The thought of pancake ice always makes me a little hungry – I just can’t help thinking about stacks of syrup-drowned pancakes, or crepes covered wish sugar and doused with lemon juice – but the science of pancake ice is quite a tempting topic too! Pancake ice occurs in areas where ice formation is repeatedly disturbed by water movement. In the Southern Ocean, the water extremely open and the swel ...[Read More]
Dense rocks rise higher because isostasy says so
From space, the Brandberg Igneous Complex looks like a coffee-coloured birthmark set upon the bony complexion of the Namibian desert. Perfectly circular, its peaks soar in a ring of mighty topography, its massive granite cliffs etched with the muscular definition of spheroidal weathering. Its bulk seems to rise out of the barren landscape, driven upward by some unseen force. In fact, granite intru ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Carving polar canyons
This week Ian Joughin, a research scientist from the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, takes us on the polar express to put glacial processes into perspective and find out what makes a moulin… This canyon formed when a melt lake on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet overflowed and created a stream that extended out toward a crevasse field. This outflow stream filled a creva ...[Read More]
Seawater, fish larvae and sediments – a snapshot of an ecosystem off South Africa
Earlier this month Jens Weiser set out from southern Africa to find out more about the region’s biology and geology. Back aboard FS Meteor, he’s searching for layers of lagoonal muds to see what the climate was like here in the late Quaternary… After quite a lot of transit, we arrived at our first big station off Durban on Wednesday afternoon. On our way here we used the time to introduce ourselve ...[Read More]