Atmospheric Sciences

Reflecting on fifty years of Mars through Viking 1’s lens

Asmae Ourkiya July 30, 2026

Collecting Samples on Mars by Maria Grulich. Source: Imaggeo

On July 20, 1976, a machine of steel and titanium dropped through a thin atmosphere and touched the dirt of Chryse Planitia. Scientists at NASA held their breath, since five years earlier, the Soviet Union’s Mars 3 probe had died less than two minutes after touchdown. To mitigate this nightmare, engineers programmed Viking 1 to scan its own footpad first. If the lander sank into oblivion, hu ...[Read More]

Interdisciplinary futures in geoscience: Cross-divisional insights from the Division Presidents – Atmospheric Sciences (AS)

Asmae Ourkiya June 15, 2026

This interview is part of an ongoing series exploring the evolving role of interdisciplinarity across the geosciences. As environmental challenges grow more complex, addressing them requires not only disciplinary expertise but also meaningful collaboration and innovation across fields, methodologies, and communities. In each conversation, I ask Division Presidents to reflect on how cross-divisiona ...[Read More]

Discovery to recovery: how international collaboration solved the ozone crisis

Hazel Gibson December 26, 2025

Early morning light at Manchester surface radiation monitoring station. Credit: Andy Smedley (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu). This is the optical dome of the ozone and spectral UV instrument at the monitoring station, Brewer spectrophotometer 172.

38 years ago, representatives from 46 countries around the globe came together to find a solution to the climate crisis. Alerted to an issue discovered by scientists 13 years previously, the representatives of these nations worked together swiftly and with purpose to create an international treaty to combat a major environmental issue. The treaty was signed by all 46 participant nations and would ...[Read More]

The spectral shadow of Samalas: When climate models conjure the Earth’s forgotten fury

Asmae Ourkiya October 24, 2025

Rinjani Volcano (3726m, Lombok Island, Indonesia) in eruption. A lava flow is emitted on the flank of the intra caldera cone of Gunung Baru. Mild explosive activity at the vent is producing a 1500m high gas and ash plume, while a viscous lava is entering the 200m deep caldera lake. A hot spring on its shower release a plume of iron hydroxide precipitates giving a peculiar yellow color. Source: Imaggeo

This Halloween, we turn our gaze from fictional haunts to the chilling, rigorous world of paleoclimatology. The paper by Hartmann et al. (2025), published on Climate of the Past, focuses on the implementation of external forcings in a regional climate model around the 1257 CE Samalas volcanic eruption. This paper can be quite the unsettling investigation, since it treats the Earth itself as a time ...[Read More]