile/unicef-chile-humanitarian-flash-report-no2-wildfires-07-march-2024 [Accessed: 3 June 2026]. Blog post edited by: Hedieh Soltanpour and Harriet Thampson

The Arctic's Blind Spot: Why Satellites Struggle Where Ice Meets the Coast

Leah Muhle — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:10:57 +0000

The first time I stood on sea ice, I could not tell which direction the coast was. A community member named Bryan could. That gap in situational awareness, between what a trained remote sensing scientist could read from the landscape and what a local hunter understood instinctively, turned out to mirror almost exactly the gap in our satellite data: ICESat-2 produces reliable freeboard across the central Arctic but goes systematically blind within 25 km of every coastline. This post traces that coastal data gap from its algorithmic roots through its ecological and human consequences, and asks what it would mean to build satellite products that close it on the terms of the communities who need them most.

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I grew up in Bangladesh, a country defined by delta and monsoon, emphatically not by ice. So when I stepped onto the frozen surface of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba in December 2021, on my first Arctic field campaign, I was meeting sea ice for the first time outside of a textbook (Figure 1).

I didn't really understand what it meant to travel over sea ice until I was on the back of a skidoo driven by a community member named Bryan. It was early in the freeze up season, what locals sometimes call the "free up" season, in acknowledgement of how volatile the margins can be. At one point, standing on the ice, I could not tell which direction the coast lay. Bryan simply followed the faint lines left by other skidoos, navigational knowledge encoded in the landscape itself, invisible to me but perfectly legible to him. A short while later, hunters returning from the landfast ice edge warned us we were closer to it than we had realised. Almost on cue, a crack began to open in the surface nearby. Bryan turned us around.

In that moment, the abstract vocabulary of my remote sensing work, freeboard, sea surface reference, landfast ice extent, collapsed into something urgent. Bryan needed to know how thick that ice was. The hunters needed to know whether the edge was stable. These are not research questions. They are safety questions.

Satellites That Couldn't See Near the Coast

The campaign was meant to be a satellite validation exercise: coincident snow depth and ice thickness measurements supporting ICESat-2 and CryoSat-2 freeboard retrievals during my MSc at the University of Manitoba (freeboard is the part of the sea ice above the waterline). But after we collected the data, we discovered that ICESat-2 had produced almost no usable freeboard within the 25 km coastal buffer around our study area. The multiyear record showed the same pattern season after season: a persistent coastal blank (Figure 2). The satellite had been overhead and had properly collected photons. But the downstream algorithms could not establish a reliable sea surface reference, and the data were flagged or discarded before any calculation for freeboard was attempted. That distinction matters, because it tells us where the solution lies: not in the hardware, but in what we do with the signal (Kwok et al, 2019, Petty et al., 2020). If ICESat-2 could not deliver freeboard within 25 km of the coast, we had to go to get the data. The following year our team at Maryland and the University of Calgary chartered a helicopter to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut (Figure 3 shows the sites that were surveyed). Cambridge Bay is, in many ways, the textbook setting for the failure modes I had identified in Hudson Bay: narrow channels with strong tidal forcing, persistent landfast ice well into spring, heavily ridged shore fast ice, and the operational stakes of sitting on the Northwest Passage shipping corridor (Smith et al., 2013). All algorithmic problems described in the following occur here simultaneously. That image of clean central Arctic freeboard ringed by a stubborn coastal void became the puzzle driving my MSc thesis and now my PhD at the University of Maryland.

[caption id="attachment_17495" align="alignnone" width="1600"] Figure 2. Monthly ICESat-2 ATL10 total freeboard, November 2023 to April 2024. The dark blue ring indicates the near coastal data gap that persists through the full winter growth season. [Credit: Monojit Saha][/caption]

How Altimeters Measure Ice

A sea ice floe sits in seawater like an ice cube in a glass with the freeboard as the portion above the waterline. Given an independent estimate of snow depth and the densities of snow, ice, and seawater, freeboard converts to total thickness through hydrostatic balance.

The two altimeters at the heart of this work see the floe differently. ICESat-2's ATLAS photon counting lidar reflects from the air to snow interface and therefore measures total freeboard (snow plus ice above sea level). CryoSat-2's Ku band radar is conventionally assumed to penetrate the dry snow column and reflect from the snow to ice interface, yielding ice freeboard, although the validity of that assumption is now under active scrutiny (Nandan et al., 2017). The difference between the two retrievals along nearly coincident ICESat-2 and Cryosat-2 orbits provides the basis for satellite snow depth on sea ice. It is also the reason coastal data loss is doubly costly: when the algorithms fail, we lose both freeboard and the dual altimeter snow depth product simultaneously.

The hard part for either sensor is the reference. We need an accurate, instantaneous sea surface height beneath the satellite, which in practice means finding open water or thin ice leads (sea ice leads are long cracks formed when Arctic ice floes diverge or shear), measuring their elevation, and differencing it from the surrounding ice. In the central pack, where leads are abundant and geometrically clean, this works well (Kwok et al., 2015). However, near the coast the scarcity of open water leads in the landfast ice along with challenges poised by algorithmic limitations linked to interactions of lidar with the rugged landfast ice makes the traditional method of measuring freeboard and ice thickness difficult. ICESat-2’s lead classifier, built on a narrow set of photon descriptors, misreads the coastal lead population: refrozen and wind roughened leads are misclassified as ice and bias the sea surface reference upward, while dark leads are indistinguishable from low albedo thin ice and excluded by default (Petty et al., 2021, Liu et al., 2025). On top of this, the embedded global tide models carry large errors in shallow bays, fjords, and inter island channels, leaving residual biases sufficient to drive thin first year ice freeboard into physically implausible negative values (Saha et al., 2025, Stammer et al., 2014).

[caption id="attachment_17498" align="alignnone" width="1600"] Figure 3. Study sites at Cambridge Bay that were surveyed to understand the near-coastal ice along the Dease Strait [Credit: Saha et al., 2025][/caption]

Rescuing the Coastal Record

This diagnosis points directly at where the rescue effort has to happen: the surface classifier. A growing body of work, including custom and machine learning classifiers operating on ICESat-2 photon clouds, has demonstrated that a meaningful fraction of voided coastal segments contains physically valid specular returns that the operational classifier discards as ‘dark’ leads (Liu et al., 2025).

As part of my ongoing PhD research at the University of Maryland College Park, I’m working towards developing algorithmic improvements to the current fixed threshold based algorithm on ICEsat-2 to a deep learning based workflow for sea ice surface classification. The improvement also tries to address the dark lead misclassification issue and leads to rescue of leads that were labelled as “dark” by the algorithm and therefore not considered for subsequent freeboard measurements from ICESat-2.

From Satellite Design to Community Design

The Arctic's coastal blind spot reflects genuine physical complexity at one of the hardest remote sensing environments on Earth, compounded by algorithms calibrated for the central pack and ancillary inputs (passive microwave sea ice thickness, global tide models) that degrade near the coast. The diagnosis is now clear, and filling the spatial gap is tractable with designing coastal specific classifiers, using multi sensor integration with NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT)/ NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), and conducting validation campaigns around the near coastal zone.

However, the near coastal zone is not just a remote scientific abstraction. It is the most socially and ecologically consequential strip of ice in the Arctic. Landfast ice is the platform from which Indigenous communities hunt, travel, and sustain cultural practices with millennial roots (Huntington et al., 2016). Across northern Alaska the landfast season has shortened markedly since the late 1990s, compressing the spring bearded seal hunting window and leaving no easy food system substitute (Mahoney & Einhorn., 2026, Druckenmiller et al., 2013). The landfast ice edge and adjacent coastal polynyas are also among the most biologically productive features in the polar ocean. They drive spring blooms and support ringed seal pups whose survival depends on snow loaded ice lairs (Stirling, 1997), an ecological dependency directly tied to the snow on sea ice product that coastal altimetry could deliver if the data gap were closed. A satellite freeboard product that systematically voids data across this zone is not a technical inconvenience. It is a missing observational record at exactly the place where human safety, Indigenous food security, coastal stability, and marine ecosystem dynamics converge.

And exactly this social and ecological importance of the near coastal zone caused me to wonder what it would look like to build satellite data products around community need rather than asking communities to adapt to what satellites already produce. It would mean going to Churchill and Cambridge Bay not just to validate algorithms but to ask what information is actually missing, at what time of season, at what spatial resolution, and in what format it would be usable. It would mean near-real-time dissemination pipelines as a design requirement, not an afterthought. It would mean feedback loops where local observers, hunters, and rangers contribute ground truth that shapes not only algorithm validation but the variables the product prioritises in the first place. The technology to do much of this exists. What has been missing is the willingness to treat community knowledge as a design input rather than a communication challenge. Bryan knew the ice better than the satellite did. The right question is not how we explain our data to him, but how we build systems that learn from what he already knows.

References

Kwok et al., 2019: ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Sea Ice Freeboard, Version 1
Petty et al., 2020: Winter Arctic Sea Ice Thickness From ICESat-2 Freeboards
Smith et al., 2013: New Trans-Arctic shipping routes navigable by midcentury
Nandan et al., 2017: Effect of Snow Salinity on CryoSat-2 Arctic First-Year Sea Ice Freeboard Measurements
Kwok et al, 2015: Variability of Arctic sea ice thickness and volume from CryoSat-2
Petty et al., 2021: Assessment of ICESat-2 Sea Ice Surface Classification with Sentinel-2 Imagery: Implications for Freeboard and New Estimates of Lead and Floe Geometry
Liu et al, 2025: Enhanced sea ice classification for ICESat-2 using combined unsupervised and supervised machine learning
Saha et al., 2025: Snow depth estimation on leadless landfast ice using Cryo2Ice satellite observations
Stammer et al., 2014: Accuracy assessment of global barotropic ocean tide models
Huntington et al., 2016: Effects of changing sea ice on marine mammals and subsistence hunters in northern Alaska from traditional knowledge interviews
Mahoney & Einhorn, 2026: The Evolving Decline of Landfast Sea Ice in Northern Alaska and Adjacent Waters: Results from an Updated Climatology
Druckenmiller et al., 2013: Trails to the whale: reflections of change and choice on an Iñupiat icescape at Barrow, Alaska
Stirling, 1997: The importance of polynyas, ice edges, and leads to marine mammals and birds

Edited by Florina Schalamon and Leah Sophie Muhle

Geodesy Cartoons – A Creative Tool for Outreach and Education

Leire Retegui-Schiettekatte — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:00:16 +0000

Geodesy is fundamental to understanding our dynamic planet. From monitoring sea-level rise and glacier melt to maintaining precise terrestrial reference frames for GNSS and Earth observation, geodesy provides the scientific backbone for many disciplines represented within the EGU and beyond. Despite its importance, geodesy often remains invisible outside the scientific community. Even within geosciences, many people use geodetic products daily without fully realizing the complex infrastructure and science behind them. To help make geodesy more visible and accessible, the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) and its Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) launched the Geodesy Cartoon initiative in 2024. The idea is simple: use cartoons and illustrations to explain geodetic concepts in a creative, understandable, and visually engaging way. [caption id="attachment_5711" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] Top cartoons in Category 1 - Explaining Geodesy. Cartoons by Eda Uzunoglu and Atmaja Septa Miyosa, distributed by geodesy.science/cartoon. CC BY.[/caption] At first glance, cartoons may seem unusual in a scientific context. However, they can be remarkably effective tools for science communication. Concepts such as reference frames, GNSS positioning, gravity field modelling, VLBI, or satellite geodesy are often difficult to explain to non-specialists. Visual storytelling helps lower the entry barrier and creates intuitive connections between complex scientific methods and their real-world applications. The cartoons cover a broad spectrum of topics relevant to the geodetic and geospatial community, including:

GNSS and precise positioning,
Earth observation and climate monitoring,
gravity field determination,
geodetic infrastructure and reference frames,
surveying and land administration,
and the role of geodesy in daily life.

Many of the cartoons are particularly useful for lectures, conference presentations, outreach events, teaching activities, and social media communication. They can also help Early Career Scientists communicate their work to broader audiences, an increasingly important skill in interdisciplinary science and public engagement. [caption id="attachment_5712" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] Top cartoons in Category 2 - Observation Techniques. Cartoons by Doru Axinte and Tom Fiedler, distributed by geodesy.science/cartoon. CC BY.[/caption] A major milestone for the initiative was the international Geodesy Cartoon Competition, whose winners were announced during the EGU General Assembly 2026 in Vienna. The competition attracted 274 submissions from 119 cartoonists across 46 countries, demonstrating strong international interest in creative geoscience communication. The best cartoons were exhibited at the IAG Geodesy Reception during EGU26 and sparked numerous discussions among scientists about new ways of communicating research and geodetic applications. One particularly encouraging aspect was the diversity of contributors. Alongside professional scientists, the competition also attracted students, educators, and professional cartoonists, highlighting how science communication can connect communities far beyond traditional academic boundaries. [caption id="attachment_5713" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] Top cartoons in Category 3 - Geodetic Products. Cartoons by Friedrich Tasser and Tom Fiedler, distributed by geodesy.science/cartoon. CC BY.[/caption] For the geodesy community, initiatives like this are about more than outreach alone. They are also about visibility. While disciplines such as meteorology or geology are widely recognized by the public, geodesy often remains unknown despite underpinning positioning, navigation, digital twins, and many Earth observation applications. Strengthening awareness of geodesy is therefore essential not only for education, but also for attracting future students, supporting scientific collaboration, and highlighting the societal relevance of geodetic research. All cartoons are openly available under a Creative Commons license and can be freely reused for educational and outreach purposes. Further information: https://geodesy.science/cartoon

– Edited by Leire Retegui-Schiettekatte

HydroTalks podcast: Introducing Ilias Pechlivanidis, the HS Division President-elect

Archita Bhattacharyya — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0000

For this episode of HydroTalks, we’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Ilias Pechlivanidis, Senior Researcher and Associate Professor (Docent) in hydrology and water resources at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), and Visiting Researcher at Uppsala University. He is currently the Vice President of the EGU Hydrological Sciences Division and will serve as Division President for the 2027–2029 term. His responsibilities will include representing the hydrological scientific community within EGU, and managing the administration of the division, especially arranging the programme at the General Assembly. You can check out the full episode here and read the interview summary in this blog! [caption id="attachment_13947" align="alignnone" width="276"] Dr. Ilias Pechlivanidis[/caption]

About Ilias’s research

Please tell us about your research. A large part of my research focuses on improving hydrological predictions. I investigate forecasting systems across river basins, from hours and days ahead to seasonal timescales. I am particularly interested in hybrid modelling, which combines process-based hydrological models with artificial intelligence. The key focus is to predict different hydrological conditions, including extremes, and translate predictions into actionable decisions. How do hydrological forecasts work in simple terms? And have you seen these forecasting systems evolve over time? At its core, hydrological forecasting needs three things: knowledge of today’s river conditions, such as soil moisture, snowpack and lake/reservoir levels; access to meteorological forecasts; and a well-performing hydrological model. To get today’s river conditions, we run the model using historical and real-time observations. Having actual condition data is a benefit, and we can assimilate those data into the model. After that, we force the model with meteorological forecasts, from hours and days ahead to seasons ahead. There are more advanced methods nowadays. Thanks to satellite-based products and methods such as data simulation schemes and machine learning, we have experienced quite some evolution in forecasting systems. For example, flood early warning systems can sometimes predict floods up to eight days ahead, depending of course on the river system. (Read More) Do forecasting systems perform equally well everywhere? Slow-responding rivers, including systems strongly influenced by lakes, snow/ice accumulation and melting or baseflow, can be more predictable than fast-responding rivers that are controlled by rainfall. Accurate meteorological forecasts are essential however, with regions experiencing localised convective rainfall remain challenging to capture. However, forecast performance is not the same as forecast usability, because decisions are even made with biased and uncertain predictions. (Read more) How could AI transform hydrological forecasting? AI and machine learning can improve accuracy, reduce uncertainty, generate high-resolution forecasts and even help us understand the drivers of predictability. Explainable AI and hybrid models are promising, because they bring physical knowledge and data-driven insights together. I see opportunities in the next-generation early warning systems through AI, supporting citizen-centred communications and helping individuals respond to disasters. However, AI integration in early warning systems must be done carefully, ensuring transparency and robustness, and following standardised evaluation frameworks and data security protocols. (Read more) How can better forecasts support local communities? Better forecasts can provide earlier and more accurate warnings, giving communities time to prepare and respond. This can reduce loss of life, economic damage and long-term disruption, as seen in some European countries in 2021, 2023 and 2024. But producing an accurate forecast is only part of the challenge. Warnings need to be clear, communicating the impacts to the society,, while they should ideally be tailored to different groups, so that everyone can to understand what the warning means for them. (Read more)

About Ilias’s role as incoming President of HS Division

When did you first become involved with EGU? I first attended EGU in 2007 and have remained actively involved since then. Over the years, I have convened sessions, contributed to community activities, and served as the scientific officer for the Hydrological Forecasting subdivision from 2020 to 2024. [caption id="attachment_13950" align="alignnone" width="477"] Photo with colleagues from the Hydrological Forecasting HS subdivision at EGU24[/caption] What is your vision for the Hydrological Sciences Division? I want the division to remain a global and inclusive home for hydrologists. This means bringing in more voices from outside Europe, supporting early-career scientists, and strengthening connections with international communities. I also want to promote innovation, and ensure that science continues supporting real-life decisions. I want to foster an open and collaborative culture of sharing ideas. Which skills do you believe could help in your role? Both academic and non-academic skills are essential. This includes a broad understanding of hydrology and water resources, alongside skills such as leadership, efficient communication, international coordination and collaboration, and inclusivity across disciplines, institutions, and cultures. What do you expect to be the most challenging and rewarding parts of the role? One challenge will be balancing the priorities of a large and diverse international community. At the same time, that diversity is also the most rewarding part. Bringing together different perspectives, supporting collaboration, and seeing ideas develop into impactful science and services can be very fulfilling. What career advice would you share with early-career scientists? Stay focused on your ethics and long-term goals, but remain open to opportunities beyond your immediate field. A career path does not always need to be linear. Sometimes taking a thoughtful risk can lead to something innovative. Check out the full episode here.

(Almost) everything wrong with: Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Editorial team 1 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:00:11 +0000

Spoiler warning!

Have you ever watched a science fiction movie and thought, huh, I wonder if that is actually possible? Now, I hope by the time the dinosaurs turned up during this film, that this transient thought had departed from your mind, but to satisfy the idle curiosity of those who wondered this during Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and perhaps even impart some geodynamical lessons, I delved into the cinematic world of the Jules Verne adaptation. In 2008, a science fiction action-adventure movie was released starring Brendan Fraser and Josh Hutcherson, adapted from the famous 1864 novel of the same name by Jules Verne. The movie follows the adventure of volcanologist Trevor Anderson and his nephew Sean as they search for Trevor’s missing brother. Their journey takes them to Iceland, to an old mine, and then down volcanic tubes into the mysterious, fantastic, and dangerous centre of the Earth. Of course, they were actors playing a part in a fictional movie; they didn’t really go there, and it is simply a fantastical tale that claims no truth in its telling. You might think it pedantic, fastidious, or pretentious to fact check such a story. You might even see it as a completely pointless endeavour. You could be right, yet I will do it anyway. For those who were mildly perturbed when Trevor Anderson whispered “muscovite” I present: (almost) everything wrong with Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Journey to the Centre of the Earth film poster, New Line Cinema

Hollow Earth?

Let’s start with the most obvious: the hollow Earth. The signal we receive from seismic waves (vibrations that transfer energy through the ground) immediately rules this out. What we see is only consistent with a layered planet, mostly solid with a liquid layer in the outer part of the core. If you want more information about what is really going on down there, check out Prachi Kar's blog post on the giant blobs deep inside the Earth. Speaking of liquids inside the Earth, I refer to molten iron and nickel, and not an ocean of water. Despite how cool it would be to sail across an underground ocean while dodging piranhas, the water inside the Earth is mostly locked away as a solid inside minerals like ringwoodite, and liquid water is dispersed in the tiny cracks between rocks, not in giant bodies of water.

Falling into the oven

If you’ve ever been underground, you might have noticed: it gets hot quickly. A main antagonist of our heroes in Journey to the Centre of the Earth is the temperature. Yet, things would be even more drastic than is portrayed on film. When they fall down the lava tube, they travel for an uncertain but lengthy distance, so long in fact, that there is a transition implying the scene was shortened for us. Trevor shouts out that it could be hundreds of kilometres deep as they fall—which would be a death sentence in many ways. From the time spent falling on screen, a back of the envelope calculation tells us they are at minimum seven kilometres deep in the Earth. Even though the movie suggests they are actually somewhere much deeper, this depth is already impressive, and would be the deepest humans have ever been inside the Earth. We know that temperature increases with depth, and we call the rate at which it does it the geothermal gradient. Beneath a regular colder part of the Earth’s crust like Ireland, where the geothermal gradient is 25°C/km, the temperature at seven kilometres would be a sizzling 175°C, and our main characters would meet a crispy end. Beneath Iceland, things are much worse. Gradients between 50 and 150°C/km in Iceland would mean Trevor and company ride their lava tunnel water slide into an ocean around 600°C. For reference, that’s a touch warmer than the hot springs of Tuscany. On a side note: water boils at 100°C at the Earth’s surface, but at high pressures this reaches much higher—so the presence of liquid water is not the crazy part. I guess they most have packed SPF 50,000, because they shrug off the blistering heat and continue on. But wait—shouldn’t they be under some serious pressure? And I don’t mean because they are on a perilous quest, but rather the immense pressures that exist at depth in the Earth. At the surface of the Earth, the pressure is 1 atm, or 101,325 Pa. At seven kilometres depth, a cavern that size would be under immense differential pressure. Lithostatic pressure of 2000 times the Earth’s surface would instantly crush the cavern and poor Trevor. Fortunately, they must have fallen into a cave with magical properties because it manages to withstand the weight of the Earth’s crust.

Suspicious rocks

Before their great fall to their physically-assured deaths, our main characters find themselves in a lava tube. Now, lava tubes are a geological phenomenon that do in fact exist—we can see them in nature. However, lava tubes form during lava flows, and are therefore found near or at the surface. They can be very long, so the 7 km length of the lava tube in the film is not strange but its orientation very much is. They form from the flow of lava and thus form horizontally, not vertically! We haven’t yet addressed the elephant in the room: the muscovite. Muscovite is not a rock, as the film portrays it, but rather a thin platy mineral found in igneous and metamorphic rocks. It is very weak, and even if you somehow constructed a thin floor made of muscovite (a geologically nonsensical idea), it would certainly not support the weight of a human. Fortunately for the characters, the muscovite in the film has a sense of dramatic timing, and only follows the laws of physics when it chooses to!

Thurston Lava Tube at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Big Island, Hawaii. Author: Frank Schulenburg

At the end of the day, Journey to the Centre of the Earth may violate the laws of physics, contradict our understanding of geodynamics, and even show dinosaurs to be living inside the Earth, but it is a fun adventure, and worth a watch!

EGU Blogs - Recent Division Posts

Sudden Temperature Change in a Warming World: Why Future Temperature Swings Are a Global Tug-of-War?

Using Generative Modelling to Downscale Climate Data for Ice Sheets

What will happen to the Greenland ice sheet in the future?

From coarse climate models to high-resolution ice sheet modelling

How can machine learning help us?

The future of ice sheet modelling

Read the paper

References

Edited by Christina Draeger and Leah Sophie Muhle

HydroTalks: Prof. Thom Bogaard on Water and Landslides, Early Warning Systems, and IAHS-HELPING Decade

How does water contribute to landslides?

How do hydrology, ecology and geomorphology together contribute to triggering a slope failure or preventing it?

How does water chemistry play a part?

Is it possible to predict landslides? And how challenging is it to predict?

How is weather radar used for land slide early warning systems?

Is rainfall location enough and how accurate are predictions?

What are the biggest gaps in reducing major losses due to landslide disasters?

How will climate change affect landslides?

What are nature based solutions and some challenges in using those solutions?

What are the main objectives of the HELPING Hydrological Decade?

What are your achievements since you've become the chair in 2025?

What is the biggest breakthrough in hydrological research in the last 10 year? And what do you think are the trends for the next 10 years?

Could you share the best and worst piece of career advice that you've ever received?

Can the Ocean Explain Why Climate Models Struggle with the Indian Monsoon?

References:

From the Lab to the Open Air: The Struggle of Making Sensors That Don't Lie

Information About the Interviewees

Dr. Wolfgang Stremme, Researcher at ICAyCC

Dr. Andrea Cadena, Researcher at ICF

The Heart of the Hardware: Fingerprints and Solar Absorption

What’s the Technical Challenge That Gives Most Trouble?

Ground Sensors vs. Satellites: Allies or Rivals?

Field Panics and Eurekas in the Wild

What Data or Gas Are We Ignoring Today That Will Be Critical in 5 Years?

A Word of Advice for EGU GI's Early Career Scientists

Information from the researchers

TopoToolbox webinar recap & resources

Ada Lovelace’s spirit at Lake Seč

GMPV Early Career Scientist Network 2026-2027

Let's meet our ECS Network members-

ECS Representatives (2025-2026)

(1) Piyal Halder

(2) Bartosz Puzio

Former ECS Representative (2023-2025)

Simona Gabrielli

Blog Editor-in-Chief

Agata Poganj

Blog Editors

(1) Guto Paiva-Silva

2024 Best Blog Winner (Public Vote)

(2) Aretì Angeli

(With additional charge of Facebook & Instagram Manager)

LinkedIn manager

Pierre Bouygues

Campfire Organizer

Chief Organizer

Organizers

(1) Fernanda Torres

(2) Metwally Hamza

Short courses/future careers Organizer

Chair

Member

(1) Catherine R. Tapalla

Geomythology. Neotectonics and Monasticism

Geological Origins of Monasticism

Historical Origins of Monasticism

References

Help us shape the GD programme for EGU General Assembly 2027

GD1 – Earth and Planetary Dynamics, Structure, Composition and Evolution

GD2 – Plate Boundary Dynamics, Structure and Evolution Across Timescales; Conceptual and Regional Perspectives

GD3 – Rheology, Rock and Mineral Physics, and Multiphase Materials in Geodynamics

GD4 – Geodynamics across the Earth System: Surface Processes, Climate, Life and Feedbacks

GD5 – Modelling, Inversion, Data Assimilation, Multiscale and Multiphysics Methods for Geodynamics

EGU Campfire Geodesy – Share Your Research – 20th Edition

Meet Samuel Badman, the 2026 Outstanding Early Career Scientist Awardee of the Solar-Terrestrial Division!

Five ways to improve your interdisciplinary communication skills

Know your limits – and state them openly

Create psychological safety

Practise active listening