EGU Guest blogger

Challenging challenges in Earth science research at the EGU General Assembly!

Eleanore Heasley, Renee van Dongen, Anne Voigtländer, Felix Nieberding, Liseth Perez and Johannes Buckel June 5, 2019

At the short course 'Crowd-solving Problems in Earth Sciences' during the EGU General Assembly 2019, scientists came together to both network and brainstorm solutions to some of the challenges that fellow researchers face.

At the EGU General Assembly 2019 last month, if you walked through the dark basement and the most distant hallways of the convention centre, into room -2.62 on Wednesday evening, you may have heard people introducing themselves followed by the words “… and I have a problem.” This may have sounded like a support group. In fact, if you had entered the room it would have been clear that you had just ...[Read More]

Bringing geoscience into prisons

Sara Mynott May 29, 2019

Philip Heron, one of the winners of a 2019 EGU Public Engagement Grant, shares his experience bringing geoscience education into prisons. Photo provided by Philip Heron

During the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, I caught up with Phil Heron, a Newcastle-born geodynamicist at Durham University, UK. Earlier this year he won an EGU outreach grant to engage young offenders with geoscience subjects and help improve their employability. He tells us how he started working in prisons and shares what we can learn from his experience. How did the proj ...[Read More]

IGLUNA: students work towards building an icy human habitat on the Moon!

Anastasia Kokori May 22, 2019

Artist’s impression of a lunar habitat in Ice on the Moon. Credits: ESA

What does it take to build a habitat in ice on the Moon? An international group of university students and professionals is working together to provide this answer and develop a sustainable and operational habitat in lunar ice. The project is called IGLUNA and is organised by the Swiss Space Center and the European Space Agency (ESA) as the first initiative from ESA_Lab, an ESA interuniversity res ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Dust devil sighting in the Atacama Desert

Rita Nogherotto May 20, 2019

Dust devil in Atacama desert. Credit: Rita Nogherotto (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Dust devils are like miniature tornadoes, they form when a pocket of hot air near the surface moves fast upward and meets cooler air above it. As the air rapidly rises, the column of hot air is stretched vertically, thereby moving mass closer to the axis of rotation, which causes intensification of the spinning effect by conservation of angular momentum. In the Atacama Desert [in Chile] they are r ...[Read More]