Today in GeoTalk, we’re talking to Xavier Fettweis, an award-winning climate scientist from the University of Liège. He tells us about his work on the Greenland ice sheet. First, could you introduce yourself and let us know a bit about your current projects at the University of Liège? As a child, I was already interested by the meteorology thanks to a small weather station installed at my parents’ ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Rainfall and Climate – a Dynamic Problem
“Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.” – John Updike Rain quenches the thirst of soils and vegetation, fuelling ecosystems and much of the world’s agriculture. Whether it ruins a day on the beach or destroys a season’s harvest, it makes humans deeply aware of their vulnerability to the vagaries of the atmosphere. It’s important to understand ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Larvae, Climate and Calcification
The absorption of atmospheric CO2 by the oceans results in a decline in ocean pH, hence ‘ocean acidification’, and reduces the availability of carbonate. This presents a problem to calcifying organisms (those that deposit calcium as either calcite or aragonite as hard parts) because they cannot produce their shells, valves (in the case of bivalves), or tests (in the case of diatoms) as readily. To ...[Read More]
Communicating Climate Change
The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee has recently launched an inquiry entitled “Climate Change: public understanding and its policy implications”, which is due to address the issue of communicating climate change research. This inquiry was raised following a recent surge in climate change scepticism and a diminishing public concern regarding its effects, with ...[Read More]