In 2010 EGU held our first annual Photo Competition at the General Assembly in Vienna. Since then hundreds of photos have been shared on imaggeo by geoscientists and researchers just like you, with a lucky few being selected each year to be highlighted during the meeting and voted on by our members.
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 2021 Photo Competition announcement page.
In some years our Photo Competition had a special theme, and in 2016 that theme was ‘Active Planet’. The winner of the theme that year was this stunning image of a polar bear taken by Mario Hoppmann, which has become one of EGU’s most widely seen images, used by news media outlets and science writers all over the globe to discuss the urgent topic of climate change.
A polar bear is testing the strength of thin sea ice. Polar bears and their interaction with the cryosphere are a prime example of how the biosphere is able to adapt to an “Active Planet”. They are also a prime example of how the anthropogenic influence on Earth’s climate system endangers other lifeforms.
Description by Mario Hoppmann.
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/.
