Will you be blogging at the 2014 General Assembly? If so, sign up here and we’ll add you to our official blogroll. We will be compiling a list of blogs that feature posts about the EGU General Assembly and making it available on GeoLog, the official blog of the European Geosciences Union. We’d ask you to write posts that relate directly to the Assembly during the conference in Vienna (27 April – 2 ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Iceland’s highlands
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays provides a little insight into what you might find beneath your feet as you explore the Icelandic highlands… You can stumble upon wild blueberries, better known to botanists as vaccinium uliginosum, in cool temperate regions of the Arctic, as well as other mountainous areas including the Pyrenees, Alps, and Rockies. They thrive in wet acidic soils – the sort y ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Shifting the O in H2O
Wherever you are in the world’s oceans, you can identify particular bodies of water (provided you have the right equipment) by how salty they are. You can get a feel for how productive that part of the ocean is by measuring a few chemical components in the water column. And, year on year, you will see a recurring pattern in how things like temperature, salinity and oxygen content vary with depth. ...[Read More]
Last chance to enter the EGU Photo Contest!
If you are pre-registered for the 2014 General Assembly (Vienna, 27 April – 2 May), you can take part in our annual photo competition! Winners receive a free registration to next year’s General Assembly! Every year we hold a photo competition and exhibit in association with our open access image repository, Imaggeo and our annual General Assembly. Last year, we also introduced a moving image compe ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Friends in the field
Out in the field you encounter all sorts of wildlife and while mosquitos are the most frequent (and most unwelcome), they generally don’t interfere with your equipment or your data. The same can’t be said for all animals though, and many scientists have to strap their equipment out of reach, barricade it with barbed fences or place it in a relatively indestructible black box. It’s a particular pro ...[Read More]
Scientists are humans
The title of this article may come as a bit of a shock, but it’s true. Scientists aren’t born scientists; they start off just like any other person and one day decide that the natural world is fascinating enough to them that they want to make a career out of figuring out its secrets. But, sometimes it is hard as an ‘outsider’ to see into science, especially academia. Sometimes it can seem like sci ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Scope for science and art
Great geoscience photographs aren’t always shots of beautiful landscapes. Sometimes there are stunning things to see at a much smaller scale. This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays showcases one such curiosity and highlights how research images can reveal a lot about the natural world when exhibited as a form of art. Thin sections are a fantastic way of finding out more about rocks, soils and tissue struc ...[Read More]
For the love of rocks
We often have a way of seeing patterns in otherwise random features, and rock outcrops are no exception. Do you see the heart on its side? To the untrained eye an outcrop like this is simply a heart-shaped feature in an otherwise grey rock. But to the geologist, the layers, swirls, shapes and colours tell a story. The ribbons in the granite show that the rock has been subjected to sheer forces and ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Pitter-patter of little paws in Patomsky crater
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by Dmitry Demezhko, who describes how Patomsky crater may have formed and why it keeps scientists puzzling… Patomsky crater, also known as Patomskiy crater or the Patom cone, sits in the Irkutsk Region of Eastern Siberia. The site is a curious cone with a crater at the top and a small mound in the center. The cone totals some 39 metres in height and ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Using tall trees to tot up tropical carbon
Forests in the tropics account for about half the above-ground carbon on Earth and as the trees grow older they are capable of storing more and more. In fact, their carbon-storing potential is so large that they are increasingly being viewed as a means of mitigating climate change. Take, for example, the United Nations effort to reduce degradation and deforestation by assigning value to forest car ...[Read More]