The Sequoia National Park in Sierra Nevada, California, is one of the most beautiful wilderness areas in the United States. The park, spanning over 1,600 square kilometres, is home to high mountains, deep canyons, and long and pristine caves. But its most distinct feature are giant sequoias, the world’s largest trees. Sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) grow to an average height of 50 to 85 metres ...[Read More]
Atmospheric Sciences
Imaggeo on Mondays: Halo
“Ring around the sun or moon brings rain or snow upon you soon.” Before the development of meteorology, visible atmospheric phenomena, such as halos, were used to forecast the weather. Though meteorological prediction has come a long way since then, these extraordinary halos really do appear in the sky on otherwise ordinary days, a lesson learned by Farahnaz Khosrawi when she saw the sun rise on a ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: The evolution of the air
After a couple of months of absence, GeoLog is once again hosting the Geosciences column. This month we have no less than two posts highlighting recent research in the Earth sciences. In the first of this month’s columns, Amanda Gläser-Bligh writes about recent research on the regulation of the air published in the EGU journal Solid Earth. If you’d like to contribute to GeoLog, please ...[Read More]
Publications by the EGU
Since 2001, the EGU and Open Access publishing house Copernicus Publications has published a growing number of successful geoscientific journals. These include 14 peer-reviewed Open Access journals, of which 11 have a Thomson Reuters Impact Factor, placing them in the top echelon of their respective discipline. EGU also publishes a host of other materials available in paper and online. As a signat ...[Read More]
Stock market crash hits EGU General Assembly shocker!
Today’s guest post is the second written at the 2012 General Assembly by Michelle Cain, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her first covered megacities. It seems the global economic downturn is so pervasive that it has even hit the Earth sciences! I’ve been to a few talks now that have mentioned the downturn/recession/crisis/apocalypse (delete as appropri ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Hurricane season, from above
From space, planet Earth resembles a glassy blue marble, a term that was first used to describe a photograph of the Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew on their way to the moon in 1972. Aside from providing stunning views of our planet, images of the Earth taken from above can also be used for meteorological observations. This beautiful photograph, taken by the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satel ...[Read More]
Megacities at EGU2012
Today’s guest post comes from Michelle Cain, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Almost a whole day’s worth of sessions on megacities – where to begin? I certainly couldn’t pick just one talk to write about, so here’s a mish-mash of the session in general and a few talks in particular. First things first: what is a megacity? Officially defined (by who, I d ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Seeing double
On 6 September 2009, monsoon clouds had built up throughout the day over the Donggi Cona lake in central China. Janneke IJmker, now a researcher at Deltares in the Netherlands, was doing fieldwork there as part of her PhD at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. By dinner time, the sun shone on raindrops from the clouds producing a magnificent double rainbow over the lake, which IJmker captured with ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Orange anvils
The anvils in this picture are not heavy steel or iron blocks but rather soft clouds coloured orange by the setting sun. The term is used to describe the upper part of a cumulonimbus or thunderstorm cloud that tends to spread out in an anvil shape as warm air bumps up against the bottom of the stratosphere (the atmospheric layer between 15-50 kilometres height). Katja Weigel, a researcher at the I ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Zurich lit by lightning
In Zurich, Switzerland, June is often the wettest month of the year. Summer thunderstorms that give clouds a purple-grey colour and bright up the skies with strong lightning bolts are common place. This picture, taken by Ryan Teuling from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, captures one of these bolts, lighting up the centre of the city.Teuling took this photo in June 2008 when he worked at ...[Read More]