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Lucia Perez-Diaz

Lucia is a geodynamicist and science communicator from northern Spain, currently based in Oxford, UK. Alongside her research, she is a published author-illustrator, with a focus on making Earth sciences accessible and engaging for children and the general public. She also regularly runs workshops to educate other scientists, highlighting the superpowers of creative writing and the visual arts for scientific communication. You can see more of her work at www.luciaperezdiaz.com (or follow her on social media as @DrLPerezDiaz)

AI in science: the ethical experiment we didn’t design

May 8, 2026
AI in science: the ethical experiment we didn’t design
Credit: Drew Hemment (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Artificial Intelligence, and its rapid incursion into the (geo)sciences, was already impossible to ignore at last year’s EGU General Assembly. (you can read my reflections then in this blog post) This year, unsurprisingly, it felt equally present. On Thursday, I attended the Great Debate on “The ethics of using AI in Geosciences: opportunities and risks”, a discussion spanning everything from scie ...[Read More]

Publish or perish? Or is publishing perishing? Reflections from a Great Debate at EGU26

May 6, 2026
Publish or perish? Or is publishing perishing? Reflections from a Great Debate at EGU26

There’s a particular kind of energy you get in a conference room when something is about to matter. You can feel it before anything starts: chairs filling quickly, people sitting closer than usual, no polite gaps left between strangers. This was the case for the Great Debate on The future of scientific publishing: do we need scientific publishing? at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly ...[Read More]

A trial by fire: Can we learn how to read a burning planet?

May 5, 2026
A trial by fire: Can we learn how to read a burning planet?
Boreal forest fire in Canada. Credit: Stefan Doerr (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

I grew up watching my dad come home covered in soot. For most of his life, he worked as a firefighter in a natural reserve in Galicia, in northern Spain, a region of green mountains and steep terrain, almost Lord of the Rings in its landscape, but also a place where fire moves quickly and is notoriously difficult to control. Firefighting crews there are used to the fact that, to even begin work, t ...[Read More]

Mind your mind: surviving the conference rollercoaster

May 4, 2026
A view of the

If you’ve ever been to Vienna’s Prater, you might know the ride. I can see it from my hotel window while I am getting dressed to head to the Austria Center Vienna for EGU26.  It’s essentially a long, slightly questionable-looking couch, strapped on either side to cables that behave less like cables and more like very enthusiastic elastic bands. One flick of a switch and suddenly — whoooosh!  you’r ...[Read More]