The Athabasca Glacier is located in Jasper National Park, in the Canadian Rockies. It is the largest of seven named distributary glaciers carrying ice away from the Columbia Icefield, the largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains. This picture shows a summer meltwater stream running on the surface of the ice disappear in a moulin – a vertical shaft forming part of the glacier’s internal plumbing sys ...[Read More]
GeoTalk: Talking about ‘ocean burps’ with James Rae
Meet James Rae, a research fellow at the Earth & Environmental Sciences Department at the Universty of St. Andrews and this year’s recipient of the Biogeosciences Division Outstanding Young Scientists Award.
Trying to understand the reasons behind the global warming of our climate is a never ending quest for scientists across the geosciences. Scientists often rely on deciphering past change to help us understand, and perhaps predict, what might happen in the future. Many will be familiar with the common saying ‘the past is the key to the future’. This is exactly what James Rae, a research fellow at th ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Soil in art
Soil profiles and associated vegetation represented as paintings in Walter Kubiena’s textbook (1953) Bestimmungsbuch und Systematik
der Böden Europas (The Soils of Europe). Taken from Feller et al., 2015 .
When you think of soil, what is the first thing that comes to mind? The answer will depend on your perception of soil: to some it has a patriotic meaning (“soil of Britain”, for example), while to others it has a strong agricultural connection and to an Earth scientist, well, it’ll depend on their field of expertise. A geotechnical engineer’s perception of soil is different to how it might be view ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The warming
The warming. Credit: Martin Jucker (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)
Events of meteorological significance, such as thunderstorms, hurricanes, cyclones, jet streams and global-scale circulations can be described by a general term: atmospheric dynamics. When it comes to it, atmospheric dynamics deals with nothing more than air, which, in truth, is very difficult to directly observe, (with the exception of clouds and precipitation). This makes the study of atmospheri ...[Read More]