The largest marble quarry in Europe is located at Monte Coto next to Pinoso in the Spanish Alicante province. Here an Eocene limestone named “Crema Marfil” is exploited on a large scale. Photo by Christoph Mayr, as described on imaggeo.egu.eu. Imaggeo is the EGU’s online open access geosciences image repository. All geoscientists (and others) can submit their photographs ...[Read More]
Fossil fuels have dominated the global energy market for centuries, and so most people find it surprising to learn that the first ever diesel engine (1892) was run entirely on peanut oil. German engineer Sir Rudolf Diesel who built the engine was almost prophetic when he said the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels “may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become in course of time as imp ...[Read More]
Dung cakes made from buffalo manure are artfully piled up in a village in Madhya Pradesh. Used as fuel for cooking fires, they are a sustainable energy source in rural areas of India, but add to air pollution by biomass burning. Photo by Irene Marzolff, as described on imaggeo.egu.eu. Imaggeo is the EGU’s online open access geosciences image repository. All geoscientists (and others) ...[Read More]
Climate change is not a new phenomenon. Nor is global warming. So why do researchers report a poor public understanding of this subject around the world? According to a recently published study, 70% of the people surveyed said they were concerned about rising global temperatures but had little knowledge about the climate crisis. When asked how much they knew about the origin and effects of global ...[Read More]
A charred pine cone lies on the ground of a mixed beech-pine forest following a forest fire in the Rax-Schneeberg region of Austria in 2021. The charred pine cone and litter are surrounded by unburned yellow beech leaves that fell to the ground after the surface fire. Pyrogenic carbon such as the charred pine cone can remain stable in the environment for extended periods of time and can affect bio ...[Read More]
Hello Abraham. Thank you for speaking with us today! Could you tell our readers a bit about yourself and your research? Thanks, Simon! It’s a pleasure to be invited to share about my work. Well, where do I begin? For starters, I’m a Genus Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. I describe myself as an early-career African ecologist with a keen inte ...[Read More]
“The ocean is not too big to fail, nor is it too big to fix, but it is too important to ignore.” Last week, Dr Jane Lubchenco voiced a thought we’ve all had at some point: that the ocean is so vast and bountiful, it is almost inconceivable that people could impact it. And yet… Speaking to more than 20 Heads of State and Government, and an audience of thousands of policymakers, ocean scientists, bu ...[Read More]
Cairo’s survival was, is, and will be dependent on the flow of the Nile. Since the city was founded in 10th century CE the Nile’s scouring waters have left behind untouched ground onto which the city has spilled and grown. Modern Cairo’s youngest districts are closest to the Nile, founded on earth which was underwater centuries before. It is the river’s changing nature that made the Nile Val ...[Read More]
Earlier this month, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change was published by the IPCC Working Group III as the third instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). It emphasises that “rapid and deep” greenhouse gas emission reductions are needed across all sectors to have any chance of keeping the world below 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels. However, it also outline ...[Read More]
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 t ...[Read More]