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GeoPolicy: Jump into Science for Policy at EGU26!

Chloe Hill — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:00:30 +0000

Each year, the EGU General Assembly offers a diverse programme of scientific and skills-focused sessions where participants can explore new research, grow their network, broaden their expertise, and build new skills. Among these are sessions that focus on science for policy, showcasing how researchers can start engaging in policymaking, connect with decision-makers, and create policy impact. This post highlights some of these sessions and how to engage with policymakers throughout the week. EGU26 participants can also find all of the science for policy sessions grouped together in the programme!

Keynote sessions: Exploring key themes

Union-wide keynote sessions, including both Union Symposium and Great Debates, provide a platform for topics that are cutting-edge, current, and of interest to a broad range of the Earth, environmental, planetary and space sciences. Here are the union-wide sessions of EGU26 on science for policy related topics!

From Honest Brokers to Lobbyists: What Could Be the Role of Scientists in Different Contexts and Countries?

Monday 04 May, 16:15–18:00 (CEST) in Room E1 This session will explore how scientists navigate their responsibilities and opportunities at the science-policy interface. It pays attention to the influence of political cultures, institutional structures, and public expectations on the mandates scientists take on. EGU Science for Policy Award Lecture by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters Monday 04 May, 19:00 – 20:00 (CEST) in Room G2 As the winner of EGU’s first ever Science for Policy Award, Linda Lammensalo will present on behalf of the Science for Policy Team of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, sharing concrete methods and tools that can be adapted to diverse policy contexts internationally.

“Greennovation”: how can scientists support the green transition

Tuesday 05 May, 08:30–10:15 (CEST) in Room E1 Achieving the goals of the European Green Deal and 2040 Climate Target requires substantial investment in innovation, clean technology, and green infrastructure, while ensuring a just transition for affected communities. This Union Symposium will explore programmes, challenges, and opportunities for scientists to engage in the innovation process, and how a just transition can be ensured.

Climate change, morals, values and policies

Wednesday 06 May, 08:30–10:15 in Room E1 In this Union Symposium, speakers will examine the moral, psychological, cultural, and social dimensions that shape public engagement with climate change. The panel will discuss how climate communication and policy can become more inclusive, trustworthy, and impactful.

Geoengineering - Overarching Great Debate

Thursday 07 May, 16:15–18:00 (CEST) in Room E1 Are geoengineering concepts (such as solar radiation management, sea curtains and ocean biomass dumping) a distraction from our urgent need for adaptation and mitigation? Is it appropriate to advocate for geoengineering without adequate research on its impacts? This session’s panellists will debate these questions and more

Short Courses: Developing your science for policy skills

Instead of focusing on a specific research area or scientific theme, Short Courses are designed to equip participants with practical information, skills, and capabilities that support their work as researchers. These sessions are typically more interactive and flexible, offering greater opportunities for engagement and discussion. This year, several courses will help EGU26 participants develop the knowledge and skills needed to begin engaging in policymaking.

Science Diplomacy: What is it and how to engage

Tuesday 05 May, 14:00–15:45 (CEST) in Room -2.41/42 Science diplomacy is a broad term used both to describe the various roles that science and researchers play in bridging geopolitical gaps and finding solutions to international issues.. During this Short Course, science diplomacy experts will introduce key science diplomacy concepts and outline the skills that are required to effectively engage in science diplomacy.

Meet the Austrian Parliament Science for Policy Staff

Wednesday 06 May, 12:45–13:45 (CEST) in Room -2.41/42 In this session, speakers from Austrian government institutions will offer insights into how their organisation applies scientific knowledge in their day-to-day work, and what kinds of research collaborations they are looking for.

Instruments and Initiatives for Policy Engagement

Thursday 07 May, 08:30–10:15 (CEST) in Room -2.41/42 Are you keen to see your research results integrated into decision-making but don’t know where to start? This session is a basic introduction that provides some tips for engagement. A panel of experts will highlight different opportunities and skills for policy engagement. It will also include teasers for different existing toolkits and training opportunities!

New Toolkits – the destabilisation of science and what we can do about it

Thursday 07 May, 10:45–12:30 (CEST) in Room -2.41/42 Science is increasingly under pressure from political polarisation, misinformation, and declining public trust. This short course will provide participants with insights into practical approaches to safeguard the integrity of science while making it more accessible and actionable.

Splinter Meetings: Engaging in the discussion

Splinter are hosted in a more intimate setting with space for up to 30 participants. They often take the form of a round table with the opportunities for all participants to participate actively.

Shaping Your Science-Policy Career: Pathways and Opportunities

Monday 04 May, 14:00–15:45 in Room 2.43 This session will convene a panel of experts working across the science-policy spectrum, who will share how they developed the necessary skills, as well as tips for those who want to take the next step in their own career!

Pitch your research to a policymaker

Tuesday 05 May, 10:45–12:30 in Room 2.42 This session will give some participants the opportunity to present the key aspects of their research to a panel of policymakers and those working on the science-policy interface! Both those presenting and those in the audience will hear a wide range of tips on how they can effectively pitch to policymakers in the future.

How to submit evidence to help inform policy decisions

Tuesday 05 May, 14:00–15:45 in Room 2.83 This Splinter meeting will highlight processes that the scientific community can engage with to submit evidence and inform policy decisions. National and EU examples will be presented, providing participants key insights as well as tips on how to frame evidence to make it actionable.

How to write a policy brief

Friday 08 May, 14:00–15:45 in Room 2.61 As an interactive workshop, this Splinter Meeting will provide participants be with tips and tools to create their own policy brief. Participants are requested to bring along one a publication to use during the workshop, ideally authored by them.

Measuring and valuing science for policy and engagement impact

Friday 08 May, 10:45–12:30 in Room 2.43 This session explores emerging frameworks, methodologies, and alternative metrics that assess the societal impact of scientific research beyond traditional academic metrics. It will also examine the tensions and opportunities in aligning research evaluation systems with goals for real-world impact.

Scientific sessions: Finding a thematic focus

There are also a few scientific sessions that build bridges between science and policy and teach researchers how to engage with policymaking processes \within a particular scientific area. Some of these sessions are listed below:

Atmospheric Science for Action: Connecting Atmospheric Responses to Emissions, Air Quality, Climate, Health, and Environmental Justice to Motivate Policy

Oral session: Tuesday 05 May, 14:00–17:55 in Room 1.85/86, Posters session: Tuesday 05 May, 10:45–12:30 in Hall X5 This session calls for research that explores how mitigation and adaptation strategies for air pollution and climate change may influence atmospheric composition and dynamics in the present and future.

Wildfire risk, vulnerability, resilience and disaster risk reduction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI): making academic findings policy- and action- relevant

Tuesday 05 May, 10:45–12:30 in PICO spot 1a By sharing experiences across diverse geographical and socio-environmental contexts, this session aims to foster dialogue on wildfire risk management and support the development of practical solutions for reducing wildfire impacts in the wildland-urban interface worldwide.

Nature-based solutions for climate-resilient landscapes: bridging science, practice, and policy

Oral session: Thursday 07 May, 14:00–18:00 in Room D3, Posters session: Thursday 07 May, 10:45–12:30 in Hall A This session aims to foster interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary exchange to advance both the scientific basis and the practical governance of nature-based solutions for resilience planning, land and water management, and climate adaptation across landscapes.

Facing the last policy challenges in the EU: How soil scientists can contribute to the demands for scientific evidence to support EU policies

Friday 08 May, 10:45–12:30 (CEST) in Room D1 This session will feature an opening address from Member of the European Parliament Martin Hojsík followed be a panel discussion with experts from the European Commission, EU agencies, FAO, and ESA. It aims aims to advance cooperation between the research and policy communities to safeguard soils for future generations. In addition to these division specific sessions, Some Divisions also have sub-programmes that gather several sessions under specific policy- or policy and society-relevant scientific themes. These include BG8: Biogeosciences, Policy and Society and SSS12: Soil Policy and Legislation.

EGU Science for Policy Help Desk

12:00 – 13:00 every day at the EGU Booth Throughout EGU26, in-person participants are welcome to drop by the EGU’s Science for Policy Help Desk at the EGU Booth every day from 12:00-13:00 to discuss their questions and how they can share their expertise more effectively! [caption id="attachment_46517" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] EGU23 Science for Policy Help Desk[/caption] General Assembly is always an exciting week with plenty to explore! If you are interested in policy and sharing your expertise more widely, include some policy-focused sessions in your personal programme. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Organise your own events at EGU26 with the Pop-Up Networking Scheduler!

Simon Clark — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:00:09 +0000

Pop-up networking returns for the #EGU26 General Assembly! Attendees can add their own events to the conference programme using the pop-up scheduling tool. Events can either be virtual or in-person, and include a number of tagging options to communicate the event theme to other attendees. The pop-up networking scheduling tool is live right now! Anyone attending EGU26 can organise an event using the scheduling tool; just be sure to have your Copernicus login details at hand when you do. Events can be of any kind – from large to small – throughout the entire week of the Assembly, 3 - 8 May. From finding a space for focused discussion to hosting a spontaneous networking event, the scheduler offers a range of in-person and virtual locations for both the in-person and virtual conference centre, whilst also including the option to advertise community events in locations outside of the centre.

How to use the pop-up scheduling tool

Both the tool and the pop-up events can be found in the conference programme:

Under "Programme", select the "Browse by Sessions",
Scroll to the “Community-led” programme group,
Click the “Pop-up networking events” sub-group.

The “Pop-up networking events” webpage will display the list of pop-up events. At the top of the page, click “Schedule your own pop-up networking event”.

How to schedule an event

Using the Pop-up Networking Event Scheduler requires five simple steps:

Enter your Copernicus login details,
Enter the event title and description,
Choose any number of event tags to communicate the event topic and scope,
Select the event date and time,
Select the location, which could be from a number of on-site choices, an off-site location, a virtual event at the EGU virtual conference centre, or a virtual event hosted on a different platform.

Selecting one or more event tags make it easier for others to find your event in the programme. These include many of the cross-cutting themes of the General Assembly – such as ‘Science for Policy’, ‘Education’ or ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)’ – and tags which indicate your intended audience – such as ‘Early Career Scientist (ECS)’, ‘Union-wide’ or ‘Division event’. [caption id="attachment_50778" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Describe your event in the pop-up scheduler![/caption]

Choosing a Location

Your event can be located at a number of on-site spaces, all of which will have signage to communicate that the space will be used for pop-up networking events. Virtual events can choose to use the EGU26 virtual conference centre in Gather.Town, an online spatial video conferencing tool. In Gather.Town, attendees control an avatar to navigate the virtual space with proximity based video and audio; when attendee avatars approach each other, they will be able to see and speak to each other and these functions will close when you move away. In-person and virtual events can also be organised beyond the official locations. This allows organisers to advertise in-person events happening off-site in Vienna, or virtual events using platforms other than the EGU26 Gather.Town. Once submitted, your Pop-up event will be added to the conference programme. Simply return to the “Pop-up networking events” programme sub-group mentioned before. Browsing the events can be refined by selecting the different event tags, with all events sorted by date and time.

Inspiration for pop-up scheduling events

Attendees looking for inspiration may look to the pop-up events of the previous years’ General Assemblies. In-person events have included:

informal post-session discussions,
networking coffee breaks,
picnics and lunches,
evening dinners,
cultural events in Vienna,
group playground visits for attendees with children,
meet-ups for users of particular social media networks,
networking between potential employers and job-seekers, and
meet-ups with the organisers of community events, such as the Early Career Scientist Representatives.

Virtual pop-up events benefit from a wide selection of engaging platforms. The EGU26 Gather.Town hosts its own networking zone, however you can link to any platform you like. Previously attendees have used:

Animal Crossing: a video game on the Nintendo Switch, where users can build their own community of anthropomorphic animals. At the 2020 General Assembly, science-artist Kelly Stanford built her own Sci-Comm island complete with a treasure hunt.
Discord: a popular community-building platform where attendees can join different channels – or topics – where they may communicate through text chat, voice, or video. EGU Pride, the Union’s network for LGBTQIA+ members, socialises using Discord.
Twitch: This popular live-streaming service is used for everything from talk shows to cooking and video gaming. Attendees can watch live demonstrations or performances whilst asking questions or converse using the text-based chat.
Zoom: The now-familiar video conferencing platform provides accessible tools which allow for face-to-face meetings, including the capability for larger sessions to be split into smaller groups, or “breakout rooms”. EGU uses Zoom outside of the General Assembly to host virtual events such as networking sessions and scientific seminars for Early Career Scientists, science-for-policy hangouts, and webinars.
Video-sharing platforms: Looking to share your favourite sci-comm videos with colleagues, indulge your favourite nature documentary, or reflect on presentations past? Platforms like tv and Watch2gether allow you to watch content together with other attendees from video services like Youtube or Vimeo with minimal effort.

The EGU community is the foundation on which Union is builds itself, and the General Assembly is no different; the pop-up networking scheduler was introduced to support community-led events at the Assembly. If you are looking to meet more of the community, foster discussion, or build on topics in the programme, be sure to return the pop-up networking events page throughout the week, and consider adding your own event!

Footprints reveal climate’s mark on mudflats

Sara Mynott — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:00:55 +0000

Tidal flats, the muddy reaches of estuaries unveiled at low tide, support rich ecosystems and fisheries worldwide. But these habitats are under threat from climate change, as sea level rise overwhelms the landscape and heavy rainfall scours away the sediment – impacts that scientists are only just beginning to explore. In an effort to understand how shellfisheries are affected by climate change, and to safeguard them for the future, scientists from University of Massachusetts Amherst, together with local shellfish harvesters, are developing rapid ways to assess the mudflats and their underlying geology. It turns out that the simple depth of a boot print can say a lot about the state of the habitat, as sedimentologist Ashlyn Oh shared at this year’s Ocean Sciences Meeting, held in Glasgow in the UK. Tidal flats in the Gulf of Maine, which extends from Massachusetts in the United States to Nova Scotia in Canada, have been harvested for over 9,000 years and, today, the area provides over 95% of America’s soft-shell clams. Despite their importance culturally, economically and ecologically, scientists are only just beginning to understand the impact of climate change on these coastal environments. “Farmers on land have access to so much data about the soil that they work in. And it's different on tidal flats…there's really almost no data that's available to harvesters” shares University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate student Ashlyn Oh, speaking at the meeting. Oh’s research is the first to develop a baseline data set for these underserved habitats. In an effort to fill the void, a team of scientists from University of Massachusetts Amherst, Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Northeastern University and Manomet Conservation Sciences, together with shellfish harvesters, have been studying tidal flats to find out how they are impacted by climate change and how much carbon these habitats store. [caption id="attachment_50753" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] A tidal flat on the Georges River, Maine. The lowest tides of the month often align with sunrise and sunset in the Gulf of Maine, this was taken at sunset. Credit: Ashlyn Oh.[/caption] Emerging findings indicate that, as winter ice has declined, so has the amount of sediment in tidal flats. Hannah Baranes, who leads the Coastal Dynamics Lab at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute explains why: “if you have ice covering the flats in the winter, you're kind of protecting that soft surface layer of sediment from the year's most energetic waves.” Describing the changes experienced in just a few decades, she adds “we worked with a harvester in one town who said that he noticed as soon as there stopped being significant wintertime ice, he went from sinking up to his hips [in mud] to hitting hard bottom with his boots when he walked out on the flat.” Shifts in the amount of sediment in tidal flats is just one of the ways this habitat is being impacted by climate change, and without sediment, there are no clams. They eat it, live in it, use it to hide from predators; clams, and those whose livelihoods depend on them, rely on sediment. The same way that farmers rely on soil. Access to tidal flats is also in decline as a small change in sea level can have a huge impact on the area exposed for harvesting. The team are working to find out whether tidal flats in the Gulf of Maine can grow enough to outpace sea level rise – as sediment is transported downriver and deposited at the coast. It's not looking particularly optimistic for most mud flats, which will continually drown as sea level rises. But the story isn’t the same everywhere: “if there's a lot of sediment in the water, then [mud flats] are able to grow faster and hopefully sustain the industry for longer,” says Oh, with a note of hope. No one knows this environment better than the people working in it day in, day out, which is why Ashlyn Oh and their colleagues are teaming up with harvesters to learn more about the underlying geology and state of the habitat. “Shellfish harvesters work viscerally in this mud twice a day through almost every season. They have a lot of intuitive knowledge about flats.” Oh shares one example: “we've talked to one person, his name is Bailey, and he said when he first started working on his flat, a few decades ago…he used to be able to step into mud that would come up to his calf and now it barely covers the top of his shoe.” The less sediment there is, the less life the habitat can support. “Some [tidal flats] have maintained really healthy shellfish output, particularly in places that seem to have a lot of sediment in the water. Others have become what folks call ‘dead mud’. That's what Bailey’s tidal flat has become over the last couple decades – you can no longer find clams anywhere.” [caption id="attachment_50754" align="alignright" width="225"] Stuck in the mud. Ashlyn Oh and their colleagues Jon Woodruff and Hannah Baranes out on the flats. Credit: Ashlyn Oh.[/caption] To better understand the fingerprint of climate change on these fragile habitats, scientists and shellfish harvesters in the Gulf of Maine are working together, but finding a common language hasn’t been easy. “The harvesters obviously care a lot about the biology and, as geologists, that's not our specialty… it's kind of like, ‘where can we connect?’ And the sediment texture has been a very useful one. It impacts the harvesters because they're walking through it and so they're sensitive to small changes,” Oh explains. For geologists, “there's a very intuitive correlation where the depth to which you sink when you walk through the mud is associated with the density. And, fortunately, the density of sediment is very strongly correlated with its organics, its water content, its grain size and so it offers this kind of opening door to all of these other characteristics that we care about.” From its capacity to store carbon to how suitable the habitat might be for shellfish, a lot can be learned from your footprints and how deeply you sink in the mud. Combining the lived experience of harvesters with detailed sediment measurements, has led to a new approach – where only a boot print is needed to learn how the tidal flats are changing. It’s a low-cost, speedy and surprisingly straightforward way to learn about the state of the environment. Now, the humble boot print is being used in citizen science initiatives throughout the region; the data is helping to ground-truth complex models, and is being used to inform local management. Along North America’s Atlantic coast, shellfish harvesters are filling in knowledge gaps – one step at a time.

Questions about accessibility at EGU26? Useful resources for parents, disabled attendees and more!

Hazel Gibson — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:00:15 +0000

The annual EGU General Assembly is a wonderful chance to gather together with friends and colleagues to discuss recent scientific work, plan new projects and develop your career, but a scientific meeting, especially one the size and length of time of the General Assembly is not an equally accessible experience for everyone. With this in mind over the years EGU have developed a range of resources aimed at increasing the accessibility of the meeting to a more diverse group of people, but if you are unsure what those resources are, we have gathered many of them in this blog to help you find them, whether you are a person attending with children, with a disability, with specific religious requirements, travel challenges or any other reason, to help you have the best meeting possible! There is a lot to get through, so let's jump right in!

Attending EGU26 with children

If you are one of the many people who attends the General Assembly with children, balancing time for science with childcare can be a real challenge. To help you as much as possible with this EGU have several resources on offer, regardless of whether your child is a newborn or a teenager. Firstly, for anyone attending on-site who is presenting don't miss out on booking a free childcare slot with our professional on-site childcare service. This is a very popular service, available for children aged 1-12 years old covering Monday to Friday, 08:30–12:30 and 14:00–18:00, and to make a booking you must have a paid registration. Check out the EGU26 childcare page for more information. In addition to this service if you are travelling with a child under 3 years old you can request a waiver for an additional parent or support carer who is not participating in the meeting to assist you with childcare responsibilities. In the conference center itself, in addition to the staffed childcare facilities we also have two family rooms on the purple level (-2) with comfortable chairs and tables, books, toys and a microwave for preparing food, as well as private breastfeeding spaces if you prefer to use those. We also provide free colouring books on-site (with a geoscience theme of course!) but if you want to print off your own colouring pages you can access the pdfs for free here. Public transport in Vienna is fairly straightforward and for all registered attendees you can use your travel pass included with your EGU26 registration to use all city public transport for free, from Sunday 3 to Saturday 9 May. Children under 6 years old travel for free on public transport, and for all other children a weekly pass is easy to book in advance. Child-friendly activities in Vienna are easy to find, in good weather the nearby Donaupark offers playgrounds and a quiet place to relax with the children whilst they run off some steam. The Vienna city tourist board all offers a range of guidance for people travelling with children. If you need to change your plans at the last minute to care for a sick child, whether to stay in your hotel room, or even to cancel your travel altogether, your on-site registration covers both on-site AND virtual access for the whole week of the meeting, so you can still connect, listen in to presentations and ask questions of the presenters wherever you are. If something arises and you can no longer make it on-site to present your abstract, you can email egu26@copernicus.org to inquire about switching to virtual participation (last minute changes are more easily accommodated for some presentation formats than others) or assign a colleague who will be on-site as the abstract's presenting author. Attending the meeting online when you are also responsible for childcare presents it's own set of challenges, and after the incredible success of last year, the EDI Participation Fund was once again made available to support access to the meeting for all kinds of people, including to cover childcare for meeting participants presenting remotely! If you missed that opportunity, the only thing we can offer is the knowledge that on several occasions in the past few years people have presented their work with their children on screen too (whether they were supposed to be there or not!) and our meeting attendees were always encouraging and accommodating of the challenges of parenting, whilst also being a scientist! If you are looking for extra help and guidance from other people who have had their children with them during the General Assembly, check out the EGUblogs for more info here, here and here.

Attending EGU26 with a disability

Anyone who has a disability of any kind knows that large conferences present a whole host of barriers to participation. The meeting is loud, busy, often crowded and especially overwhelming if you are balancing your own health and well-being with the traditional ways that these meetings are run. In order to attempt to mitigate these challenges both EGU and the conference center, the Austria Center Vienna, are making changes every year to reduce barriers to participation, and make the meeting space more flexible. These measures currently include:

The entire conference center has step-free access options available, in cases where this is reliant on accessibility lifts, staff are on hand throughout the meeting to provide instant access to these - whether to get participants into a meeting room or onto a stage to present. For additional support, contact the EGU info desk on the Yellow Level, call +49 176 21444874 during the meeting, or you can email egu26@copernicus.org in advance to facilitate any accessibility arrangements you may require.
Hand-held and hands-free microphones are available to speakers in PICO and oral presentations, and to all audiences.
Flexible height and angle presentation screens and lecterns, and seating options are available to presenters of all formats (including during poster and PICO presentations).
Conference assistants are available to help with putting up and taking down posters in all poster halls.
Closed captions are provided for all Union-wide events and short courses. We also encourage people to use captioning in their own presentations and to think about accessible language.
The route to the conference center from the nearest public transport is step free with an incline, and made of asphalt and concrete. There is wheelchair accessible parking at the Austria Center Vienna that has a single continuous ramp to the venue.
We are a facemask friendly meeting, and no-one is required to remove a facemask in order to present, network, receive awards or medals, or participate in any other EGU activity.

For full details of the building's accessibility features, you can read this document provided by the Austria Center Vienna. [caption id="attachment_50727" align="alignright" width="225"] Credit: Fabio Crameri[/caption] If you are attending the meeting with a support person or carer, then these people are entitled to a registration fee waiver. Their registration can only be acquired by email. To secure the waiver, send the full name and email address of the support person together with the invoice number of the registered attendee to egu26@copernicus.org. A special registration link will then be sent to the support person allowing them to register for free. To make interaction easier EGU are offering a range of alternative lanyards that you can choose to use if you prefer, that indicate your need to be offered a seat, a need for people to talk more slowly with you, or indicating that you have a hidden disability. No disclosure is required for you to have one of these lanyards, you can just collect one in the badge pick-up hall or head to the EGU booth in the Exhibition Hall (purple level) and exchange your regular EGU lanyard for the lanyard of your choice. All EGU lanyards (including the alternative designs) are also adjustable, so you can set them to a comfortable length for you to wear and for others to read. For when you are participating in the meeting on-site there are dedicated quiet rooms on the purple level (-2) where you can take a moment of calm away from the busyness of the meeting. There are also outdoors spaces which can be valuable for getting quiet time away from the crowds, the terraces on the purple level (-2) and the blue level (3). The schedule of the meeting is set up in such a way that activities are set in specific times, and although we know you are likely to be busy you should be able to plan your day without feeling too overwhelmed. The personal programme and the EGU26 app help you to organise this. Also each presentation format is organised into 10 minute blocks, so you should be able to accurately time the presentations you need/want to attend without sitting in the whole session if you are not able to, but we don't recommend trying to attend too many different sessions in one time block as that can be a very stressful experience and the conference center is very large. Every floor of the meeting is accessible by elevators and there is an on-site doctor on the yellow level (beside the entrance to the Panoramic Walk, the Union wide session room E1 and the Exhibition), available for free to help anyone who needs assistance or support. Beyond the physical constraints of attending the meeting are the mental, emotional and sensory impacts. EGU's Neurodiversity Network just published their advice for people attending the meeting, and our Early Career Scientists also published a series of blog posts called 'Mind your head' with advice on everything from impostor syndrome to healthy advisor-advisee relationships that are an excellent resource. In this instance the nearby Donaupark is very valuable again, providing you with a green outdoor space for decompression and to allow you to recenter yourself. If you are joining online, why not take advantage of our digital EGU26 Quiet Room playlist, and follow our advice on taking breaks whilst attending a virtual meeting. Another way to manage your capacity can be choosing when to attend a session on-site, or virtually. All on-site registration covers both on-site AND virtual access for the whole week of the meeting, so you can still connect, listen in to presentations and ask questions of the presenters wherever you are. If something arises and you can no longer make in on-site to present your abstract, you can email egu26 @copernicus.org to inquire about switching to virtual participation (last minute changes are more easily accommodated for some presentation formats than others) or assign a colleague who will be on-site as the abstract's presenting author. For some other first hand descriptions of attending the General Assembly with a disability, read the following blog posts here and here.

Food and drink at the EGU General Assembly

There are a range of food and drink options at the General Assembly, both inside and nearby the meeting, but given that we expect around 19,000 people to be attending the meeting onsite expect these provisions to be busy. There is food provided at outlets by the Austria Center Vienna's caterer Motto on the purple (-2), yellow (0) and red (2) levels (look for the cutlery symbol on the floor plans). This food is freshly prepared on-site with full information about allergens or additional information available upon request. Motto also have a number of additional coffee outlets that provide a more limited menu of snacks and cakes. Outside the main venue there is a 'Beergarten' area with a number of food trucks providing a range of food options, with outdoor seating. The vendors will be able to take pre-bookings for food requests during the week of the meeting, reducing the amount of time required for queuing during peak times. Keep an eye on the EGU26 website for updates on how to book and reserve your food. About a 5-10 minute walk from the entrance to the conference center are some grocery stores where you can also purchase foodstuffs or drinks. The three closest are the bakery Ströck, which is open from 06:30-18:00, the supermarket Billa, open 07:30-19:45 and the supermarket Höfer (on the lower level of the concourse around the ACV), open 07:30-19:30. Within the conference center there are many free water stations, so don't forget to bring your re-usuable water bottle, and each day free tea and coffee is provided during the morning and afternoon breaks, but the queue for these can be fairly long (pro-tip, head to the coffee points in the Exhibition and poster halls, they can often have shorter queues)! On the floor plans, the water stations are marked by rain drops, and the coffee stations by coffee cups.

Other resources for meeting attendees

Free online participation for people from certain geographical locations, and those who are undergraduate or masters level students!
Guide to inclusive language - it can be easy to slip into using gendered language, especially when English is not your native language, but this guide should help you catch some of the more frequently used words.
Avoid using rainbow scales! They are actually very hard to read for a lot of people and create more of a barrier to understanding.
If you are someone who doesn't have English as your native language and are worried about discussing your work in a busy and loud environment, pick up one of our 'Please speak slowly' lanyards, to help people adjust to a more easily understood speaking speed.

Free, emergency menstrual products are available at the Information Desk, Press Center and at the Facility Desk of each poster hall (Hall X1, Hall X2, Hall X3, Hall X4, Hall X5, and Hall A).
Half our bathrooms are 'All Gender' bathrooms, although some of those do still have urinals in them (due to the building's construction). All Gender bathrooms are available on each floor.
Multi-faith prayer rooms are available on the purple level (-2) for use at any time during the conference opening hours. Please be respectful of other users of these spaces.
[caption id="attachment_50730" align="alignright" width="225"] Credit Fabio Crameri[/caption] Pronouns can be added to your name badge at your discretion - if a mistake has been made you can also get your name badge corrected and reprinted via the EGU information desk on-site. Pronouns can be added entirely at your own discretion, however the pronouns of others must be respected, and intentional misgendering of another person is a violation of the EGU Code of Conduct.
Pride and progress pride stickers, and a pride flag lanyard are available via the EGU Booth in the Exhibition Hall, to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ members of our community.
Discrimination of any other person on the basis of dress/appearance, religion, perceived or stated gender identity, career stage, age, marital status, sexual orientation, racialised identity, disability or any other marginalised identity is strictly prohibited and against EGU's Code of Conduct, which all attendees agreed to upon registration. If you experience or observe a violation of this Code of Conduct, and you feel able to, you can report this to EGU's Persons of Trust for appropriate action to be taken.

If you want more advice on how to be an active ally during the meeting, in previous years one of the current EGU Persons of Trust, Andrea Popp, wrote a very comprehensive guide to combating discrimination or unethical behaviour at a scientific meeting, and is well worth a read. One of the key sections is on how to be an active bystander, something the EGU EDI Committee provide extra training on throughout the year. Andrea said: What can you do if you experience unethical behaviour during the EGU General Assembly? (inspired by the toolkit of the New York University, Academic Bystander Working Group)

Stay calm and assess the situation (Is the question/behaviour appropriate? How does it make you feel?).
Look for allies and active bystanders! If you feel unsafe intervening yourself, there may be others that can provide support. For instance, try making eye contact with friendly colleagues or the session convener.
Remember: if you are presenting your work, you as a speaker are in control! Know that you are not obliged to engage with insulting or condescending questions/comments.
If you feel safe and comfortable enough, set your own boundaries. You can react to an inappropriate question/comment with the following counter-questions/comments:
- “Do I understand correctly that you think …”,
- “Why do you think that this is relevant to my study?”
- “I do not see your point / do not understand your question. Can you please explain your main point and why this is pertinent to this discussion?”
You can also diffuse the situation:
- You may reply that you will get back to them later (e.g., as answering their question would go into too much detail at the moment and that you want to give others the chance to ask questions too.)
- You can also disrupt such situations by reinforcing the main focus of your research, thereby dismissing the question.
We strongly recommend writing down what happened in as much detail as possible: What happened and when did it happen? Who was present and witnessed the situation? How did you react and how did the situation make you feel? This can be difficult to do alone, so you might sit down with a trusted person (friend, family, a trusted colleague, etc.). Such a document will help you think about ways to handle such situations in the future and clarify for yourself whether you wish to report the incident to the EGU (see Box 3).
More examples by the Academic Bystander Working Group @NYU, including regarding sexual harassment, can be found here.

How can you be an ally and active bystander?

Stay calm and assess the situation.
Be respectful and constructive.
Be aware of your own biases and counter them.
Make space for others if you feel they are not being heard.
Follow one or more of the 5 Ds of Bystander Intervention (adopted from ADVANCEGeo Partnership, 2018 link; Figure 3)

Although EGU has tried to provide a lot of resources to help overcome many of the traditional barriers to attending conferences, we are very aware that this is only the beginning of the process. If you have other tips or advice for your fellow participants please don't hesitate to share them in the comments, or let us know what more we could be doing to help improve access to the EGU General Assembly!

The Neurodivergent Guide to the EGU General Assembly: Tips and tricks to improve your experience

Simon Clark — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:00:13 +0000

What is neurodiversity?

Neurodiversity is the concept that individuals experience the world, process information, function and communicate in diverse ways; there is no 'default' way of thinking. As a framework it supports the self-advocacy of people who face obstacles due to their needs not being considered in the design of environments and systems. Such individuals think and experience the world in ways that do not conform with societal norms and are often referred to as neurodivergent, and includes (but is not limited to) autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, and dyspraxic individuals. Large conferences and meetings pose additional and specific challenges for neurodivergent attendees due to, for example, heightened sensory sensitivities, as well as executive function and communication challenges. About 15-20% of the global population is estimated to be neurodivergent; if we assume that 20,000 people attend the EGU General Assembly, then about 3000-4000 participants may be neurodivergent. This blog is for anyone seeking advice on how to improve their experience of the EGU General Assembly, or support those neurodivergent people they encounter at the meeting. The blog is organised as follows: Supporting neurodivergent researchers:

Guidelines and resources for inclusivity and accessibility

Resources for neurodivergent researchers:

How to build a programme that works for you
Neurodivergent networking
Sensory overload and how to manage it
Tips from previous neurodivergent attendees
EGU support and services
Sessions of interest for neurodivergent attendees

Who to contact if you need support

Before we dive in, EGU General Assemblies and other meetings are meant to be inclusive and safe spaces, as described in the Code of Conduct. If you need help, or encounter inappropriate behaviour, please contact an EGU Person of Trust at conduct@egu.eu or by asking for them at the EGU help desk after the entrance of the conference centre.

Supporting neurodivergent researchers

Guidelines and resources for inclusivity and accessibility

This sections highlights a few accessibility tips in order to improve the assembly experience for yourself and others EGU26.

Using inclusive language

Some people might feel uncomfortable when they are addressed in a way that is not considerate of their identity.

Use gender-neutral language. Instead of 'manned' or 'mankind', use 'crewed' or 'humanity', for example.
Respect people's pronouns. Pronouns are printed on EGU26 conference centre name badges. Please check a person’s pronouns on their name badge, and add your own on the EGU26 profile before printing off your badge. If you make a mistake, simply correct yourself and move on.
Do not use mental health terms inappropriately. Avoid using mental illness as a metaphor, such as by describing behaviors as 'OCD' or 'bipolar', for example.
Avoid describing disabled people as victims or as abnormal. Do not say someone 'suffers from' a disability, is 'confined' to a wheelchair, or refer to abled people as 'normal'.
Be generous with other people's language ability. English is the most common language used at the General Assembly, but for many attendees it is not their first language. Additionally, many neurodivergent folk may have communication challenges. As such, we ask that you be patient and understanding in conversation with people.

More information on inclusive language is available in EGU's Promoting inclusive language: an incomplete guide.

Visual and audio accessibility

Use large font sizes. Presenters should use font sizes that are large enough to be easily read on a laptop screen or from the back of a room in a presentation room. This should also apply to labels on figure axes.
Keep fonts simple. Avoid fonts that are decorative, italicised and have serifs, as they are harder to read by people with visual impairments. Fonts should be san serif and have distinct letters, such as Open Sans.
Avoid using too many colours. Colour is another way to communicate information; avoid using random or too many colours as it may distract from or obscure what you are trying to say. Use a limited colour palette (for example, use a maximum of four colours in a presentation) and avoid using rainbow scales; suggested scientific palettes are available here.
Use colour-vision deficiency friendly palettes. Ensure your presentation is understandable by people who are colour-blind, colour-vision deficient or visually impaired; do not only use colour as an indicator, but consider shape, pattern and structure too. Check that your presentation is accessible by using tools like Coblis.
Practice using closed captions. EGU26 will feature AI-based closed captioning for all presentations, which attempts to capture a wide range of speaking styles. Improve your own captions and practice speaking slow and steady.
Use a microphone. Microphones are not there to just project your voice, but are also used to produce live-captions, avoid echoes and are essential for online participants to hear you.

Information on inclusion and accessibility at the EGU26 General Assembly is available here. More tips how to make your presentation accessible and impactful is available in the EGUwebinar: SciComm101: how to present at a scientific conference.

Resources for neurodivergent researchers

How to build a programme that works for you

The EGU General Assembly is a huge conference, with dozens of sessions occurring simultaneously, from 8:30 in the morning until 20:00 in the evening (and beyond if you account for social events, dinners with colleagues, etc). There is so much going on all at once that it's impossible to attend everything we are interested in. Take this to heart as you build a programme:

Prepare your schedule in advance. Check the programme before the General Assembly begins, start making your plans and add activities to your calendar. You can always adjust them during the conference week, but at least you will have a strong foundation to build on.
Make your schedule for the entire week. Knowing your activity for the entire week will help you identify where you could take longer breaks. It is especially important to include lighter days to balance out those that are packed full.
Schedule your breaks and recovery time. Keep some evenings free to have time to relax and recover, especially after some of the most busier days. Have at least one half-a-day free in the whole week to give you some time to recover.
Prioritise with an the optimistic schedule. Create a programme with everything you want to see - even if that would require you being in multiple places at once. Use this to prioritise sessions you want to attend, select those you will not attend, or identify what can be skipped if you need a break. Similarly, give yourself free time to explore and discover the conference.
Schedule informal events. Many events will happen out of the conference formal schedule, especially in the evening, such as dinner with colleagues, which you should keep in mind when building your programme. Many informal, community-led events can be posted discovered on the pop-up networking programme.
Include buffer periods for presenting and convening. Identify when you will be presenting or convening sessions, and make sure your schedule is less busy around these times to allow for preparation and recovery.
Build your schedule so it works to your own rhythm. Some people are early-birds, others are night-owls, and others need a nap in the afternoon or a longer break for lunch. Consider skipping sessions that are not at the top of your priority list and which conflict with your usual rest time.
Attend sessions remotely. Even as an on-site participant, you can still join the sessions online! Consider joining sessions virtually if you are feeling overwhelmed by the crowded rooms, or just need a change of scene.
Be flexible. Do not try to attend everything or feel like you have to commit wholly to your programme. If your body needs to rest, then take a break without feeling guilty.

You can build your personal programme here.

Neurodivergent networking

The prospect of networking can be a source of discomfort for many neurodivergent people, who may feel overwhelmed by the conference environment and the effort required to interpret social cues. This is frequently compounded by a lack of specificity about what networking is actually meant to be: it is generally portrayed as a skill, and sometimes misunderstood as speed-socializing, or engaging with as many individuals as possible. Good networking is about establishing personal connections with others. Even small interactions, such as sharing a space, can lead to potential friendships or collaborations. Networking can occur anywhere, whether at a mixer, a poster session, or during a coffee break, on-site AND online.

Focus on quality over quantity. Try to engage in one-on-one conversations that allow you to deepen your connection, instead of trying to talk to as many people as possible.
Warm-up with small-talk. Small-talk works as a social lubrication - it helps people to become familiar and at ease with one another, providing a base for richer conversation. If you unsure of what to say, you can try remarking on common, positive experiences at the conference or extend a compliment - avoid complimenting on appearance, and instead compliment something the recipient has control over such as their research and or presentation, and make sure they are always genuine. Remarking topics close to their work also means it is easier to segue into conversation about collaboration.
Prepare a script. Be ready to describe what you do and why you are passionate about it, using clear and simple language so that is easily comprehensible to those not familiar with your area of expertise. Keep this pitch under under 3-minutes and, ideally, also have a 1-minute pitch ready for busier periods. You can learn how to deliver an elevator pitch at the EGU26 short course.
Select an environment that works for you. Focus on authentic, structured, and low-pressure approaches; whatever makes you feel more comfortable. If you meet someone in a busy, overwhelming environment then request that you meet again in a more suitable place and time. If it makes you more comfortable, attend events with a friend or colleague.
Connect online. Always end conversations with a route for people to contact with you for future discussions, such as by exchanging your email addresses or connecting on LinkedIn. This can help sustain a connection if you want to take a break from socializing.
Follow-up on your connections. It is a common truth that most people won't contact each other after exchanging contact details, so do not assume they will contact you and take the initiative. When initiating a conversation, always include a short reminder of the circumstance in which you met (for example, the date, time and name of the event ) and a topic you had discussed.

Keep an eye out for the EGU26 blog on how to network in the coming weeks!

Sensory overload and how to manage it

Sensory overload is when an environment causes an individual to experience uncomfortable or distressing sensations such as heightened levels of stress, anxiety, a sensation of paralysis, a failure to focus, or higher levels of irritation. Physically, one may feel dizzy, increased blood pressure, nausea, shaking, trembling, loss of eyesight, sweating, tighten feeling in the chest, and sometimes even blackouts. Participating in large conferences can lead to different levels of sensory overload, due to having to navigate large crowds, being in noisy and unfamiliar environments, artificial lighting, etc; so it's important that you are prepared to manage sensory overload. The core principle to regulating yourself is to plan ahead, minimize exposure to triggers, and prioritize your comfort and well-being throughout the conference.

1. Plan ahead

Identify spaces which could be used to retreat from the conference environment, such as:

Accessing quiet rooms, which are available on the Purple (Level -2) of the conference center.
Leaving the conference centre and going to one of the nearby parks, such as Donau Park.
Listening to the calming EGU Quiet Room playlist.
Sometimes participating in the meeting from a private space close to the conference centre, such as your hotel room.

Bring items which help to reduce sensory overload, such as:

Earplugs, available at the EGU Help Desk near the main entrance on Yellow Level (Floor 0)
Sunglasses and or blue-light glasses
Small, discrete items that help with stimming and self-soothing.

2. Minimize exposure to triggers

Sound: Use noise-cancelling headphones or earplugs. Filtered earplugs can reduce background noise while still allowing conversation - this is especially useful for poster sessions. Be aware of possible sudden loud or high-pitched sounds during talks, e.g. from microphones. Light: Sunglasses or blue-light glasses can reduce discomfort from bright lighting. Gradual transitions between lighting conditions may help manage sensitivity. Touch: Wear comfortable clothing and avoid irritating fabrics. Choose supportive shoes, as conferences like EGU involve significant walking and standing. Be mindful of crowded areas (entrances, transport, cafés) and plan to avoid peak times where possible. Busy areas include:

- - Near the conference centre entrance just before and just after sessions,
  - Kaisermühlen-VIC metro station in the morning, at lunch time and at the end of the conference day. Entering the metro at the other end of the platform (e.g. front carriage when coming from the city centre) can help avoid the worst of the crowd.
  - Refreshment stations and the conference centre cafe during the breaks,
  - During lunch breaks, popular shops include Billa supermarket (Leonard-Bernstein-Straße 4), Hofer supermarket (lower level, Donau-City-Straße 9), Ströck bakery (upper level, Donau-City-Straße 9).

Taste: Stick to familiar 'safe foods' that suit your preferences (such as pasta, bread, carrots, crackers, mild cheeses, etc). Plan meals in advance, buy groceries outside of busy times such as lunch, check menus, and consider bringing snacks to ensure suitable options. Smell: Wearing a face mask may help reduce exposure to strong smells. Avoid areas with concentrated food odors when possible, and avoid strong perfumes. Discouraging attendees to use perfumes is already common practice in a number of events and places.

3. Personal space and boundaries (deliberate touch)

Cultural differences may include varying norms around physical touch. If you feel uncomfortable, communicate your boundaries or step away from the interaction. If the other person is inappropriate, please seek help a the EGU Help Desk near the entrance of the conference centre or contact an EGU Person of Trust at conduct@egu.eu.

4. Prioritize your well-being

Conferences can be overwhelming. Prioritize your well-being by:

Planning regular breaks and shorter days
Only attending high priority sessions
Scheduling your rest time
Taking spontaneous breaks as required, even if they conflict with your original schedule
Leaving environments when feeling overwhelmed
Using quieter or outdoor spaces to reset

5. Breathing techniques

Breathing exercises can help manage stress and sensory overload. While some of these techniques are subtle, some would require private spaces. Examples include:

Box breathing (inhale–hold–exhale–hold for equal counts)
3-3-3 breathing
Deep diaphragmatic breathing
Extended exhales (longer exhale than inhale)
Visualization techniques (e.g., imagining a balloon expanding and deflating)
For more suggestions, check out this free guide

6. Stimming and self-soothing

Stimming (short-hand for self-stimulatory behaviour) refers to repetitive movements or actions that help regulate the nervous system and manage stress or sensory overload. While often associated with autistic individuals, it is a common self-regulation strategy used by many people. Stimming can take different forms, including physical movements (e.g., tapping fingers, rocking), interaction with objects (e.g., fidget tools), or subtle behaviors like toe movement or quiet humming. Allowing yourself to stim can help reduce tension and maintain focus during the conference. Consider:

Bringing small, discreet items for self-soothing
Identifying quieter spaces where you feel comfortable engaging in these behaviours.
Use subtle alternatives to partially stim, if visible stimming feels uncomfortable.

General tips from previous neurodivergent attendees

Scheduling and the programme:

Use a silent alarm to keep you on time
Include *everything* in your calendar, and have notifications on
Schedule time not just to pause but also schedule time to reflect and observe your emotions, and what your nervous system is doing
Schedule breaks so you take them
Schedule eating/drinking breaks. The conference can get so busy and engaging that you might forget taking care of basic needs
Don’t try to see everything - keynote events, which you might not want to miss, such as Great Debates and Union Symposia, will be available online after the conference anyway

Self-regulation and management:

Have a notes app ready on your phone’s first screen to easily add things before you forget/to help get repeating thoughts out of your brain – or use a notebook and pen to signal to your brain to move on
Bring a refillable bottle and some SOS snacks
Plan time to recover. That can be alone time, a call with your partner or a friend, a meditating time, doing something that is resourcing to you (maybe a creative activity you can have easily with you, watching a movie in the evening, spending time outside in a park or the river border). EGU is a marathon, be careful to not burn yourself by overdoing the first couple days.
You don’t have to go to the dinner with everybody. If you prefer a chill dinner alone or with people you know, it’s alright.
Adjust settings: for example consider moving outdoors for a networking discussion, if indoors is too crowded.

EGU26 services and features

Find out more about EGU's services and features on the 'Questions about accessiblity?' EGU blog post. EDI Booth The members of the EGU EDI Committee have a dedicated booth in Hall X2, Purple Level (Floor -2), opposite the EGU Booth. Here you can learn more about the initiatives implemented by the EGU to raise awareness of the diverse challenges faced by geoscientists in their careers, as well as provide feedback.

Sessions of interest for neurodivergent attendees

For more information about the EGU Neurodiversity Network, please contact edi@egu.eu.

How to make your EGU26 presentation accessible!

Hazel Gibson — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:51:54 +0000

Most people spend a lot of time and effort making their presentation engaging and impactful, but how much time do you spend making sure it is accessible!? An accessible presentation takes into account the diverse backgrounds and abilities of the audience, to support a better understanding of the message and information you are trying to share. This is particularly important for scientific research, where presenters need to be confident that their research is being communicated in a manner that is both scientifically sound and accessible; regardless of the barriers that will naturally exist, be they language, cultural or a disability. Continuing our developments over the last few years, EGU's upcoming General Assembly EGU26 will once again be a fully hybrid meeting, allowing you to make connections with other researchers both inside and outside your specific field, for on-site and virtual attendees alike. So how can you ensure that you're making the most of this opportunity for everyone who accesses your research? Regardless of whether you are speaking to someone in the same room as you, or to someone joining virtually from thousands of kilometres away, here are some top tips to help you share your research with as wide an audience as possible. Make use of live captions, and don't forget to practice! [caption id="attachment_28913" align="alignright" width="150"] The closed caption symbol 'cc' lets users know when a transcription of the dialogue is available. (Image credit: Wikimedia)[/caption] Whether the person attending your talk is Deaf or has a hearing disability, or perhaps English is not their first (or second, or third) language, good closed captions are essential to help that person understand your presentation. At EGU we are keen to support accessibility for our talks, so all EGU sessions this year will have closed-captioning available for virtual attendees (through the Zoom captioning option). We also strongly encourage presenters to do their own captioning for all videos uploaded in advance as part of the supplementary materials! As the acceptance of live captioning of scientific talks becomes more widespread, we have also seen examples of how it can go wrong, when the software mistakes a scientific word, or cannot master a strong accent. These are often called 'craptions' and although it may be tempting to find them funny, publicly mocking incorrect captions and turning them into a joke is a form of ableism that negates the fact that many people rely on good captions to be able to participate in scientific events. EGU and our conference partner Copernicus have done research into the best AI live captioning systems available, but there are things that you as the presenter can do to help us avoid craptions as much as possible. So what can we do to make EGU25 live captions better? Well, to start with, we have three tips to help you improve your computer-generated live captions:

Speak slowly and communicate clearly. This helps the automated transcription service to track your words and have a higher success rate. It also helps people to better understand your talk, and with pre-recording and uploading your full talk, you can have a few attempts until you get it just right.
Practice with your live closed-captioner turned on. AI-based closed captioning services are smart - they learn from you and your speech patterns - so the more you practice speaking into your live closed caption service, the more accurate it becomes, even for fairly complex scientific words. Try Powerpoint, Otter.ai, Google slides or Rev for live captioning, and if you have worked with a captioner, and it knows you and your speech style well, let the organiser know, so they can preferentially use your software where possible.
Use an external microphone. Your inbuilt microphone in your computer or laptop will not be able to capture your speaking voice clearly enough, so you need to have some kind of external microphone (even one on headphones or a headset will do) to really give the automated closed captioner the best chance at success. This is another good tip for online presenting in general; for an audience to hear you, you need an external microphone.

Also if you are particularly worried about certain words, include technical language written simply on the slide. This is not an excuse to present a block of text, but if you need to present a word that you know live automatic captions struggle with, then include the word written clearly and plainly on your slide. You can also pre-caption your own recorded video uploads, so you know they are correct. For more great tips, read this Eos blog post on best practices for live captioning or read Stephanie Zihms' blog post about how to record accessible videos for teaching. Think about the language choices you make Beyond just how you present your work visually, aurally or physically are the choices of words you use when communicating about your work. Did you know that abbreviations are a barrier to understanding for everyone - even other scientists? Have you thought about how you use technical terms and who is in the audience? You have probably heard about using simple language to communicate your science, but beyond that how much thought do you put into the actual words you use and the range of meanings that may go with them? Often these language choices are about not unconsciously reinforcing outdated gender ideas, the use of uncrewed, instead of unmanned, for example is a more accurate choice as the gender of the 'crew' is not being assumed. Some fields struggle with implicit use of language more than others. This can also include the use of 'master' as a term, especially in computing, which has very obvious connections with slavery. When English is not your first language this can become especially challenging as the nuances of words won't be as available to you. To help you with this EGU drafted an incomplete guide to inclusive language to get you started thinking about accessible language choices you can make. No one will get this right all the time, but stopping to think about the words you choose, and the way they may include or exclude other people from your presentation can make a big difference. Keep your pictures simple and clear Similar to live captioning, presenters are becoming more and more aware of how to create accessible images for their talk. Images can sometimes be difficult to understand for many reasons and yet, a well designed and carefully selected image can be key for many people to really connect with the researcher's idea. Good images are obvious when you see them, but it is also still easy to make mistakes and create a confusing or even misleading image or graph, at any stage of your career. This is especially useful when uploading your supplementary materials - adding image descriptions to visualisations, graphics or photographs will allow people using a screen reader to understand what you are referring to in your slides or on your poster. This will in turn encourage more interaction with your research, leading to better science! Try these three tips to help bring your EGU25 images to the front of the stage: [caption id="attachment_28919" align="alignright" width="300"] This image highlights the de-saturation of certain colours that colour vision deficiency (in this case deuteranopia) can have on a standard colour wheel, demonstrating just one of the reasons why a rainbow scale is not a good choice for graphics. (Image credit: Ed Hawkins)[/caption] 1. Rainbow scales are bad for presenting and interpreting data. Not only do colours in rainbow scales have emotional and perceptual meanings that cause people to incorrectly interpret them (yes, researchers too), they are very difficult for many people to even read in the first place. Just say no. 2. Contrast and clarity in your slides is key. When it comes to creating a presentation that is accessible, bear in mind that a reasonable proportion of your audience will have a colour-vision deficiency. High contrast between your text and the background of your slide helps and you can even test how well your images perform for people with different colour-vision deficiencies by using test websites like Coblis. Clarity and simplicity in your slides are key, to help everyone follow your talk. 3. Describe and explain your images. This may seem simple, but if there is an image on your slide and you don't explain it, then you aren't making it accessible or effective. Talk through the image piece by piece, and then explain its relevance. There is nothing as excluding as having someone say 'as you can see here' and then moving on with a related point without describing or explaining what you can see. These images and diagrams may be familiar to you as the speaker, but there will certainly be someone in the audience who can't see what you are referring to, whether because of a disability, or maybe because they are new to the field (or both!). Describing and explaining your images helps everyone. Remember, your presentation is more effective when it is easily understood by people of different backgrounds - and the choice of words and visuals may be more important than you think! EGU's popular webinar by geophysicist and graphic designer Fabio Crameri will help you visualise results in a manner that is true to the data, and includes a helpful list of ways to emphasize the readability of your visuals. As Fabio says, it helps to “imagine your graphic on a highway billboard and the people driving by have around 10 seconds to get your main message.” The webinar also shows you how to avoid some of the common visualization mistakes that geoscientists tend to make, including but not limited to the use of non-uniform colour maps, faulty scales, inaccessible colour coding, unreadable annotations, inaccessible graphs, and missing acknowledgments. Don't forget your presentation screen layout Thinking about how your presentation will show up in its final form might seem like an obvious point, especially if you are a poster presenter, but the placement of objects or text on your slides/page matters to everyone. If you are presenting an oral or PICO don't forget that the zoom presenter's window will cover the top right hand section of the screen. You also have to remember that the timer rectangle will be in the center top or top right of the screen too. For most rooms the very bottom of the slide will probably be partially obscured by the tops of people's heads - so don't put critical information, annotations or formulas along the bottom of your screen - keep the critical information in the center of each slide, so it will be easy to read no matter where the person is in the audience. For more advice on how to present in the various formats, check out our 1 study 4 presentations webinar. These points are only the very start of how we can all work to make presentations more accessible, and build on advice for visually accessible and audio accessible presenting that we have given previously, as well as using inclusive language in talks. For more resources check out the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Geosciences project resources page and feel free to share tips, ideas and other useful resources in the comments - we are all here to learn and share together, and make our research as accessible, for as many people as possible.

GeoPolicy: Response to the new European climate resilience framework

Simon Clark — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:45 +0000

Climate change is having a profound impact on the planet. According to several reports, 2023 was the warmest year on record, with the global average temperature over the 12-month period from February 2023 to January 2024 exceeding the 1.5 °C threshold above pre-industrial levels. Climate change acts as a risk multiplier, as its impacts transcend national borders and amplify existing threats and crises. Climate-related hazards can trigger cascading and systemic disruptions across interconnected systems, affecting entire societies and disproportionately impacting vulnerable social groups. In response to the increasing intensity and complexity of climate-related hazards, the European Commission is developing a new Integrated Framework for European Climate Resilience and Risk Management. The framework builds upon the 2021 EU Adaptation Strategy, and seeks to build a comprehensive approach to hazard assessment which will include how mitigation, adaptation, preparedness and response can be integrated across different sectors, regions, governments and communities. The policy package is expected to be adopted in the second half of 2026, before which it was open to feedback via public consultation on the the Commission’s "Have your say" platform. The EGU Climate Hazard and Risk Task Force welcomes the new frameworks ambition to reckon with the complex and far-reaching affects of climate change, and have responded to the publication with key recommendations focused across five themes. The full document is available here, and a summary of their response is provided below.

1. Climate resilience by design

Integrating resilience by design is essential to address intensifying, long-term climate impacts across sectors, and with particular consideration given to cascading and compound risk. The Task Force recommended embedding climate resilience proactively across all major sectors with a key emphasis given to risks which cross sectoral boundaries, harmonised digital infrastructure, social equity, the "no maladaptation" principle for EU spending, and cautioned against weakening biodiversity safeguards. Priority sectors identified by the Task Force include:

The built environment and critical infrastructure. Long asset lifetimes make proactive action essential in urban landscapes.
Health and social care systems. Such systems are already under pressure from heatwaves, flooding, and air pollution,
Agriculture and water. Both resources are highly sensitive to drought and soil degradation,
Energy systems. Energy infrastructure is vulnerable to extremes that threaten security of supply,
Coastal zones. Our coasts face compound pressures from sea-level rise and storm surge.

Ultimately, effective climate resilience must be embedded systematically across EU policies and investment frameworks, particularly in sectors where today's choices lock in long-term exposure.

2. Legislative framework for climate resilience

Progress on climate adaptation across the EU is slow and unable to keep pace with accelerating climate change due to a fragmentated responsibilities, inconsistent policies, governance and co-ordination across Member States, exacerbated by limited budgets and weak compliance. The Task Force supports establishing a common legislation that incorporates:

Common baselines and risk standards. A mandatory EU-wide baseline of common climate scenarios and minimum risk standards, connected to the latest climate science.
Multi-hazard and cascading risk assessments. Assessments must move on from considering singular risks to requiring multi-hazard and cascading risk assessments as a standard element of planning and investment decisions.
Clear institutional risk ownership. Each identified systemic risk should have a clearly designated institutional risk owner, with ownership mapped out in National Adaptation plans.
Vulnerability, equity, and open data. Priorities open-access socio-economic data for exposure and vulnerability, ensuring that risk frameworks explicitly address the needs of vulnerable populations and high-risk regions, and increase the representation of cultural heritage through interdisciplinary and community-grounded strategies.

3. Decision-support tools for climate resilience

Access to clear, reliable, and practical information is a prerequisite for effective adaptation, yet most existing tools are too technical, use different methods and reference points, and are poorly integrated across borders and sectors. The Task Force called for interoperable, decision-relevant climate risk tools that serve public authorities, financial actors, and citizens - moving beyond purely scientific platforms towards systems directly embedded in governance and adaptation planning, including:

Prioritise interoperability. Prioritising the interoperability, comparability, and practical usability of existing climate information systems would strengthen knowledge sharing, validation processes, and capacity development across scale and borders.
Embed tools within governance. Current platforms need to move beyond scientific modelling and directly supporting adaptation planning and decision-making at all levels, such as through a single, accessible platform with harmonised data on climate-change impacts.
Communicate statistics with stories. Quantitative risk metrics can be better communicated when accompanied by qualitative approaches that deepen contextual understanding and ground decisions in real-world impacts.
Accessible, usable and sharable. Any tool must be accessible to diverse audiences, meet the needs of decision-makers, and strengthens communication whilst including sector-specific modules, risk timelines, and vulnerability indicators.

4. Protecting people and supporting regional and local action

Climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable groups; for the framework to be considered legitimate, adopted and effective climate action must engage local and regional authorities as well as their target communities. Yet, adaptation policies lose impact if they do not the uneven administrative capacities and diverse geographics which affect adaption planning. The Task Force recommends:

Common standards for systemic support. Minimum protection standards for planning and critical services - such healthcare, early warning systems - should be established and harmonized between Member States. Such standards should be by a vulnerability framework which prioritizes vulnerable social groups and regions.
A people-centered, place-based approach. Adaptation planning can be strengthened by adopting a co-operative approach meaningfully engages and builds trust with local stakeholders through community-level and bottom-up resilience-building while integrating local and traditional knowledge into decision-making.
Integrated training and education programmes. Evidence-based training on climate-related risks integrated through education, healthcare and professional sectors would enhance public awareness and preparedness, whilst improve climate adaptation and transition through investment in reskilling and upskilling.
Flexible funding for diverse adaptation. Long-term, accessible funding must also be flexible and coupled with technical assistance and capacity-development to address the diverse technical and administrative needs.

5. Finance and insurance

Climate change is already exacting socio-economic costs whilst the magnitude of finances required for building resilience exceeds government capacity. However, only a only a faction of the climate-related losses are insured whilst a €70 billion gap exists between the current and needed yearly investment for adaptation. The Task Force recommends:

Systemically assessing financing needs. A systemic comparison of the adaptation financing needs between Member States would establish a foundation for identifying investment gaps, climate risks, support public planning and mobilizing fair funding for vulnerable States.
Strengthening financial incentives. Use targeted fiscal and regulatory incentives through tax measures and innovative instruments - such as resilience bonds and blended finance - to transform adaptation from a cost into an investable opportunity, and better align private investment with long-term resilience objectives.
Closing the insurance protection gap. Access to affordable insurance can be achieved by aligning insurance incentives with climate adaptation investment and de-risking insurance markets, by strengthening public–private reinsurance schemes, developing an EU-level risk pooling, and prioritising Member States most affected by the insurance gap.
Long-term, integrated reporting. Corporate reporting should include small and medium-sized enterprises and be supported by policies that incentivize reducing impact and exposure, delivered through a coherent framework of incentives and disincentives linked climate and environmental activities.

Access the full document here: EGU Climate Resilience Framework response

Making a plan: using your EGU26 personal programme

Hazel Gibson — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:00:08 +0000

The EGU26 Programme is online and hopefully by now you have found your abstract or session, so what do you do next?! This year’s scientific programme of the General Assembly features a wide range of options, including the Keynote sessions; Medal and Award Lectures (MAL), Great Debates (GDB), Union Symposia (US), and the Union-wide sessions; Short Courses (SC), Education and Outreach Sessions (EOS), as well the community events like Townhall (TM) and Splinter Meetings (SPM), just to name a few. The Disciplinary sessions and Inter- and Transdisciplinary Sessions (ITS) encompass the oral, poster and PICO sessions covering the full spectrum of the Earth, planetary and space sciences, all available in a hybrid format–both virtual and on-site. There are several ways to access the programme, so you can explore the sessions with ease:

Browse by day & time: view the oral, poster and PICO sessions by their time and location, each sorted chronologically by conference day, time block and programme group, select the day and time block you wish to view
Browse by session: view the scientific sessions and their oral, poster and PICO sub-sessions by programme group
Session schedules by Programme Group: online view of the oral, PICO, and poster sub-sessions of a selected programme group listed by day and time block (sessions with multiple time blocks are listed repeatedly).
Personal programme: a great tool to generate your own personal programme, just select the specific presentations or sessions you’re interested in to create your own personal schedule
Abstracts of special interest: a list of abstracts which are of particular interest for the public. This selection was compiled by the session conveners.

So what else do you need to know about the #EGU26 programme! What does it mean for my abstract/session to be scheduled? The scheduled abstract time in your session is the time during which you will be required to give your live presentation. Don't forget you need to upload your presentation file at least 24 hours before your session, to allow the conveners to have all the slides ready to go - regardless of what format you are presenting in (PICO, oral or poster; virtual or on-site). For oral presenters and PICO presenters your time represents the specific time in your session that you must present, for PICO presenters this is the 2 minute summary presentations you give before you head to the interactive screens for the longer in-depth discussion times. For poster presenters the time you are given is the period that you must stand by your poster (either virtually or on-site) to present it, which may also look like the whole session time. Any questions about your schedule, please contact your session convener as soon as possible, or email egu26@copernicus.org. Can I still create a personal programme? Absolutely! The personal programme option is a great way to organise all the sessions you are interested in. The personal programme allows you to add either entire sessions or individual abstracts to keep track of your most important topics. You can add an item to your personal programme by clicking the yellow star next to the abstract or session. One thing to bear in mind is that the personal programme will only be able to list times in CEST – but during the week of the General Assembly you will also be able to click an ics link that will import your session or abstract into your own calendar – which will automatically translate it into your time zone. What about the schedule time zone? As EGU26 will be taking place in central Europe the time zone for the conference is in CEST - Central European Summer Time. The conference schedule has been set into very specific time blocks to help you manage your discussions, whether they happen on-site or virtually. These regular time blocks will help you manage your time and move between the presentations, regardless of their format or location with ease. Will there be additional online materials again? Yes! Once again we are encouraging our authors to upload online materials to be shared virtually on your abstract page. In the past we have called these display materials, but from now on they will be called supplementary materials. Watch the following video which explains how these materials work! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIy07yfp--Y One of the things our attendees really loved from the virtual formats we have run so far was the ability to comment on scientific content outside of the presentation time, so this is something we have kept . You can comment on supplementary materials any time from when they are uploaded through to the end of May 2026. I'm joining virtually and I’m worried about juggling my responsibilities during the week, including childcare and caring responsibilities. What do I do? Firstly, we acknowledge how difficult it is to attend a virtual conference, even when you are just worried about juggling your working responsibilities. We really hope that you will be able to be kind to yourself this week and, where possible, focus only on attending EGU26 – just as you would if you were attending in Vienna. And yes. that also includes taking some time out to explore and go for walks, talk with friends and colleagues and enjoy (hopefully) the late spring weather. In Vienna you are not constantly in the conference centre for the full week, and we hope you will be able to also let yourself be not constantly working whilst attending EGU26 virtually as well. Other top tips for making an online conference easier:

Take regular breaks! This can mean doing something that isn’t work related, or even stepping away from your computer altogether.
Keep a pad and pen nearby to doodle on while you listen – let yourself fidget. Research suggests that letting yourself fidget whilst you listen can actually help you focus and remember more, so if you want to doodle whilst you listen – do it!
Schedule varied events. Once you have added your key sessions and abstracts into your personal programme, why not consider adding some more varied events? During the week of EGU26 you will be able to add and attend pop-up networking events, from Division social events to short presentations by our Artists in Residence. As usual the Great Debate (GDB) and Union Symposia (US) sessions will be streamed live and you will also be able to participate in a number of short courses! Adding varied events to your schedule will give you a chance to focus your attention in different ways over the ten days of the meeting.
Be ruthless to the schedule, but kind to yourself. We at EGU know how easy it is to get excited when the programme is released and there are so many exciting sessions you want to attend, but remember – these events are very tiring to attend and you have to take care of yourself – so be conservative with adding events to your calendar and ruthless if you need to cut some out. Similarly, to ease the burden, you should try not to attend more than one session simultaneously. You would not be able to do this in Vienna, don’t feel like you have to do it now.

For people who have caring responsibilities, in 2021 we spoke with two of our Division Presidents, Ira Didenkulova and Dan Parsons, who have experienced attending an EGU General Assembly whilst caring for young children about what they suggest for balancing caring with attending a virtual conference, but we would also very much appreciate any tips or advice any of you have to share.

My partner is also in research, so we plan our weeks in advance, so that one takes over the kids, while another needs to be at a conference/seminar. Obviously, it does not always work for both of us, but is more of a survival kit. Cleaning the house is also a challenge - we clean the house only every couple of weeks...! Toys are more often than not lying around. When my partner reaches his limit, he collects them into the box and hides them somewhere for a while. And... unless it is something special, when I should concentrate very much, I let the kids run around and get involved if they want to watch my zooms. Then either they become bored and soon leave, or they start to play in something of their own, so I can work nearby. In the worst case scenario, when both of us are busy and the kids ask for attention, we use cartoons! I am trying to keep it at the level of not more than once a week, so this is our emergency solution for critical days. I have my own selection of downloaded, approved cartoons and use a projector and a big screen. So, they have kind of a cinema! Another emergency solution is to re-discover the box of hidden toys after some weeks or even months. This gives an excitement for several hours, so practically saves a day!

Ira Didenkulova, Natural Hazards Division President, 2021 (current Programme Committee co-chair)

Managing the workload of attending a virtual conference with all the other pressures of life during a pandemic is not easy, particularly when you have a 4 year-old, a 10 and 12 year-old all at home – as was the case during EGU20! ….and I was really lucky to be heavily supported by my wife, Katie. I know that many would have had less support making it even harder to juggle things. It was difficult getting to see all the sessions as well as keeping the children home-schooled and entertained. My wife, who is in the middle of her PhD, and I did a tag-team around the most important sessions I wanted to see last year and around the important times and parts of being a Division President. Overall, although I felt like I missed so much great science the fact that the resources were all available outside of the session times meant that I was able to catch up with things I would undoubtedly missed if I was in Vienna in a normal General Assembly. So ... what have I learnt? First, have a listing of those sessions you want to see most – prioritise – gold, silver and bronze or similar. Second, try not to worry if you miss things – I miss things all the time in Vienna, and at [EGU23] you can find the content afterward and follow up with the authors in the networking space. And finally, you can go to a conference in your pyjamas….take advantage of that!

Dan Parsons, Geomorphology Division President, 2021

We will continue to add more information about EGU26 over the next few weeks and are looking forward to having you join us either in Vienna or online, very soon!

'GeoVision' at EGU26: join us for a night of music and science!

Hazel Gibson — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:58 +0000

Vienna - the city of music! Of Mozart and Mahler, Beethoven and Brahms - and of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest! In this spirit, we invite you to a music-filled evening to wrap up EGU26 and let your hair down. An evening where geoscience meets music and art, and where we celebrate the creativity, diversity, and spirit of our community together. Join us for a fabulous night of music and science! (And karaoke!) When? 18:10-20:00CEST, Friday 8 May Where? Room E1, Yellow Level, Austria Center Vienna (ACV) in EGU26

What is GeoVision Night?

GeoVision Night has two principal parts. First, the performance section, which will see 10 pre-selected creative acts (sign up now) competing for the audience’s favour. Come and vote for your favourite artists! Second, a karaoke free-for-all that offers an opportunity for anyone to join in and have fun! No sign-ups required! All you need to bring is an idea for which song to tackle (karaoke equipment is provided!) and the panache to step up to the mic and let loose! Even if you’re not in the mood to take to the stage yourself, why not stay at EGU26 until the Friday and drop by to cheer on your colleagues, and take to the dance floor!

How to enter the GeoVision Night?

If you want to participate in the GeoVision Night performance section, please fill out the form proposing your act by 13 April 2026! Since we only have a limited number of time slots available, the GeoVision organising team will pre-select 10 entries from the proposals we get. You will be notified whether your act has been selected on 14 April. Then, you can start preparing your contribution in the four weeks you will have to go to the conference. In your proposal, please describe the act you’d like to perform and what equipment/instruments/props you’d need. We can provide a violin, guitar, and keyboard on-site. You’re also very welcome to bring your own equipment! If playing live isn't something that would work for you, you can also pre-record backing track to perform with, and even prepare a dynamic background or slideshow that will be projected in the background during your performance. The winners will be selected on-site by audience vote!

What kinds of entries does the GeoVision Night accept?

The only rule is that your GeoVision entry has to combine music, dance, or poetry with geoscience content.

Do you want to rap about your latest fieldwork adventure?
Write a ballad about your trusty lab equipment?
Present the odyssey of submitting a project proposal through interpretive dance?
Or sing about the peer review process to the tune of a popular artist?

The choice is yours! Give your creativity free reign and craft an entry that will win over the hearts of your audience. A few things to keep in mind:

Group acts should not have more than 10 performers for time reasons
If you send us a backing track, please ensure that it is either your own audio or that you have permission to use it. (If it is a popular song, we can provide it via the karaoke platform we have!) All backing music must be provided in .mp3 format by Thursday 7 May, end of day.
All song suggestions, performances and lyrics must be appropriate for a social event at the EGU26 General Assembly. If upon review the organisers feel that your song choice is not appropriate they can ask you to present another choice, or ask a back-up participant to perform in your place.
As this is an event held during the EGU26 General Assembly, the EGU Code of Conduct also applies to this event, and all audience members and performers must have a valid EGU26 registration for the day of the event.

Please note that this is an on-site social and networking event only. It will not be recorded or live-streamed. Have any questions? Reach out to me!

GeoRoundup: the highlights of EGU Journals published during March!

Asmae Ourkiya — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:30:12 +0000

Each month we feature specific Divisions of EGU and during the monthly GeoRoundup we put the journals that publish science from those Divisions at the top of the Highlights section. For March, we are not featuring any particular divisions, but an ensemble of all the highlights of this month instead.

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Emerging low-cloud feedback and adjustment in global satellite observations - 26 March 2026 Biogeosciences Drivers of long-term grassland CO₂ fluxes: effects of management and meteorological conditions during regrowth periods - 2 March 2026 Climate of the Past Evaluation of nine gridded daily weather reconstructions for the European heatwave summer of 1807 - 5 March 2026 Wine must yields as indicators of May to July climate in Central Europe, 1416–1988 - 9 March 2026 Earth Surface Dynamics Limited influence of bedrock strength on river profiles: the dominant role of sediment dynamics - 24 March 2026 Hydrology and Earth System Sciences A lesson in preparedness: assessing the effectiveness of low-cost post-wildfire flood protection measures for the catastrophic flood in Kineta, Greece - 23 March 2026 Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Mitigating Mazuku hazards: implementation and effectiveness of local dry-gas degassing measures in the Goma area (Virunga Volcanic Province) - 6 March 2026 Numerical experiments of cloud seeding for mitigating localization of heavy rainfall: a case study of Mesoscale Convective System in Japan - 11 March 2026 Ocean Science The role of cyclonic eddies in the detachment and separation of Loop Current eddies - 10 March 2026 Thermodynamic concepts used in physical oceanography - 20 March 2026 SOIL Mapping the fertosphere's phosphorus availability distribution in a field trial using a novel diffusive gradients in thin-films (fDGT) technique - 17 March 2026 Solid Earth Where curling stones collide with rock mechanics: cyclical damage accumulation and fatigue in granitoids - 5 March 2026 Feldspar alteration by disequilibrium CO₂-H₂O fluids in reservoir sandstones: implications for CCS - 9 March 2026 The Cryosphere The terrestrial ice margin morphology in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) - 25 March 2026 Weather and Climate Dynamics The impact of Aeolus observations on wind and rainfall predictions - 12 March 2026

EGU26's Code of Conduct: standards of behaviour for all our participants

Hazel Gibson — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 10:00:02 +0000

Are you ready?! EGU26, Europe's biggest meeting for Earth, planetary and space science research, is now just over a month away! But even sooner than that you only have two days left to grab your Early Bird rates for registration. If you have already booked your registration you will probably have noticed that by purchasing your registration to participate in EGU26 you will also have agreed to abide by EGU's Code of Conduct, but what does that mean? EGU is strongly committed to the principles of inclusivity and diversity in all our events, but especially at the General Assembly we firmly require our members and attendees to treat each other with basic courtesy and respect. This is why you may notice on all our guidelines we state that anyone who participates in EGU26 must behave according to the EGU Code of Conduct. You can read the full code of conduct here: EGU_Code_of_Conduct.pdf Since this year's General Assembly is a hybrid one, i.e. taking place on-site and virtually, we selected a few key points to emphasise in this blog. Most importantly, open and respectful conduct, based on basic politeness, is expected of all EGU26 participants. The EGU also expects all members and attendees to pursue integrity, honesty, respect, courtesy, responsibility, rigour, and equity in their professional activities. Respectful behaviour We expect our EGU members and EGU26 participants to behave respectfully. This behaviour encompasses many facets, including:

The EGU values diversity and equality as essential values. As such, scientific discrimination, harassment, bullying, coercion, intimidation, censorship and plagiarism are considered unethical behaviours.
The EGU requires that its members carry out research and draw their conclusions based on critical analysis of the evidence. Findings and interpretations are expected to be reported fully, accurately and objectively, along with the related uncertainties.
The EGU encourages the use of reporting methods that ensure verification and reproducibility by others. Making data findable, openly accessible and interoperable, and allowing data exchange and re-use between researchers, are encouraged, as are making software and codes freely accessible.
The EGU emphasises that author credit should only be given to those who have meaningfully contributed to the research. The names and roles of all people who made significant contributions should be properly acknowledged.
The EGU encourages officers, members and people taking part in EGU activities to clearly distinguish professional, scientific-based comments from their personal opinions when publicly presenting their work and/or engaging in public discussions related to EGU activities.
The EGU encourages members to take responsibility to act or intercede, where possible, to prevent misconduct. It also recommends that any case of misconduct be promptly reported.

The EGU encourages open discussion on social media and blogging platforms during EGU26. However, you should never post or share any images or video online without the authors’ explicit permission. Please respect any request from an author not to disseminate the contents of their presentation or display. If you aren't sure, look for the labels either indicating encouragement to share content, or a request not to. [caption id="attachment_46646" align="alignnone" width="1024"] These images can be downloaded to add to slides or posters to indicate if you encourage sharing or not. Sharing is encouraged here and sharing not permitted here.[/caption] Reporting violations All participants of EGU26 are expected to follow EGU’s Code of Conduct. Should you observe or experience violations against these rules, please contact the General Assembly programme committee co-chairs at programme.committee@egu.eu and/or send an email to conduct@egu.eu. Messages to this latter address are treated confidentially and are only read by EGU’s persons of trust. You can also contact a person of trust onsite at the information desk in the entrance hall. Violations to the rules of conduct, or misconduct, will be taken seriously and appropriate actions will be taken where necessary. Misconduct is defined as a violation—proven by evidence—of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behaviour in scientific research. Misconduct includes the unethical and/or biased treatment of people in a professional setting and while participating in scientific activities. It also encompasses actions such as discrimination, harassment, bullying, coercion, intimidation, censorship and plagiarism. Misconduct does not include errors of judgment; honest errors in the recording, selection, or analysis of data; or differences in opinions involving the interpretation of data and results. The EGU may undertake an investigation and decide to take action when misconduct is reported by any person and is directly connected to an EGU activity. EGU may also investigate cases that may have an impact on the reputation or integrity of the Union. Sanctions imposed by EGU for misconduct may include, but are not limited to, the following:

Written advice or admonition;
Removal from an official EGU position;
Withdrawal/retraction of presentations and published material;
Suspension from delivering presentations at—and convening—EGU meetings either temporarily or permanently;
Denial or revocation of honours and awards;
Notifying the home institution of the person responsible of misconduct;
Issuing a public statement regarding the scientific misconduct.

It is necessary for us to make the EGU Code of Conduct a clear and central part of EGU26, but we have confidence in our community’s ability to be respectful, inclusive and professional, especially during these times of new conference formats. Please be empathetic in your interactions with other people, and we know that we will be able to have a really great meeting! Contact email address to report violations of the EGU code of conduct: conduct@egu.eu You can also contact the General Assembly programme committee co-chairs at programme.committee@egu.eu

GeoCinema: coming soon to the EGU26 General Assembly!

Jane Roussak — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:00:48 +0000

After a big success last year, GeoCinema is back for EGU26! As many of you know, doing science is very rarely just about the research, but also involves sharing that research in several forms and formats. For many talented researchers this means using films. Either working with a film-maker or creating something themselves, several of our EGU26 attendees submitted wonderful films this year, from science in the lab or fantastic spectacles in the field, to producing educational features on the Earth, planetary or space sciences! Selecting films on a first-come-first-served basis that met our criteria and standard of quality, we co-ordinated 14 films that will be screened on-site (and virtually), followed by a short Q&A with the author, and one additional film which can be watched on-demand at any time.

GeoCinema sessions will take place in room E1 at the Austria Center Vienna (ACV) on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of the conference week, between 18:00 and 20:00 CEST. The room is equipped with a hybrid set-up, allowing us to live-stream the films to our virtual audience in addition to those on-site in Vienna.

If you can't wait to get started, why not take a look at the online archive, with films that explore all facets of geoscience from ocean depths to outer space, submitted to GeoCinema in the past. Read on for a full description for each of our on-site and on-demand films featured in GeoCinema EGU26!

On-site films

The rhythm of the lakes Mon, 04 May, 18:10–18:20 CEST Convener: Rodrigo Martinez-Abarca Divisions: CL, EOS, SSP Lake sedimentary records are excellent archives of climate system variability. Changes in the climate throughout Earth's history have been modeled by a variety of drivers interacting over different time scales. In this film, we share the principles of paleolimnology through the versatility of oriental dances. This video illustrates the climate drivers that have shaped the climate during glacial and interglacial periods, as well as their importance in the deposition of lacustrine sediments. The Paths of Fire Mon, 04 May, 18:20–18:55 CEST Convener: Giovan Peyrotty, Nicolas Oestreicher, Charline Lormand Divisions: EOS, GMPV, GD, TS This documentary offers an immersive journey into a unique experience carried out in 2024: a group of geoscience students from the University of Geneva travels to Iceland to explore the major natural phenomena that shape this volcanic land. The film follows their scientific expedition through breathtaking landscapes — from vast lava fields and towering glaciers to seismic faults. In the field, the students meet with Icelandic researchers, speak with experts from the Icelandic Meteorological Office, and discover the methods used to monitor volcanoes, which are essential for anticipating natural hazards. Day by day, Iceland becomes a true open-air laboratory. The young scientists collect samples, observe the traces left by past eruptions, and document the ongoing geomorphological transformations. The experience quickly takes on both an academic and deeply human dimension. Loch Monar - the Highland fold factory Mon, 04 May, 18:55–19:20 CEST Convener: Rob Butler Divisions: TS Folds are fundamental geological structures that can tell stories of a restless world. This film - shot on location - follows structural geologist Rob Butler as he visits hallowed ground in the history of tectonics. The mission is to examine the spectacular folds on the shore of Loch Monar in the NW Highlands of Scotland. It was here, in the 1950s, that a young John Ramsay developed important ideas for recognising and analysing polyphase deformation. But the outcrops are important for understanding tectonic folds and folding in general and well as being exceptionally beautiful. The film, released in mid 2025, is one of a large number (>250) on earth science curated on The Shear Zone - a channel hosted on YouTube. Gathered in Darkness Mon, 04 May, 19:20–19:50 CEST Convener: Daniel Zietlow, Rebecca Haacker Divisions: EOS, PS For thousands of years, total solar eclipses have captivated humanity and they continue to bring communities together to experience these celestial events. They are also great for science and deepening our understanding of our Sun. The CATE 2024 project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by the Southwest Research Institute and NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, brought community and professional scientists into partnership to gather data on the solar corona, our Sun's outermost atmosphere, during the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse in an eclipse relay race. Gathered in Darkness highlights not only the science of CATE 2024, but more importantly perspectives from community participants on total solar eclipses and being involved in a large-scale citizen science project like CATE 2024. CAESAR: Life on an Arctic Field Project Mon, 04 May, 19:50–20:00 CEST Convener: Daniel Zietlow, Rebecca Haacker Divisions: AS, EOS Sometimes cold air moves from the poles towards the equator as part of the global circulation of air around our Earth. This is called a cold-air outbreak (CAO) and they are common in mid-to high latitudes during winter. The cold air, when moving over open water, forms unique clouds, and can result in heavy snowfall and strong winds. CAOs remain a mystery because of the many natural processes involved in their creation. CAESAR was an international field campaign to study the structure of marine boundary layer clouds during CAOs in the Sub-Arctic Region. This region is experiencing drastic effects of global warming and sea ice loss, and yet, the connection between high- and mid-latitudes and their effect on global climate is not well understood. CAESAR deployed from Kiruna, Sweden and reached the Arctic sea ice edge using the NSF/NCAR C-130 to track the evolution of the cloudy boundary layer using state-of-the-art instrumentation. Seas of the Sun: The Cluster Story Tue, 05 May, 18:10–19:10 CEST Convener: C.-Philippe Escoubet, Matthew Taylor, Arnaud Masson Divisions: PS, ST What began with tragedy ended in triumph. This is the untold story of the European Space Agency’s pioneering 25-year Cluster mission to study how invisible solar storms impact Earth's environment. Like a ship in a never-ending storm, Earth is bombarded by swarms of particles ejected from the Sun at supersonic speeds. Most of these solar wind particles are deflected by the magnetosphere and sail harmlessly by, but Earth’s shield is not bulletproof. Since 2000, Cluster sailed the seas of the Sun and revealed the complexities of the Sun–Earth connection. After two-and-a-half incredibly successful decades in space, ESA took the decision to safely deorbit the four Cluster satellites throughout 2024–2026. The mission officially ended on 8 September 2024. But a space mission is so much more than science. Experience Cluster’s story as told by the people who lived it. The film also features an original soundtrack by Karlotta Skagfield and additional music by Bruce Dickinson. The Chronicles of Dudley Tue, 05 May, 19:10–19:20 CEST Convener: Barbara Silva, Jonathan Larwood Divisions: EOS GeoAnimations, a 2024 Natural England project led by Dr Jonathan Larwood, Dr Barbara Silva, and Cordelia Spalding, explored how animations can communicate the value of geodiversity in nature. Developed with animators Damn Fine Media, the project stressed collaboration and location-based storytelling. Premiered at the Geological Society's 2024 Earth’s Canvas conference in London, the films aim to boost public engagement with geodiversity and inspire nature recovery. The Chronicles of Dudley (narrated by Sir Lenny Henry) follows the story of Silurian limestone - a ‘magic ingredient’ in the Industrial Revolution, and the creation of Dudley as we know it today. The narrative is connected to the deep past through tropical limestone fossils still found on the Wren’s Nest National Nature Reserve in the heart of Dudley and the Black Country UNESCO Global Geopark. Something in the Water Tue, 05 May, 19:20–19:50 CEST Convener: Pauline Querella, Kyril Wittouck Divisions: CR In the heart of Greenland’s ice sheet, in a little-known region called the “Dark Zone,” a multidisciplinary team of scientists and explorers ventures into a landscape undergoing dramatic transformation. Where ice should reflect light, dark particles accumulate— accelerating the melt. The expedition focuses on supraglacial lakes, mysterious bodies of water that form on the surface of the ice sheet and can drain away in just a few hours. Facing extreme conditions, total isolation, and unexpected storms, the IMAQA expedition documents these invisible yet alarming phenomena. Each data point collected becomes a crucial piece of the puzzle to better understand the upheaval underway. “Something in the Water” is not just another adventure film. It’s a raw immersion into an open-air climate laboratory. Blending cutting-edge science and human adventure, the film highlights both the fragility of our planet and the determination of those striving to understand it—before it’s too late. Surviving EGU as an introvert Tue, 05 May, 19:50–20:00 CEST Convener: Luc Illien Divisions: EMRP, GM, SM This episode is about the experience of introverts at international conferences. It is part of a web-series All is Well! (it's a fiction). This was filmed at EGU25 with other attendees. Polar Kinships Thu, 07 May, 18:10–18:30 CEST Convener: Annukka Pekkarinen Divisions: EOS Polar Kinships is a journey between two nomadic sea peoples from the opposite ends of the planet: the Iivi of East Greenland and the Kawésqar of Southern Chile. An ocean voyage in the Arctic brings together those who share an ancient connection with the sea, the wind, and the ice. Aboard the sailing vessel Byr, their worlds meet through gestures, songs and silences that reveal a shared strength: the resilience of those who continue to exist, to remember and to care for their lands and waters. This is a story about belonging, about continuity. This is a story that celebrates the voices of two indigenous cultures that despite distance and difference recognize themselves in the ripples of the same ocean. Across the Caspian Shallows: The Call of the Seals Thu, 07 May, 18:30–19:25 CEST Convener: Assel Baimukanova Divisions: OS The film "Across the Caspian Shallows: The Call of the Seals" tells the story of years of research on the Caspian seal conducted by scientists from Kazakhstan. Since 2015, they have been uncovering the secrets of this remarkable animal by studying its diet, behavior, age, population, distribution, and migration. Viewers will see how researchers search for seal rookeries across the vast expanses of the Caspian Sea, conduct aerial surveys, and analyze collected data. The film not only shows unique footage of seal life but also highlights the dedication, enthusiasm, and commitment of the scientists to their work. "Across the Caspian Shalows: The Call of the Seals" is a story of people who are passionate about their work and of a rare species that needs our protection. Inheritance Thu, 07 May, 19:25–19:45 CEST Convener: Maria José Llinares León Divisions: AS, CL Herència (Inheritance) is a documentary born as the final project for the Master's in Scientific, Medical and Environmental Communication at UPF-BSM, with the aim of bringing the discussion on climate change to the Valencian territory. The starting point is the DANA of October 2024, which laid bare the territory's vulnerability and the urgent need to build a culture of risk. The documentary combines interviews with young people, researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and an environmental expert from the Albufera de València. Their voices weave a narrative that unites scientific knowledge and the memory of the land, showing that climate change is not a distant threat but a present reality that is already transforming our environment. LEAP - Learning from the past Thu, 07 May, 19:45–20:00 CEST Convener: Christian Burlet Divisions: ITS This movie relates the activities (fieldwork+lab work) of an interdisciplinary team studying the impact of rapid and short climate changes on past societies and ecosystems in Belgium during the last 10 000 years. Archaeologists, Palynologyst, geologists and speleologists gather informations on Belgian cave deposits (speleothems), peat bogs (Hautes Fagnes reserve), and human remains (archaological sites) around the Belgian Meuse basin. The team try to understand how climate change affected the environment and populations in pre-complex and early-complex societies in the Meuse basin of Belgium. This will help to gain new knowledge on human resilience and address on-going and future regional climate changes. Magnetic Earth Entangled Tue, 05 May, 19:10–19:20 CEST Convener: Klaus Nielsen Divisions: EMRP Earth’s magnetic field is in a state of constant flux with local variations in field strength and shifting magnetic poles standard elements of what we deem a stable magnetic field. However, during the history of our planet, the magnetic field has undergone some massive changes with full pole reversals, where magnetic north and south switch places, and so-called excursions, where the poles move towards a full reversal, but do follow through. In both cases, dramatic changes occur in which the magnetic field strength are weakened and field lines entangled. In two short animations, we present the latest Excursion (the Laschamp event 42K years ago) and the latest Reversal (the Bruhnes-Matuyama event 780K years ago). Visualizations were done by Max Schanner (GFZ) and sonifications by Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space & Maple Pools).

On-demand films

The following film can be enjoyed on-demand any time by clicking the link below! Discovering dust in the ocean Divisions: CL, OS In this 360 video Jan-Berend Stuut introduces you to his research onboard the RV Pelagia. You'll find out how we measure dust over the ocean using vacuum cleaner engines, drifting traps and a buoy and how these are deployed from a Research Vessel at sea. Desert dust is transported over large distances through the atmosphere with the offshore trade winds. Dust is a potential fertilizer of the ocean and interesting for climate change (mitigation).

EGU Photo Competition 2026: only ONE WEEK left to submit!

Hazel Gibson — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:00:04 +0000

Until 8 April, every participant registered for the General Assembly can submit up to three original photos and one moving image on any broad theme related to the Earth, planetary, and space sciences. Photos submitted can be recent or from previous years so if there's a beautiful photo that you've been holding onto, this could be your year to enter it! A panel of judges will shortlist the best 10 photos and one moving image to be exhibited in an online gallery during the conference. General Assembly participants will then vote for their favourite photos and the three winning images will be announced online on the last day of the meeting. Winners will receive a free registration to EGU's General Assembly in 2027! These images can be of anything to do with geology or geoscience - we get many beautiful landscape images, but you can also upload laboratory images, fieldwork images, hand samples or microscope images; even videos! The winners are awarded a free registration to the EGU General Assembly the following year and you can share an image taken at any time - they don't have to be just from the last year - we even accept historical images, as long as you have the rights to share them! For more information visit the EGU26 Photo Competition announcement page. EGU26 will take place from 3 - 8 May 2026. For more information on the General Assembly, visit the EGU26 website. Imaggeo is the EGU’s online open access geosciences image repository. All geoscientists (and others) can submit their photographs and videos to this repository and, since it is open access, these images can be used for free by scientists for their presentations or publications, by educators and the general public, and some images can even be used freely for commercial purposes. Photographers also retain full rights of use, as Imaggeo images are licensed and distributed by the EGU under a Creative Commons licence. Submit your photos at http://imaggeo.egu.eu/upload/.

First time at an EGU General Assembly? We've got you covered!

Hazel Gibson — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:00:01 +0000

Europe’s biggest geoscience conference, EGU26, is just over one month away! Each year, the EGU General Assembly brings together over 19,000 researchers, scientists, academics and journalists to discuss and share the latest developments in planetary exploration, Earth observation, polar science, climate change, natural hazards, and much more. And it is held at the Austria Centre Vienna (ACV) which is big enough to confuse even the most directionally gifted of us! If this is your first time attending the EGU General Assembly, we would like to make your experience less overwhelming and more fulfilling, so you can make the most of our exciting science. So read on for a quick first timers guide on how to plan for your conference week. Choose the best registration for you. There are many kinds of registration you can pick - including virtual and on-site options. The full list is available here on the EGU26 website. If you are attending on-site, live in Europe and you book your registration before the close of the Early Bird cut-off at 13:00 CET 1 April, your name badge will also be mailed out to you ahead of the meeting–saving you time (and queues) when you arrive! When you register is also the place that you can choose your stickers that will be displayed on your name badge (remember to check this before 1 April if you want your name badge mailed out to you). Set up your profile to help you make connections at the meeting Your personal profile on the EGU26 website is like your digital business card at the meeting. It makes it easier for people to connect with you before, during and after the General Assembly! You add stickers to your profile too; highlight that you are a first time attendee, or if you are looking for work, as well as your Division and EGU journal affiliations! You can also add your pronouns to your profile, especially if you don't have a photo attached. Not only that but this is where the QR code to print your badge will be once you have completed registration–in case there are any issues, this is where you can find it. Book your travel and stay NOW Vienna is a hub for conferences and tourism alike, and EGU26 alone is expected to bring in up to 18,000 participants to the city! Not only that, but this year the week following the General Assembly the annual Eurovision song contest is being hosted in Vienna! This means fierce competition for accommodation and travel, so we recommend booking right away if you haven’t already done so. If you are able to, EGU always recommends travelling by train to the conference. The international rail network across Europe is fast and regular, and a beautiful journey, especially the closer you get to Vienna. Check the ÖBB website for information (or use third party websites like trainline.eu to discover information about connecting travel across countries). Our favourite way to travel is to use the NightJet lines and the EuroNight lines, which are a series of sleeper trains that allow you to travel overnight. The network is constantly expanding, but places book up fast, so check now to see if there is still any availability on your route. For those travelling by plane to the conference, a top tip is to look for flights to Bratislava. The Slovakian capital is only 80 km away from Vienna and well connected via bus, train and even boat! Bratislava airport is served by a good selection of low-cost airlines and it’s often cheaper to fly there than directly to Vienna. A bus ticket between the two cities can cost as little as five euro (if booked well in advance) with the average for a return train trip being around 14 euro. If that’s not enough to persuade you, it’s worth factoring in a little time to discover the city. It’s a warren of quaint little streets, an imposing castle and good, affordable beer and food. Last chance to sign up to EGU's Peer Support programme! Don’t just limit your conference experience to attending presentations and mingling within your own circle. EGU26 offers the perfect opportunity to broaden your professional network–whether on-site or virtually. If social media is your thing, the #EGU26 conference hashtag is a great way to stay current with the meeting as well as connect with others to find out about their work. We also strongly recommend signing up to be a novice with EGU’s Peer Support Program (formerly called the mentoring programme). This unique program supports first-time and novice conference attendees by pairing them with experienced attendees to help them navigate the meeting more easily. Register here before 31 March. Download the EGU26 app The EGU26 General Assembly mobile app will be available at the beginning of April. Check the EGU26 website for release information. For first time attendees, the app can be a great pocket guide to browse and search the meeting programme, select presentations to add to your own personal programme and keep up with important events. Another good source of information at the General Assembly is the daily digital newsletter EGU Today, which highlights sessions and events at the meeting each day of the week. Issues are available online on the General Assembly website and through the conference app during the meeting, so keep an eye out and subscribe now to not miss a thing! Check the schedule, but don't overload yourself Each day of the EGU General Assembly begins at 08:30 and ends at 20:00 and is organised in time blocks (TBs) with a number of breaks. Here’s an overview of what each day will look like:

Time block (TB)	Time (CEST)
TB1	08:30–10:15
AM Coffee break	10:15–10:45
TB2	10:45–12:30
Lunch	12:30–14:00
TB3	14:00–15:45
PM Coffee break	15:45–16:15
TB4	16:15–18:00
Networking	18:00–19:00
Medal & Award lectures, evening events	19:00 & onward

Each time block further comprises a number of presentations, which – needless to say – can be quite tiring to sit through an entire day. It would be wise to shortlist sessions of your interest and plan to attend them accordingly through the week. More information about the meeting format is available here. Don’t forget to take regular breaks to keep stress levels at bay - whether attending on-site or virtually. Try a 5 minute coffee meditation or 5 min yoga stretch at your desk, and feel free to recommend to a friend! Explore beautiful Vienna The city’s public transport is exceptionally well planned and connected, so do your best to explore some of Vienna during the conference week. Staying along the U1 underground (U-bahn) line ensures quick and easy access to all the main tourist spots and the conference centre, but don’t fret if your accommodation is already booked elsewhere – you’ll be able to get around the city fairly easily either way. Vienna has plenty to offer, from picturesque parks and gardens, through to impressive architecture and a plethora of museums. A good starting point is Wien Info where you’ll find tips on how to enjoy the city to the full, without breaking the bank. The site has information about arts and culture events, free wifi spots, the best places to go for a bite to eat or a drink, as well as a selection of affordable sport options too. Your EGU26 registration includes a complimentary public transport pass that is valid from Sunday 3 May to Saturday 9 May for a week's registration, or the corresponding day for a day registration AS LONG AS YOU HAVE YOUR BADGE WITH YOU. So if you are not able to get your badge in advance, make sure you buy a ticket to get you to the conference center, or you could be fined. And here you can find information on the Vienna City Card to get around if you stay past your free EGU26 transport ticket time. So there you have it! A beginners guide to help you make the most of your first General Assembly experience. Stay tuned for further conference updates which will be shared regularly via the EGU blog and on social media.

GeoTalk: meet Christina Orieschnig, hydrologist and science communicator!

Simon Clark — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:00:15 +0000

Hello Christina! Welcome to GeoTalk. Before we dive in, could you introduce yourself to our readers?

Hey everyone! I’m a researcher at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) in Montpellier in the South of France. For my work, I specialise in remote sensing and hydrological modelling, with study areas in Cambodia, Tunisia, and France. At EGU, I’m also the outgoing Early Career Scientist (ECS) representative of the Hydrological Sciences (HS) division and help lead the ECS Network's task group on Communication and Outreach. At the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), I co-coordinate the working group on Science Communication, Outreach, and Promoting the Digital Water Globe. In fact, we just published a community paper on best-practice science communication in hydrology!

Hydrological landscapes develop in tandem with the people who inhabit them, their processes changed in reaction to local, traditional practices up to large-scale engineering projects. How does adopting historic and eco-cultural perspectives help us better understand such environments?

I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of interdisciplinary colleagues at IRD, EGU and IAHS - many of them sociohydrologists, human geographers, or anthropologists. IAHS even has an entire scientific decade, Panta Rhei, dedicated to the co-evolution of human-water systems - check out the EGU HydroTalks podcast episode about it! Working with these experts, I’ve learned the value of taking into account a multiplicity of perspectives in understanding hydrological processes; the expertise of local actors is invaluable in understanding coupled human-water systems, especially if you’re starting work in a new study area. Similarly, looking into the past evolution of hydrosystems can help us understand current challenges. For my PhD, for example, I worked on an eco-hydrological model looking at infrastructure rehabilitation in the Cambodian Mekong Delta. It helped me immensely to do some research in the archives of the French colonial administration, which first built these infrastructure elements, to understand the logic behind them - you read more about this in our paper. [caption id="attachment_50457" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Early Career Scientist Representatives - 2024[/caption]

You’re also engaged in science communication, both in research and in facilitating training, such as the Short Course on sci-comm fundamentals at the EGU26 General Assembly. What advice do you have for researchers looking to engage in science communication?

For anyone who wants to get started in science communication, I can really recommend keeping an eye out for free training opportunities offered by organisations such as EGU or - for hydrologists - IAHS. The Short Course we offer on science communication fundamentals at the upcoming General Assembly in Vienna is just one of several that can give participants a solid basis in different sci-comm skills. Beyond that, EGU also offers a wide range of online webinars and workshops, many of which are also recorded and available on the Union's YouTube channel playlist. There is even the fantastic science-media toolkit. Apart from training opportunities, I also recommend getting some hands-on experience by getting involved in your communities. The EGU division blogs, for example, typically welcome guest posts - all you have to do is reach out to the editors and pitch a topic. Plus, many EGU Scientific Divisions also welcome new team members to contribute to sci-comm tasks and building a community. So if you’re interested in getting involved with managing or editing a blog, running seminar-style online "Campfires", keeping people up to date through ta division newsletter, recording a podcast, or engaging people through social media, all are great ways to get started.

As a volunteer for EGU, you have also taken on numerous roles within the Union, such as a blog editor and as one of the Early Career Scientist representatives for the Hydrological Sciences division. What drew you to work with EGU?

The EGU bug bit me during my first in-person General Assembly in Vienna - after two years of online conferences during Covid. I attended one of the Short Courses on how to navigate EGU, co-produced by the ECS reps, and I was incredibly impressed by this open and welcoming network of international researchers. I joined the blog team of the HS division that year and then applied for the role of HS ECS rep and was selected. Since then, it has been so enriching to become part of this community, contribute to existing initiatives, launch new projects, and attend online and in-person meetings to help organise the GA and events throughout the year. It’s been fantastic to connect with senior researchers in my field and from other EGU divisions. But the best bit has been making friends within the ECS network! I’ve come to know - and love! - people in more places across the world than I ever would have dreamed of when I started my PhD. Working together with them in the geoscience community has been extremely fulfilling, and a great deal of fun!

Finally, as someone experienced in EGU general assemblies, what advice do you have for people attending EGU26?

Keep an eye on your division's blogs and social media, both in advance of the General Assembly and during it. You’ll get the inside scoop on all the latest highlights and networking events. EGU also runs a webinar ahead of the General Assembly to help you get prepared. I can really recommend the “personal programme” function in the EGU26 app, which is released a month ahead of the GA. It will let you highlight the sessions you want to see and stay on top of things during a week that can otherwise get pretty overwhelming. If you're already an experienced attendee, you can help new attendees and share your insights by signing up for the General Assembly peer-support programme! Most of all, though, you need to schedule in some downtime, otherwise, conference fatigue will hit you hard and fast. Vienna is an amazing city, so plan in some time to visit a museum, stroll around, meet colleagues for some cake in one of the traditional coffee houses, or catch a concert in the evening!

Congratulations to the 2025 winner of the first ever Geolog post of the year!

Asmae Ourkiya — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:00:03 +0000

At EGU, we’re always looking for new ways to celebrate and amplify the voices of our community.

For our second edition of the top Geolog post of the year in 2025, we selected the top five performing blog posts and held an internal vote within the EGU Executive Office to select the winner. We are now excited to announce that the award for the best blog of 2025 goes to (drumroll ...) CJ Rajendran for his piece The 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake: A singular Himalayan earthquake on its 75th Anniversary! Published on August 15, 2025, CJ's blog revisits the 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake on its 75th anniversary. On India’s 4th Independence Day, the magnitude 8.6 Assam-Tibet quake unleashed landslides that choked the Brahmaputra, killed thousands, and redrew Himalayan rivers. This blog shows us why the eastern syntaxis remains a Mw≥8.6 hotspot amid locked central segments, booming dams like China’s Yarlung mega-project, and urban sprawl primed for disaster. If you haven’t read CJ's piece yet, now’s the time! [embed]https://blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2025/08/15/the-1950-assam-tibet-earthquake-a-singular-himalayan-earthquake-on-its-75th-anniversary/[/embed]

Your voice matters, pitch your idea to Geolog!

This competition isn’t just about celebrating outstanding Geolog blog posts, but to also inspire you to share your stories, research, and insights with the wider geosciences community. Whether you’re an early-career scientist, a seasoned researcher, or a science communicator, we welcome guest contributions that explore geoscience topics in engaging and accessible ways. Do you have an idea for a blog post? Maybe you want to highlight an underrepresented issue in geoscience, share your fieldwork experience, or showcase how your research connects with society. If so, we’d love to hear from you! Check out our Geolog submission guidelines and pitch your idea to the Media and Engagement Manager Asmae Ourkiya. Congratulations again to CJ Rajendran for this brilliant piece!

Congratulations to the winners of the best EGU division blogs of 2025!

Asmae Ourkiya — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:00:54 +0000

If you’re a regular reader of the EGU blogs, you may notice a certain annual tradition of ours: we like to celebrate the contribution of our science writers and bloggers over the year gone by. And 2025 was no exception of course; we had a number of inspiring and thought-provoking blog posts published across the EGU’s official blog GeoLog and division blogs.

Thank you to each one of you for your time and commitment in supporting our science communication efforts!

To continue our annual appreciation for the impressive display of science writing across the blogs, we launched the annual EGU Blogs competition in December 2021. From a shortlist of posts selected by our blog editors, we invited you, the EGU Blogs readers, to vote for your favourite post of 2025. We also invited EGU division blog editors and office staff to take part in a panel vote. After a month of voting by almost 400 people, we’re happy to announce the results below. The winning blogs and what they tell us Congratulations once again to the Natural Hazards (NH) Division Blog, winner of the panel vote, and the Geodynamics (GD) Division Blog, winner of the public vote! The GD Division blog was crowned winner of this year’s public vote for their blog One Ring to Rule Them All: The Geology of Middle-earth written by Manel Ramos. The author bridges the gap between high fantasy and hard science, and proves that the legendary landscapes of Middle-earth are far more than just pretty backdrops. By treating the Misty Mountains like the Himalayas and Mount Doom like a volatile stratovolcano, the post reveals a tectonic soul pulsing beneath Tolkien's maps. As for the panel vote, the NH Division blog ranked first with their post If a Resilient City Had a Face: It Might Look Like Kagoshima The blog is written by Hedieh Soltanpour, who explores how Kagoshima, Japan, maintains a resilient way of life despite its extreme proximity to the highly active Sakurajima volcano. Residents manage this constant hazard through a unique cultural identity that views the volcano as a source of both spiritual connection and agricultural bounty. This high-risk exposure is mitigated by sophisticated warning systems, specialized evacuation shelters, and daily safety routines like children wearing protective helmets. Soltanpour concludes that Kagoshima proves how preparedness and community awareness can successfully transform vulnerability into a calm, sustainable existence. But wait…. we’re not done yet! We would also like to add that all the posts that entered the competition are worthy of a read too. You can click here to find the blog contest announcement, and then scroll down to the list of shortlisted entries to read them individually.

That's not all! The best Geolog post is back for the second time, more details to be announced this week so stay tuned!

We welcome regular and guest writers If you’re inspired by the diverse range of posts on EGU Blogs and want to try your hand at science writing, we’d love to hear from you! All EGU Blogs welcome (and encourage!) guest contributions. We’re especially eager to feature a wide variety of voices, as it’s the mix of guest posts and regular features that makes our blogs such a great read. If you would like to contribute to any of the division blogs or GeoLog, please send a short paragraph detailing your idea to the EGU Media and Engagement Manager Asmae Ourkiya at media@egu.eu

25 years of interactive open access publishing: An interview with current and former EGU Publications Committee chairs Barbara Ervens and Ulrich Pöschl

Eduardo Queiroz Alves — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:00:54 +0000

It is not every day you get to celebrate a silver jubilee in the world of digital publishing, but this year, the European Geosciences Union is doing exactly that. Twenty-five years ago, back when most of us were still navigating dial-up internet, EGU was already flipping the script on the black box of scientific publishing. By launching the first interactive open-access journal, they moved the scientific conversation from behind closed doors into the open air. Today, that experiment has grown into a powerhouse portfolio of 20 journals and a vibrant community of over 50,000 peer-reviewed articles. Today, I sat down with current and former EGU Publications Committee chairs Barbara Ervens and Ulrich Pöschl, to discuss how this interactive approach builds trust, supports early-career scientists, and stays ahead of the curve in the age of AI. Hello Barbara and Ulrich. Thank you so much for your time and for agreeing to answer a few questions of mine! Firstly, I want to know, why is this year an important milestone for the EGU Publications? Ulrich: Hello Eduardo, and thanks for having us! This year, we celebrate 25 years interactive open access publishing to reflect on the success of the European Geosciences Union as a pioneer and trailblazer in open science. In 2001, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics was launched as the first scientific journal with transparent peer review and public online discussion. Since then, the EGU portfolio has grown to 20 interactive open access journals that have published over 50,000 high-quality peer reviewed scientific articles and 250,000 interactive comments and replies from authors, reviewers, and the scientific community. Despite global initiatives and declarations promoting open science, a large fraction of publicly funded research is still locked behind subscription paywalls, and peer review continues to take place behind closed doors in most journals. As a result, readers can neither assess whether publications were rigorously reviewed by experts, nor can they learn from the exchange between authors and reviewers as an integral part of the scientific discourse. At a time when science and scientific expertise are increasingly questioned, transparency as provided through public peer review is essential for building and maintaining trust in science. Barbara:The EGU model of interactive open access publishing removes access barriers and enables efficient integration and use of scientific results and discussion in research, education and innovation. It was the first and continues to be one of the most successful examples of open access publishing and open peer review in the global scientific community. How does interactive open access publishing benefit science and humanity? Barbara: Open access fosters scientific research, education and innovation, but we do more than just providing access to the final published journal article. We understand publishing and peer review as a process that is central to the scientific discourse and progress. There is great value in opening and documenting this process, during which scientific knowledge is assessed, refined and validated. Therefore, manuscripts are first published as preprints or discussion papers, allowing rapid dissemination and discussion of new findings. The manuscripts are publicly peer-reviewed, whereby dedicated referees, authors, editors and other members of the scientific community can contribute to the discussion. Readers can follow how a manuscript evolves in response to this feedback, gaining insight into the reasoning, debate and evaluation that define scientific progress. Ulrich: This transparent exchange is important in scientific discourse, as it reveals not only what we know, but also how well we know it, and where the limitations are. Accordingly, the complete documentation of this process, including all manuscript versions, referee reports, community comments and author responses, is of high educational value and frequently used in our community, e.g., in various journal clubs. Early career scientists learn how to engage constructively with criticism, how to respond professionally, and how manuscripts are improved through review and revision. Beyond training, this openness facilitates evaluation, strengthens accountability, encourages more careful writing and reviewing, and therefore, contributes to higher-quality and more trustworthy scientific literature. How do the EGU publications go beyond traditional scientific journals? Ulrich: The EGU publishing model goes far beyond traditional scientific journals by combining rapid dissemination and transparent peer review of preprints, journal articles and special highlights within a single community-based open science framework. This framework includes the interactive community platform EGUsphere, twenty interactive open access journals covering the full width of geosciences, the interdisciplinary highlight compilation EGU Letters, and the Encyclopedia of Geosciences. EGUsphere is an integrative open access platform for the posting of preprints, comments, conference abstracts and presentations. Here, all preprints entering the public peer-review process in an EGU journal are published as discussion papers. In addition, EGUsphere accepts preprints that may not yet be ready or not even intended for peer-review and publication in a scientific journal. Thus, EGUsphere combines the features of traditional preprint servers and the discussion forums that EGU had introduced in 2001 for public peer review (e.g., Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions). EGU Letters comprise concise highlight journal articles that are of comparable quality, interdisciplinary relevance, and visibility as in traditional high impact journals, and the Encyclopedia of Geosciences contains comprehensive review articles. Barbara: Instead of having separate journals for special papers, EGU Letters and the Encyclopedia of Geosciences rely on the transparent expert peer review and editorial decisions in the disciplinary EGU interactive open access journals to distill and highlight particularly important papers. This interactive multi-stage open peer process supports both scientific rigor and the broader dissemination of knowledge in ways that few other publishing models currently achieve. How do you respond to criticism or skepticism about open access publishing? Ulrich: The value of open access publishing is widely recognized, but some researchers and stakeholders still raise concerns about the costs and quality of open access journals. At EGU, we address and resolve these concerns by demonstrating that open access is not only compatible with, but actually instrumental for, maintaining meticulous peer review and high scientific standards at moderate costs. Unlike commercial publishers, EGU is a non-profit organization that keeps publishing costs as low as possible, and any revenues generated are re-invested into union activities that benefit the scientific community, such as early career scientist support, conferences and other scientific initiatives. EGU also applies a generous waiver scheme to ensure that authors from low and middle-income countries or anyone without dedicated funding, can publish without financial barriers. This makes the EGU publications truly inclusive, fair and financially sustainable, showing that high-quality open access publishing can be both affordable and responsible. Looking ahead, what are future developments you envision for the EGU publications and scientific publishing as a whole? Barbara: The EGU publishing portfolio will continue to evolve and grow to meet the changing needs and demands of the global scientific community. This includes new publishing venues for emerging research areas such as the recently launched journal Earth Observation and plans for a journal dedicated to mathematical methods that may follow later this year. At the same time, we continue to explore ways to further improve the publishing process by responsibly leveraging new technologies, while maintaining transparency, integrity, trust and community involvement. In particular, the rapid development of AI-based tools presents both challenges and opportunities for scientific publishing. AI can be a helpful assistant for all involved parties: authors, reviewers, editors and readers. For example, AI tools can help to improve clarity and check technical aspects without replacing guidance and judgment by human peers. Scientific publishing will continue to fundamentally rely on expert evaluation, critical thinking and scholarly debate. More broadly, we expect that transparency in peer review will become standard across the global publishing landscape. Publicly sharing peer review reports helps counter concerns about poor editorial practices or excessive commercial interests in scientific publishing. Some publishers, such as Springer Nature, are following our example and have begun to mandate that peer review reports accompany published papers. This is an important positive step but does not yet fully live up to the EGU interactive open access publishing model, where the scientific discourse is fully transparent, traceable, and open to contributions from the global community. Ulrich: To conclude, we can both confidently say that EGU publications are well positioned to meet current and future demands of the scientific community, while continuing to serve as a role model for transparent, community-driven, and not-for-profit open access publishing. More information is given in our recent review and perspective article (Ervens et al., 2025).

GeoRoundup: the highlights of EGU Journals published during February!

Asmae Ourkiya — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:01:25 +0000

Each month we feature specific Divisions of EGU and during the monthly GeoRoundup we put the journals that publish science from those Divisions at the top of the Highlights section. During this month, we are featuring The Cryosphere (CR) and Solar-Terrestrial Sciences (ST). They are represented by the journals Geoscientific Model Development (GMD), Annales Geophysicae (ANGEO), and The Cryosphere.

Annales Geophysicae A source or a sink? How the altitude of particle precipitation influence high-latitude electrodynamics - 26 February 2026 When energetic particles rain into Earth’s lower ionosphere, they ionize the gas, creating a highly conductive base layer. Using a large database of observations from four orbiting space weather satellites, we demonstrate that this plasma foundation acts as a giant electrical short-circuit: it actively neutralizes the electric fields that would otherwise power plasma turbulence higher up. Without this conductive base to drain the energy, topside turbulence freely grows and persists.

Geoscientific Model Development

NorESM2–DIAM: a coupled model for investigating global and regional climate-economy interactions - 12 February 2026 We introduce NorESM2-DIAM (Norwegian Earth System Model version 2-Disaggregated Integrated Assessment Model), a first-of-its-kind tool linking a climate model with a high-resolution economic model to study how climate change, internal variability, and economic activity interact across the world. The model reveals strong regional differences and large annual swings in economic impacts, offers insights for climate policy discussions, and provides a strong foundation for future model development. The Cryosphere Water vapour isotope anomalies during an atmospheric river event at Dome C, East Antarctica - 09 February 2026 In December 2018, an atmospheric river event from the Atlantic reached Dome C, East Antarctica, causing a +18 °C warming, tripled water vapour, and a strong isotopic anomaly in water vapour (+ 17 ‰ for δ18O) at the surface. During the peak of the event, we found 70 % of the water vapour came from local snow sublimation, and 30 % from the atmospheric river itself, highlighting both long-range moisture advection and interactions between the boundary layer and the snowpack. Atmospheric Measurement Techniques Enhancing dust aerosols monitoring capabilities across North Africa and the Middle East using the A-Train satellite constellation - 18 February 2026 Biogeosciences Machine-learning models of δ13C and δ15N isoscapes in Amazonian wood - 02 February 2026 Northward shift of boreal tree cover confirmed by satellite record - 05 February 2026 Nutrient flows and biogeomorphic feedbacks: linking seabird guano to plant traits and morphological change on sandy islands - 26 February 2026 Earth System Dynamics The largest crop production shocks: magnitude, causes and frequency - 03 February 2026 Investigating controls on fluvial grain sizes in post-glacial landscapes using citizen science - 05 February 2026 Challenges and opportunities for understanding societal impacts of climate extremes - 27 February 2026 Geochronology FAIR fission track analysis with geochron@home - 25 February 2026 Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Towards an operational European Drought Impacts Database (EDID) - 20 February 2026 Lessons learned in institutional preparedness and response during the 2022 European drought - 27 February 2026 Ocean Science Phytoplankton blooms affect microscale differences of oxygen and temperature across the sea surface microlayer - 09 February 2026 Mesoscale variability and water mass transport of the Caribbean Current revealed by high-resolution glider observations - 23 February 2026 EGU in the news - February

The Micropalaeontological Society draws attention to their EGU26 session Harnessing foraminifera and other microeukaryotes to understand Earth’s ecosystem changes: perspectives from past, present and future
Mission Earth Ambassadors initiative at EGU26? Register for the workshop here
AnaEE-ERIC to Present at EGU2026: Advancing Ecosystem Research in the Face of Global Change
SCAR will be convening a session on Antarctic ice sheet past to future: bridging science to decision making at EGU26

Are you ready to vote for your favourite Division blog of 2025?

Asmae Ourkiya — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:00:32 +0000

Our EGU blogging team has had a fantastic 2025 posting across our official blog, GeoLog and the division blogs. Most of our readers appreciate EGU’s blogs for their informative yet accessible style, and for our bloggers' ability to take complex geoscience content and make it fun and relevant to the reader. If this sounds like something you’d like to get involved in, we encourage you to get in touch with your Division blog editors, or email media@egu.eu. To celebrate the excellent display of science writing across the network and division blogs, we are back again with this year’s EGU blogs competition! We’ve asked our blog editors to put forth their favourite post of the year in the running to be crowned the best of the EGU blogs. From now until March 6, 2026, we invite you, the EGU Blogs readers, to vote for your favourite post of 2025.

How to vote for your favourite blog:

Browse the poll below to see the shortlisted posts. Click on a title to read the full post, then cast your vote for the one you believe deserves the title of Best Post of 2025. The post with the most public votes will be crowned the winner. Additionally, EGU blog editors and staff will select their favourite; the post receiving the most votes from this group will win the panel vote. Please cast your vote here. [embed]https://poll.fm/16658017[/embed]

List of shortlisted blog posts:

Join our blogging community

Are you a science writer or communications expert, or perhaps want to try your hand at science communication? All the EGU blogs, GeoLog (the official EGU blog), and all the division blogs, welcome guest contributions from scientists, students and professionals in the Earth, planetary and space sciences. It couldn’t be easier to get involved. Decide what you’d like to write about, find the blog that is the best fit for your post and contact the blog editor. You can find all editor details on the individual blog pages. If in doubt, you can submit your idea for a post via the Submit a Post page on GeoLog, or email the EGU Media and Engagement Manager to help you with initial enquiries and introduce you to individual blog editors. Don’t forget to look at the blog pages for a flavour of the content you can expect from the new and existing blogs in 2025. The blogs are also a great place to learn about new opportunities, exciting fields of research and keep up to date with news relating to the upcoming 2026 General Assembly, taking place from 03-08 May 2026 in Vienna, Austria and online. So go on then, get voting and keep an eye out for our post in February for the winners!

How 40 years of Viking missions decoded the Universe’s most misbehaving matter

Asmae Ourkiya — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:00:43 +0000

In a couple of days, on 22 February, we will mark a major milestone in space history: 40 years since the launch of the first Swedish Viking satellite, when an Ariane rocket from Kourou in French-occupied Guiana launched on 22 February 1986! While the general public might hear the word Viking and picture longboats, heavy axes, and a level of beard maintenance that borders on the professional, space scientists see something else entirely. In the world of science, Viking represents a series of daring raids into the secrets of the solar system for, guess what? Data. Specifically data regarding plasma, the fourth state of matter, as ubiquitous as it is frustratingly difficult to pin down.

From the rust-colored plains of Mars to the shimmering curtains of the Northern Lights, the Viking legacy represents the moment plasma physics moved from the chalkboard to the stars. It was the era when we stopped guessing how the sun interacts with planets and started measuring the mosh pit of charged particles for ourselves.

Understanding plasma

To appreciate what the Viking missions achieved, we first have to rescue the definition of plasma from the back of a high school textbook.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3T2ldsdtMg[/embed]

Most people are taught that plasma is ionised gas. That description is technically true, but it’s also incredibly bland. In reality, plasma is a charged, collective, and highly reactive, let's say, soup of particles! Because the electrons have been stripped away from their atoms, the resulting mix becomes hyper-sensitive to electric and magnetic fields. Plasma doesn't just flow; it also twists, pinches, and beams. It fills 99% of the visible universe, from the heart of stars to the thin void between galaxies. It is basically the universe’s most dramatic state of matter: always charged, always in a group project with magnetic fields, and never quite where the diagrams say it should be. To truly understand it, we had to go where it lives.

Mars, but make it ionospheric

While the 1976 Viking 1 and 2 missions are legendary for their search for Martian life, they also carried a hero for physicists: the Retarding Potential Analyzer (RPA). This sophisticated bonk detector used electrical grids to measure ions in the Martian ionosphere. This provided the first ever in-situ look at how solar radiation transforms another planet's atmosphere into plasma. The data revealed a surprisingly chaotic ionospheric mosh pit, where low-energy electron levels skyrocketed during descent, and the boundary with the solar wind was a turbulent, messy smear rather than the crisp line predicted by textbooks. When it proved that space refuses to behave like a neat diagram, Viking successfully turned abstract plasma equations into a gritty, thrilling reality.

From longboats to low Earth orbit

Launched in 1986, the Swedish Viking satellite was indeed Sweden’s first satellite. While it shared a name with the NASA planetary landers, this Viking orbited Earth and never landed anywhere. Its eyes were turned toward a different plasma phenomenon: the Aurora Borealis.

To the average observer, the Northern Lights offer a silent, poetic, dance across polar skies. To plasma physicists, however, the aurora is anything but gentle! It's actually a powerful natural particle accelerator. These shimmering curtains are visual proof of Earth's magnetic field lines channeling high-energy particles into our atmosphere, where they slam into gas molecules and trigger cascades of light. Viking was launched into a highly elliptical orbit specifically designed to sample the auroral acceleration region, positioned roughly 1 to 2 Earth radii above the surface. This altitude was a strategic sweet spot that previous satellites had either skimmed beneath or sailed well above, leaving a critical observational gap. Equipped with a sophisticated instrument suite, including the V3 particle spectrometer, Viking spent 444 days embedded in the electromagnetic maelstrom of the auroral zone. The mission was a massive international plasma expedition and drew scientists from Canada, Denmark, France, Norway, the United States, and West Germany into a collaborative hunt for understanding. Viking's daily routine involved flying through shock structures, wave bursts, and particle beams. Imagine piloting an extremely sturdy, extraordinarily expensive thermometer directly through a thunderstorm, except the storm consists of charged particles and writhing magnetic fields, and the lightning never stops. That was Viking's everyday commute. During its mission, Viking detected auroral kilometric radiation (AKR) and, by crossing these radiation source regions, made measurements showing that auroral kilometric radiation is generated within field-aligned auroral acceleration structures linked to electron precipitation and discrete auroral arcs. Yet, what I find most remarkable, is that Viking also captured some of the first high-resolution images of the aurora from above. This showed, in detail, the structures that are normally invisible from the ground, therefore developing human understanding of these celestial storms.

Why do we bother the plasma?

It is tempting to treat all this as a niche saga of "'Nerds Bother Plasma" film at 11'. But the Viking missions did something structurally important: they moved plasma physics from an Earth-centric theory into a multi-world discipline.

When we take measurements at Mars, a planet with no global magnetic field, and compare them to Earth (a planet with a very strong one!) we create Comparative Magnetospheric Science. These data provide the benchmarks for:

Understanding how the solar wind strips the atmosphere away from a planet (explaining why Mars went from wet and blue to dry and red).
How different magnetic environments modulate a planet's long-term health.
Learning how energy is rearranged in the vast, magnetised weather of the solar system.

Final reflections

Forty years later, the Viking legacy reminds us that the space between planets is, in simple words, a mosh pit. It’s a turbulent, electric, and magnetic sea that connects every world in the solar system. The Viking missions made it possible to stop guessing and start measuring how that drama actually plays out. They showed us that whether you're at the poles of Earth or the deserts of Mars, the universe is always plugged in. Plasma might be difficult to study, but as the Vikings proved, if you’re brave enough to sail into the storm with a well-calibrated bonk detector, the secrets you find are worth their weight in gold.

GeoTalk: Meet Marie Cavitte, policy officer for the Cryosphere Division, member of the EGU Climate Hazards Task Force, former Blue Book trainee

Asmae Ourkiya — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:00:04 +0000

Welcome, Marie! Could you please introduce yourself to our readers? Hi, my name is Marie Cavitte. I’m a glaciologist and climatologist with a passion for the polar regions. I spent 10 years studying Antarctica. I started off during my Masters, then PhD, looking at the oldest ice on Earth, hunting for THE region of the ice sheet that might contain million-year-old ice. An ice core has been drilled since and all initial results indicate that we hit the target spot-on (very nice to see this years later!). During my postdoc, I transitioned into researching recent climate change in Antarctica, trying to see if we can measure increasing snowfall rates in East Antarctica, key to understanding how fast sea levels may rise in the decades to centuries ahead. I have the travel bug, so moved around a lot during my studies, having done my undergrad in the UK, then PhD in the US. I’m now back in Belgium. In my current position as valorisation officer for the climate team of the Water & Climate Department at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), I facilitate the uptake of science into policymaking. I support the team’s research on climate impact by sharing the science done with all relevant stakeholders: policymakers, NGOs, the media, the public. I also keep a foot in science by working on proposal applications, writing scientific reports, policy briefs... And of course, I’m still working on a few polar files. I’m very much involved with the EGU for a while, as I am the policy officer for the Cryosphere Division and a member of the EGU Climate Hazards and Risk Task Force. When I’m not doing all this, you’ll find me running everywhere (physically and metaphorically). When did you apply for the Blue Book Traineeship programme, and how did your everyday work at the Commission look like? I applied for the traineeship in my last year of postdoc. I interned with the Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG CLIMA) in 2024. My work of my unit was quite transversal, I contributed to the climate science team and the team working on monitoring, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas emissions for the EU. [caption id="attachment_50324" align="alignleft" width="169"] Marie Cavitte's internship badge[/caption] Part of my role was to keep an eye on the latest science that could be relevant to the unit’s work and share it through summaries, policy briefs, presentations in meetings. I attended feedback-to-policy workshops where I acted as the intermediate between scientists and my colleagues, organising follow-up meetings where relevant. All those soft skills we tend to undervalue as researchers (presenting, writing, working collaboratively, networking) were essential in my day-to-day work. I really enjoyed my work at the DG CLIMA and for sure it triggered my change in career path: going from research to knowledge brokering. How has the traineeship experience contributed to your science for policy skills? Before starting the traineeship, I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t have enough policy background to make a difference. It turned out that to develop solid policy skills, you really need to do the work, and you pick it up faster than you think. During my 5 months at DG Climate Action, I learned to work in bilateral and multilateral settings and to listen to scientists as policymakers do, focusing on how science aligns with policy needs and how it can be translated into action. I also learned a lot about multilateral processes under the UNFCCC workflows, and COPs. And importantly, I developed a strong network in climate policy that I continue to develop to this day. Where did you see the value of your training as a glaciologist during your time with DG CLIMA? While applying for this position, I felt that I can put my climate science knowledge into use. Antarctica has direct impacts on our world, most visibly through its role on rising global sea level. The West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the biggest tipping points in our climate system. A total collapse of this ice sheet (possible if we reach 2°C of global warming) would raise sea level by around 7 meters. The Arctic is also home to two tipping points: permafrost and the overturning ocean circulation, compounded by the geopolitical issues around rapidly disappearing sea ice. As an insider to cryospheric research, I was able to pick up on relevant science updates much faster and share them. I was also supporting the drafting of funding topics, where I could apply understanding of the state of the art of climate science. In some of my work, I had less expertise of course, but I think one of our superpowers as scientists is the ability to read lots of material and learn fast, so I definitely applied that skill for the win. What were the most surprising aspects and the main challenges of this experience? One of the biggest surprises for me was how few scientific profiles work inside the Commission, even in climate policy. At the same time, it makes sense, since economics, psychology, political science are incredibly important to design and implement (climate) policies. I think what makes DG CLIMA so strong is having a combination of all these domains, and I was definitely trying to learn as much as I could from my colleagues. Regarding the challenges, I already knew the workload was intense at the Commission, but I don’t think I realised just how intense. Colleagues were working on so many files, often all equally urgent and important, having to understand the big picture but also the nitty-gritty details of policies. A lot of the work entails continually reading policy news, climate updates, EU news, following what the Commission is putting out as new priorities. Policymakers in DG Climate Action are incredibly knowledgeable and invested in their work. The rigid hierarchical structure was the hardest to get used to. Any note, any decision, any communication, must be approved from above, which certainly slows down things at times. But it also means you’re part of this big machine and you feel part of a larger effort, rather than working in isolation. So, it also has its good sides. What would be your advice to those who would like to apply for the traineeship? Apply! If you are curious about the science-policy interface and whether you would be a good fit, I think the best way to find out is to dive in and be part of it. You will learn SO much in just 5 months. It’s really a perfect length as it is long enough to learn if you are a good fit or not, and not too long such that you can go back to your research if it turns out that that was more your thing. Regardless, I think the bluebook traineeship exchange brings a lot for both sides: as researchers, we get to understand how our research fits in the big picture, and how we can steer research in general to be relevant for (in my case, climate) policies. On the Commission side, we bring our own set of knowledge and perspectives inside the units we intern in, bringing with us new ways of thinking which can sometimes unlock fresh thoughts or policy developments. So, it’s really a win-win. Plus, you might just meet some great people, make lifelong friends. I am happy to be contacted by anyone interested in applying to the Blue Book Traineeship programme. You can reach me at marie.cavitte@vub.be.

McMurdo Sound’s 70th anniversary: An expedition journal by Julia Martin

Asmae Ourkiya — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000

It was October 28, 2022 around 3 p.m. Fascinated by the majestic white snow-covered mountain caps, deep-blue sea ice cracks and light-blue pressure ridges, I gently press my nose against the cold double-glassed window of the Royal New Zealand 757. The tires smoothly touch the ground, and the warm voice of the flight attendant fills the dry air in the aircraft: “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Antarctica.” [caption id="attachment_50262" align="alignleft" width="300"] Picture 1: Sea ice and snowy mountains in Antarctica. The flight from Christchurch, New Zealand is between 5 to 8 hours depending on the aircraft and weather conditions. (Photo: Julia Martin)[/caption] And just like that my life’s dream became a reality! I arrive in Antarctica, the white, snowy, magical continent in the south. The aircraft stops. Time to gear up. Dressed in Scott Base orange attire, we disembark the aircraft. Slowly, we are descending down the stairs in our warm but difficult to walk in moon boots. A gentle breeze and the happy smiles of the ground staff welcome us to Antarctica. Amazed by the stunning white and blue beauty around us, we are guided to our station transport vehicles. For us the Kiwis and our friends the Americans, this is an enormous orange bus (Ivan, the Terra bus) with tires as tall as I am (1.75 m). Squeezed together like emperor penguins, we are sitting in the huge vehicle. The heating kicks in. I’ve never felt so hot in my entire life! For about half an hour, we are marinating in our own sweat, bumping up and down as we cross the Ross ice shelf until we reach the light-green buildings of New Zealand’s Scott base just in time for dinner (fish and chips!) with the New Zealand prime minister while she was visiting the station. This was the first day of our expedition. [caption id="attachment_50263" align="alignright" width="300"] Picture 2: IVAN, the Terra bus transportes the Americans and Kiwis to Mc Murdo and Scott Base. (Photo: Ruzica Dadic)[/caption] We are a team of three women: Ruzica Dadic, Roberta Pirazzini and myself. We are going to camp on the sea ice for four weeks to investigate the physical properties of the snow to understand the role that snow plays on the sea ice engeres balance.. I wake up slowly as the sunshine caresses my cheeks. I open my eyes and begin to smile as I recognize the scenery in front of the window - the mild, calm green of New Zealand’s Scott Base buildings in front of the majestic Mount Erebus. The clear sky is crystal blue, and a soft plume of smoke decorates the volcano's peak. My smile could not be any bigger, and my sleepiness disappears in an instant. It's preparation time. We are delighted as our four drones and our automated radiation stations arrived not only in time but also in perfect condition, all the way from Helsinki. Even the missing pallet from Switzerland was located and sent in time to Scott Base. With the Scott Base staff's help, we manage to prepare everything in time and I want to thank the 2022 Antarctica New Zealand Scott Base team for their support and motivation. It was extraordinary, and we are utterly grateful to have been supported by those amazing people. Next, we head out on the sea ice surveying the area to find a base camp location. In total, we mark five different measurement areas which represent the key features of this year's sea ice in the McMurdo sound. Usually, the McMurdo sound sea ice starts to form in March and continues growing until around November. In 2022 however, due to heavy storms rushing down from the continent towards the ocean, the sea ice formation was interrupted several times. This resulted in ice with different thicknesses and snow conditions. The "mature ice" (about 2.5 m thick) started developing in March 2022, and the so-called "immature ice" (less than 1.5 m thick) began forming not before August 2022. [caption id="attachment_50266" align="alignleft" width="300"] Picture 3: Popular yellow-red Scott polar tents anchored to the sea ice via V-threads. (Photo: Julia Martin)[/caption] Our main measurement site is close to our camp on the "mature" sea ice. Here, we install our fixed measurement stations as they require daily maintenance. I call it "the garden," where each station is a flower we must care for. Basic at Scott Base, besides planning our fieldwork and preparing our science equipment, we undergo countless inductions for the various tasks ahead of us. The most essential induction is the overnight Antarctic Field Training (AFT). We were taught how to set up a polar tent, build a snow cave for shelter, and generally survive the harsh Antarctic conditions. The first night in a polar tent is an adventure I will always remember. Before crawling into my tent after a busy, beautiful day, I sit down on the snow, my face warmed by the dazzling midnight sun. I am overwhelmed with joy as the beauty and magnificence of Antarctica surrounds me. The white delight makes me feel small and unimportant and I sleep like a baby covered in two layers of down sleeping bags, one layer of fleece inlet, and my thermal underwear. One of my favourite places at Scott Base is the lounge. Huge windows allow the sunlight to enter the room and create a bright and calm atmosphere, making you pause for a second and escape the busy humming of the base life. The national flag is waving outside, rocked from side to side by the stiff Antarctic breeze. I spend some time looking through the binoculars watching a small staff team set up our camp in the vast white open on the sea ice. It is a freezing day. The tents are massive, the four humans tiny. The main tent weighs a ton, and the temperature makes it challenging to install heavy gear. Antarctica does not aim to please. The harsh continent could not care less about what humankind has in mind. Impatiently I watch the colourful tents grow in the distance, and finally, the day has come when we pack our gear and head out onto the sea ice. Aiming at the yellow squares on the horizon, we slowly approach our home base for the next four weeks. Our little caravan is led by a Hagglund – a dual-cab, all-terrain, amphibious vehicle on four rubber tracks. Hagglunds are widely used for transportation in Antarctica. We arrive at camp and the air is dry, and the biting cold ambushes my lungs with every breath. We are setting up our four sleeping tents and anchoring them into the sea ice with v-threads. We drill two holes, each at a 45° angle, and pull a string through the hole. This technique is a terrific way to attach equipment safely to any ice surface. The tent guy wires are connected to the v-threads, and chances are exceedingly high that your tent will survive even harsh Antarctic storms. I clearly remember my big smile when I finally got the knot right after several attempts. Our sea ice camp consists of four sleeping tents, a toilet tent, a cold storage tent, a cooking tent, and a fuel trailer. Setting up the tents and unpacking our cargo takes the rest of the day. The cold slows down every thought and move I make. Exhausted but overly happy, we finally enjoy our home-cooked dinner and delicious evening tea. Later, the happiness vanishes as we slowly start realising our stove is not generating enough heat to keep the tent at the desired temperature between positive 10 to 15 °C (necessary for our lithium batteries' survival). We assemble our automated weather station inside to monitor the temperature as our cargo with the thermometers still is on its way to Scott Base. It is too cold for the batteries. And so, I share my sleeping bag, not with one but five dreadfully cold and dreadfully large lithium batteries and one drone control unit. My feet are slightly freezing during that first night as my body needs to provide additional heat for the batteries gathering for the sleepover. I will not lie. The first days out on the sea ice were rough. But then, they almost always are. It is cold, and it takes time to adapt. During the first nights, my breath condensates on the tent wall, and when moving, tiny snow crystals fall on my skin and pierce my exposed cheeks and lips. I tucked very inch of the rest of my body into the insulating layers of my sleeping bag. Undressing, dressing, cooking, personal hygiene and assembling equipment are slow and sometimes painful. The skin on my fingertips cracks, and I must tape it to heal it. You will not feel comfortable in Antarctica if you don’t generate enough body heat. The environment is harsh, brutal, and ice-cold. The continent is not interested in keeping you alive, and you must learn how to keep yourself safe and warm. Setting up our main measurements field fills my heart with joy as I see our scientific mission grow. Living on the sea ice is incredibly special. It is a unique, extreme, and challenging environment that reduces life to the bare minimum: eat, work, eat, sleep and repeat. And sometimes I put on my headphones and dance with a tear in my eye to warm up before going to sleep. I love every single second. Every ice-cold breath I take, I take with joy. And I realised not only what a privilege it is to be a snow scientist, but that it is what I was dreaming about growing up as a little girl. Dreams come true.

International Day of Women and Girls in Science: Reflections from seismologist Simona Gabrielli

Asmae Ourkiya — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:00:34 +0000

Hello you, and happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science! My name is Simona Gabrielli, and I am a researcher at the INGV (Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Italy), where I study seismic attenuation (in other words: how earthquakes lose energy while passing through rocks), to understand the presence of fractures and fluids. My specialization in recent years has been in tectonic and volcanic seismology, and I focus on the central Apennines and Mt. St. Helens volcano. Before coming back to my home country, Italy, in 2020 (and I’m still in a non-permanent position, but we will get back to that soon!) I had to travel extensively to find my proper path, to define what I could achieve and what I could become as a scientist, and, most of all, as a Female Scientist. What really changed my life was the opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, a place that opened my eyes even more than they already had been. The comparison between different universities and research environments showed the blatant gender gap in Italy. I can start by talking about one of the most classical questions during a Ph.D. interview in Italy: “How could you handle being distant from your partner?”, which insinuates that a woman wouldn't/couldn’t move or give up her career for love. I still remember vividly the shock of that moment; my mind kept repeating, “No one would ask me this if I were a man.” It was one of the first times that the gender bias hit me directly, right after I had just graduated! At that point, I started to picture myself climbing what I can describe as a really crowded mountain, women trying to find a spot in a world that doesn't fit them. My doctoral studies in the UK immersed me in a daily discourse regarding FLINTA* in STEM, an experience that was as inspiring as it was resourceful. However, it also highlighted the saddening reality: this level of engagement is far from the global standard and, in many spaces, continues to face significant institutional resistance. As I wrote before, I don't hold a permanent position, and this is one of the main struggles I face as a woman in STEM: the uncertainty of my work situation. Don’t get me wrong, research means changes, continuous motion, and cooperation around the world. This is a transversal problem that affects the entire early- and mid-career scientific community, regardless of gender. If your home country is unable to sustain this instability and uncertainty with proper wages and welfare structures, you are unable to plan your life (have your own family, buy a house, …), and you feel powerless.

Let's talk statistics

The journey through Italian academia begins on relatively level ground, with women holding a hopeful 44.1% of early-career roles, but as the path climbs toward the peak of full professorship, a quiet exodus occurs. By the time the summit is reached, the landscape shifts dramatically, leaving women to occupy only 27% of those top-tier positions, quite the leaky pipeline also documented in the geological sciences by Radeff et al. (2025). This is the story of the 30s pivot, a crossroads where brilliant researchers are more likely to be forced to choose between the laboratory and the living room, especially in a culture where only 20–21% of fathers utilize optional parental leave. Yet, even these sobering numbers from the 2024 ANVUR report don't tell the whole story; because the data remains strictly binary, gender-diverse and trans researchers are rendered effectively invisible, leaving us without a true map of the obstacles faced by those who don't fit into a "standard" statistical column. This leaves the entire burden of the family on women’s shoulders, automatically increasing the gender gap in STEM. This has an impact, for instance, on women with families or caregivers who should attend a conference, a fundamental part of our job. While some conferences now provide funds or support for such cases, others don’t, leaving women once again to choose between family and work. EGU has an EGU EDI Participation Support Scheme, which provides financial assistance to scientists who encounter significant EDI-related financial barriers that prevent them from attending the EGU General Assembly. The deadline for this year's applications is 20 February. You can check the eligibility criteria and how to apply here: https://www.egu26.eu/authors/financial_support_and_waivers.html#edi-support . This uncertainty is stressful for all of us and can affect our work. Our daily lunches at work in the past months have been mostly focused on these difficulties: several women in their thirties, with the same work instability, who confide in each other about possible solutions to the problem. And even if it sounds like a sad moment, it is also wonderful to hear the resilience of this group of girls and the different plan Bs they have (mine, personally, is to open a wine shop, but that’s a story for another day). But that is the point: we should not have a plan B! We are already working and fulfilling our plan A! Moreover, as you all may know, geology and geophysics (as many other STEM disciplines) include fieldwork, which could become another “invisible” problem for women in STEM. Managing the menstrual cycle during geological surveys can be a very practical but often overlooked topic. When it comes to fieldwork, it is important to me to calculate my period before planning a campaign, due to my reduced mobility and extremely severe pain, but sometimes you cannot avoid it, and you still go on. The need to calculate such a more detailed plan can be an additional "mental burden" compared to other male colleagues. And sometimes, it is not taken into account at all. I assume, I hope, that the logistical challenges of being in places without bathrooms or shelter are well known. For example, during my PhD fieldwork at Mount St Helens, there wasn't even a tree to hide under, making managing personal hygiene a logistical nightmare that men don't have to face. This brings me to another point: what I highlighted so far is a binary vision of the problem of women in STEM. Science is not only male or female, and the diversity in the gender spectrum should be addressed equally. Fieldwork, for instance, can turn into an unpleasant situation for transgender* folks, as much as the difficulties of acceptance in a closed-minded work environment that does not allow you to exist or behave authentically. I consider myself as someone who has been and is still fortunate, as I have the privilege to spend my career years surrounded by empowering women leaders and supportive supervisors. Their commitment to recognizing and addressing unconscious gender bias has been creating a better environment of continuous growth and meaningful change And this is what I would like to see in the future: more awareness and more education. I am a firm believer that most people in a workplace don't create problems out of malice. It can be difficult for some to intuitively understand logistical needs or fluctuations in capacity that they haven’t personally navigated. To bridge this gap, we must replace assumptions with open dialogue. Updated training courses. Self-paced unconscious bias training for any new employee or contractor. There are so many ways to improve any workplace by simply tackling the assumption that as long as people's intentions are good, what is said and done should not matter much. It does. Harm can be done regardless of intention. Thus, speaking candidly about our socialisations, biological, and practical realities without shame, is the way to normalise these experiences within academia and the workforce. Only when we build an environment that accommodates all people can we stop wasting energy on 'Plan B' contingencies and focus entirely on our 'Plan A' ambitions.

"Should I just jump in the lake in my lab coat?" EGU’s Teacher-Scientist Pairing Scheme

Asmae Ourkiya — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:00:05 +0000

This was the moment when our video duet lesson really started to take shape. Yes, we’d already sketched the idea for a lake stratification lesson months earlier when we applied for EGU’s Teacher–Scientist Pairing Scheme, supported by the Education and Outreach committees, but we wanted an opening that would stop students in their tracks. Nothing like a cold plunge to get everyone’s attention! We begin by introducing ourselves: Sarah, a Ms. Frizzle–type middle school science teacher (sadly without her magic school bus), and me, Laura, a scientist who’s eager to share her excitement about research with the world. Luckily, we’re sisters-in-law, which made it easy and fun to work on this together. The process of creating the lesson was, in itself, a teaching duet. With every new concept I wanted to introduce, Sarah was there to help me understand what her students needed. We traded notes constantly: what’s essential for grasping lake stratification, what’s going to be confusing, and what will make students lean forward. Laura (that’s me) brought in the science: stratification, lake habitats, the thermocline, seasonal turnover, density differences with temperature, and how light and mixing affect oxygen and life in different layers. Sarah translated those into classroom-ready pieces, which were simple, clear messages, quick checks for understanding, and interactive worksheets like Habitat House Hunters, where students find homes for lake plants and animals in the different layers based on temperature, light, and oxygen conditions. [caption id="attachment_50194" align="alignnone" width="756"] Sarah, the co-author of this post, sharing an example of the Habitat Hunter worksheet completed by one of her students.[/caption] We wanted the lesson to feel like an invitation: lakes aren’t just pretty scenery; they’re layered, dynamic ecosystems. So we built a narrative around the question, “Where would different organisms live and why?” From there, we eased into the vocabulary and the visuals. The video walks through the structure of a stratified lake (epilimnion up top, metalimnion in the middle, hypolimnion below) and pauses at the thermocline as a turning point. The thermocline isn’t just a line on a graph; it’s a boundary that shapes how heat, oxygen, and nutrients move. We paired footage from the lake with simple diagrams so students could see what the words describe and how the science shows up outdoors. Because students remember what they experience, not just what they hear, we layered in hands-on elements. In the classroom, Sarah uses a clear container, water at different temperatures, and a bit of food coloring to show density differences. In the video, you see temperature depth profiles and lake diagrams during different seasons (as well as pictures of lakes during these seasons. We kept the content focused and visuals strong, always circling back to the big ideas: warm water floats, cold water sinks, mixing matters, and living things track those changes. To show what happens in a lake, Sarah explores the density of warm and cold water, using clear containers, water, and a bit of food coloring. While less-dense, warm water (red) floats above cold water (blue), denser cold water mixes with the bottom cold water. Behind the scenes, our Google Doc looked like a wall of sticky notes: segment ideas, demo setups, ways to rephrase a sentence so it lands with sixth graders. We’d ask: Is “thermocline” too complicated a term? Are we asking students to remember too many new words at once? Can we swap jargon for images? Sarah’s classroom instincts kept us honest. I’d get excited about adding a bit on turnover, and she’d say, “Yes, but one clear example, and let’s scaffold it with a question they can answer.” The result is a tight, accessible lesson that still feels like real science. Students get to see the lake as a system: the sun warming the surface, wind mixing the top layer, the thermocline holding its line until seasonal changes break the stratification and the whole water column turns over. From there, the Habitat House Hunters activity asks them to think like ecologists: If you’re phytoplankton, where’s your best “address”? If you’re a cold-loving fish, what’s your layer and why? What happens when oxygen gets used up in deeper water? Our end product was just a tiny slice of our spate of brainstorming notes. Honestly, we could have created a semester’s worth of lessons about lakes, food webs, invasive species, nutrient cycles, human impacts, and winter dynamics under ice. The video lesson and all teaching materials are available online following the links shown below:

The full video lesson, with chapter markers for easy pausing (watch video)
A teacher’s guide (embedded at the end of the video) with lesson objectives, timing, and tips
Printable Habitat House Hunters worksheets (download here)

https://youtu.be/KlgZW8fw_XM?si=VzN3_vtd5CDWyq6- If you’re a teacher, we hope this feels ready-to-use. If you’re a scientist, we hope it’s a reminder that translating your work for students is about choosing the right entry points and building from there. For us, the partnership was the magic: Sarah kept our message clear and student-centered, and I kept the science accurate and alive. The duet made the lesson better than either of us could have made alone. And yes, the lake was really cold. Are you interested in creating a teacher-scientist pairing video? Then get in touch with the Outreach Committee: outreach@egu.eu