At EGU, we like to believe that a new year is more meaningful when we pause to look back at the year gone by – just a brief glimpse to appreciate all our good work and progress! 2021 was certainly an excellent year for our blogging network at EGU. Across the EGU’s official blog, GeoLog and division blogs we had so many inspiring, thought-provoking and even entertaining posts this year. Thank you to each of you for your writing contribution!
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 2021. We also invited EGU division blog editors and office staff to take part in a panel vote. After a month of voting, the winners are finally in!
Hearty congratulations to the Ocean Sciences Division Blog, winner of the public vote, and the Cryospheric Sciences Division Blog, winner of the panel vote!
The OS division blog was crowned winner of this year’s public vote for their post on Connecting the Networks for a better Understanding of the Ocean written by Arvind Singh. This blog highlights the many challenges of observational ocean science research, and the need for a strong multi-team network to get meaningful insights of the ocean. Singh explains his unique role in connecting diverse ocean research networks for a larger goal: the dissemination of ocean related information that can help and support early career ocean scientists (Ocean ECS) in multiple ways.
The CR blog ranked first in the panel vote with their post: It’s getting hot in here: Ancient microbes in thawing permafrost written by Maria Scheel. The blog explores ‘extreme’ microorganisms that survive at minus degree temperatures. It turns out these microbes serve as a crucial connection between the environment and climate. Scheel takes on everything from permafrost soils and genetics to microbial biodiversity and climate change, to tell a fascinating story of microbes that survive in extreme conditions, sometimes even for a million years! Even more interesting is their hunger for carbon and why it matters during global warming.
We happened to notice that both our blog winners have a certain theme in common: connection and the inter-dependency of life! Isn’t that an interesting coincidence? At this point we’d like to add that all the posts entered into 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.
If you find yourself inspired by the range and breadth of posts across the EGU Blogs and would like to try your hand at a little science writing, then remember all the EGU Blogs welcome (and encourage!) guest posts. We particularly encourage a wide diversity of writers to send us their ideas, as it is the variety of guest posts, in addition to regular features, which makes the 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 Communications Officer, Gillian D’Souza at media@egu.eu
